Dear Subscribers,
As his government endlessly flounders, Starmer is edging Britain closer to a ‘dynamic alignment’ with the EU. Ministers are preparing a radical bill that will give the EU power to legislate on British food standards, animal welfare and pesticides. The government calls this ‘dynamic alignment’ which means ‘the UK will effectively be expected to comply with regulations from Brussels’, according to The Times. The bill will also bring British electricity and carbon markets under the auspices of EU law, which Starmer justifies as redressing the economic harm Brexit has done to the British economy – a myth debunked consistently by Briefings for Britain.
There is no evidence that Brexit has damaged UK productivity growth
Tied with Starmer’s legislative commitment to the EU is his foreign policy. In response to Trump’s desire to take control of Greenland, Starmer has joined the European chorus in denouncing Trump’s ambitions. Starmer has also signed a joint declaration with Macron committing the UK to the deployment of troops in Ukraine as part of a peace settlement – for which he was sharply criticised by Kemi Badencoh for not addressing Parliament on the matter at PMQs.
Aside from parliamentary scrutiny, there are other impediments to Starmer’s commitment: financially, there is a £28 billion shortfall required for the strategic defence review; and militarily, the British army is at its lowest headcount since the Napoleonic Wars at just over 70,000, and a fifth of those are classed as ‘medically not deployable’ or ‘medically limited deployable’, according to The Telegraph.
The government is expected to U-turn on its business rate hike from the Autumn Budget due to its impact on pubs. The business rate hike will clobber an already ailing pub industry because it involves reassessing the value of a pub’s rental value, which was last done in 2021, when rent prices had been distorted by the Covid lockdowns. The Budget had also planned to scrap business rate relief, which had been introduced during the lockdowns. And from another direction, the government is looking to reduce the drink-driving limit from 80mg to 50mg of alcohol per 100ml in an attempt to improve road safety. The main victims of this would be rural pubs: in her wisdom, the Transport minister told BBC Breakfast, ‘If you want to go out and have a drink, don’t drive.’
Lastly, Starmer has threatened to use Ofcom to ban X (Twitter) in the UK. This comes as X users have been using Grok (Musk’s AI) to create non-consensual sexualised images of women. Starmer is determined to utilise ‘all options’ to prevent this: the Online Safety Act, for instance, gives Ofcom the ability – providing it has a court order – to block access to websites that refuse to take down illegal content. The Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna has warned Starmer that banning X would lead to sanctions, to say nothing of the perception of Starmer as an enemy of freedom of speech.
Blog
Our Future is Global by Adrian Hill
Britain’s global trade strategy should look beyond Europe to CPTPP, Commonwealth and Pacific growth markets, using maritime strength, free trade and post-Brexit flexibility to boost long-term prosperity.
Media
Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph: Impotent, useless Britain is the weakest it has been for 500 years
Tom Jones in The Critic: Can foreign policy survive migration?
Key Points
Starmer’s despotism
According to the OED, the word despot was borrowed from French (despote) and is derived from the Greek to denote a master or a tyrant. It is an appropriately European word, but is little used today, even though the EU is a despotic institution. That’s no matter, however, since in Britain we have our own aspirant despot. From the cancellation of local elections to the threat to ban X, Starmer has displayed many of the qualities in attitude and in policy worthy of a despot.
His latest, and most unashamed, despotic act is the EU reset – or rather, the reversal of Brexit. As the domestic and international political waters become uncertain and threatening, Starmer has been in need of a way forward; he has opted for realignment with the EU. His government use the rhetoric of ‘dynamic alignment’ which insinuates that this an exercise in Brexit reparation.
Starmer is, consciously or unconsciously, a modern European leader. He shares the same mentality that begat the EU’s ‘Democracy Shield’, having now found a justification to muzzle political dissent on X. This despotism is not unique to Europe, nor to Starmer: it characterises many of the central institutions in British public life.
For example, in anticipation of a Reform government, some civil servants have announced that they would resign their posts. (So much for public service.) Or take the universities: the UAE is trying to stop sending its students to study in Britain because they are being radicalised by Islam on British campuses! (So much for an academic and humane education.) Or take the police: an investigation by the Tory MP Nick Timothy revealed that the West Midlands Police’s ‘intelligence’, used as the grounds for banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from Villa Park in November, was disguising political pressure from local Islamic activists. (So much for ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’: rather, institutional despotism – see also the grooming gangs.)
Not for nothing is there a growing feeling that the political regime loathes the majority of the British electorate. Such feelings are essentially right: those who rule us are doing so in spite of democracy. While we are not (yet) governed by EU law de jure, we are governed de facto by the same despotism that makes such laws and will undo Brexit.
