There are few more obvious winners amid the destruction of America’s war in the Gulf than the influential gang of Remainers who dominate public life – in parliament and beyond.
Chief among them is the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who this week used the cover of global chaos to make his feelings clear: in a ‘volatile’ world, he said, ‘our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the European Union (EU).’
Labour has been unpicking Brexit for some time, not least with a limited ‘reset’ of relations aimed, for example, at smoothing cross-Channel trade in food, electricity and carbon emissions, and visits for young people.
Now, Starmer has gone a decisive step further, telling a news conference on Tuesday that, ‘We want to be more ambitious, closer economic cooperation, closer security cooperation, a partnership that recognises our shared values, our shared interest and our shared future, a partnership for the dangerous world that we must navigate together.’
It’s true that the world is ‘volatile’, but I’m in no doubt about what is really playing out – which is a coup by an anti-Brexit Establishment which has never accepted the verdict of the 2016 referendum and has been working to undermine it ever since.
I’m talking here about Britain’s professional classes, the well-paid, well-connected metropolitan types – lawyers, bankers, consultants, civil servants – who run much of Britain yet have more in common with Paris and Berlin than Barnsley. They hold millions of their fellow citizens in contempt.
To the Euro-obsessives, the Brexit vote was a personal affront, a shocking challenge not just to their inflated self-regard but to a globalist, anti-patriotic outlook in which any form of national affiliation is an affront.
Starmer hasn’t yet gone so far as some Labour figures, such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who have demanded that we rejoin the EU wholesale. Yet we should be under no doubt as to what ‘closer cooperation’ would mean in practice for Britain, or how disastrous it would prove.
Frank is talking about Britain’s professional classes, the well-paid, well-connected metropolitan types – lawyers, bankers, consultants, civil servants
It would mean, for example, accepting ever-greater oversight from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), a intrusive body already determined to interfere in any trade deal we try to reach, and which imposes itself across the board – from industry to agriculture – whenever possible. Britain’s interests rarely come first.
It would be expensive, too. If we want smoother trading arrangements, the EU will naturally demand we pay billions of Euros in return – to help shore up its own budget, now in serious deficit.
We’ve already seen Brussels demand a punitive E4- E6billion-euro contribution (£3.5-£5.2billion) merely to take part in a scheme for EU-wide defence procurement, despite the fact that our participation would benefit everyone concerned.
A closer relationship with Europe would mean thousands of young Europeans coming to live and work in Britain under a new youth mobility scheme, not to mention the thousands more arriving through the Erasmus scheme for students and young entrepreneurs.
I’m in little doubt that Europe would eventually require us to accept the wholesale free movement of EU citizens across our borders – something that the British people comprehensively rejected in 2016.
As for the dead hand of European bureaucracy, millions of us will get a personal taste of it when we go on holiday this summer and are forced through the new regime of EU border checks, complete with mandatory fingerprints and photographs – a painful hour or two we will never get back.
Perhaps that’s that point. I spend half my year working in Brussels and am in no doubt how the EU Commission (effectively the EU government) and those who work for it like to think. Their position is crystal clear: ‘You British might well want to cooperate, but don’t for a moment think we’re going to make life easy.’
Sadly, it’s all too true that Trump’s actions – the insults to longstanding allies, the economic chaos – have left the door wide open for Labour’s Remain insurgents. Worse, the president’s unpredictable behaviour has camouflaged the sheer irrationality of what they are proposing.
Starmer has gone a decisive step further, telling a news conference that, ‘We want to be more ambitious’
I had a depressing insight into their demented, dogmatic commitment soon after first arriving in Brussels. Chatting to a colleague in a bar, I was overheard by Commission officials from Italy and Germany – who proceeded to yell abuse at me for Britain’s ‘criminal’ actions in leaving the EU!
I fear their sympathisers in London and our university towns think much the same.
Yet the vote for Brexit was not ‘knee-jerk xenophobia’, or a ‘roll of the dice’ or merely a failed gamble on America as some dismissively suggest. Rather, the decision to leave the sclerotic embrace of Eurocracy was a hard-nosed recognition that the world has changed.
Beset by energy shortages, cripplingly low productivity, chronic bureaucracy and endemic welfarism, the EU has been failing for decades. It was crucial that we left and is essential that we do not rejoin – even partially.
The Remainer supposition that accepting Brussels’s rules will somehow rescue and recharge the British economy is absurd, not least because France and Germany – the dominant forces in the bloc – have national interests which are quite different from our own.
Why clamber aboard a sinking ship, or pay billions for the privilege of roping ourselves to the mast as she sinks beneath the waves? Brexit has set us free to chart our own course – and that is exactly what we must do.
My concerns are not just economic, they are strategic, too.
Today, we find ourselves in a new world, in which resilience and self-sufficiency are key. Tying ourselves to the apron strings of the EU or America might seem the ‘safe’ option, yet quite the opposite is true. We need nimble, sophisticated decision making with our own national self-interest at the heart of it.
Now more than ever, our priorities must be to ensure Britain’s economic well-being (which, above all, means reducing energy prices) and to exploit our international autonomy so as secure the very best deals for our people.
Trump will not last for ever, after all. Current US polling suggests his formidable powers might not even last beyond November’s mid-term elections.
Yet our alliance with America will endure, as must our relationships with Australia, India and the many other nations around the globe with which we have such strong historical ties.
Yes, let’s take a realistic view of the position in which we find ourselves, warts and all. But we must take a clear-eyed view of Britain’s strengths and freedoms, too – and act upon them.
Dragging us back into a failing EU bloc amid the fog of war is a tawdry, underhand piece of opportunism – a chronic misreading of the past and a horrendous betrayal of what future prospects still remain.