Starmer gave a speech in Newcastle in which he says there is no case for rejoining the EU for 50 years.
This is nonsense, if we want the UK to be more than an offshore money laundering factory, then re-joining the EU is inevitable. It will only happen when membership becomes a non-partisan issue, or its partisan opponents are once again an irrelevance. The queues and delays at Dover, the developing maritime routes between Eire and continental Europe, and the declining trade balances as our export trade with the EU dies, all require remediation. To these problems we can add the labour shortage-based inflation as the plutocrats’ essential services, i.e. sandwich & fast food shops and restaurants can’t find staff and the people’s essential services are under funded and failing.
The short to medium term task for those who want to rejoin is to show & highlight Brexit’s failings, show how these failings are as a result of the Tories’ deal and that a better deal is possible. I outline my first five steps ( my blog, Labour’s policy forum, medium). Other’s have points to add, but by offering a better future, we will win people to the position that we can do better than what we have. We need a better deal and we need to build a stable majority for a better relationship with the EU and see where it goes. Other’s have pointed me at this which is a better way of dealing with the policy issue, I quote,
What Starmer should have said: Boris’s Brexit deal has failed. Even the Tories can’t think of a single benefit. But we’ve left, so we need a better deal, one that frees our exporters from bureaucracy and allows our workers to travel in the EU. We will negotiate that deal.
- Michael Skapinker (@Skapinker) February 14, 2022
Some argue that the EU’s own developments will strengthen opposition to the EU in this country but more importantly it’s possible that we will have problems meeting the EU’s requirement to have “stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;”; the House of Lords (and maybe Parliamentary Sovereignty & FPTP) plus the “Hostile Environment” are all problems. However the most rapid short-term changes in the EU today are its adoption of the Budget Conditionality Regulation, designed to sanction Hungary and Poland; this is…
