Dear Subscribers,
There is growing pressure to rejoin the Customs Union amongst the political Left. On Tuesday, a Liberal Democrat bill for the government to enter negotiations for rejoining was proposed: the vote was a tie 100-100, with most Labour members abstaining and most Conservatives opposing. Starmer has stated that this is not government policy. It comes after David Lammy stated in an interview on 3rd December with The News Agents that
LAMMY. It is self-evident that leaving the European Union badly damaged our economy, took us out of an important marketplace and created serious friction… Our future is inextricably linked to the European Union and we should be working deliberately over time to be closer [with the EU].
[…]
SOPEL. [Do you want to rejoin] the Customs Union?
LAMMY. That is not currently our policy… but you can see countries like Turkey seemingly benefitting and seeing growth in their economy.
That it is a truth ‘self-evident’ that Brexit has ‘badly damaged our economy’ is a fundamental assumption amongst Remainers, who are trying to edge the government closer to rejoining the Customs Union, even in spite of Starmer. The falsity of this assumption has been rigorously exposed by contributors to Briefings for Britain here, here and here.
Meanwhile Reform UK has officially become Britain’s largest political party in terms of membership. It has over 268,000 members, surpassing Labour (under 250,000), whose membership, The Times reports, has fallen by 100,000 since it took office. the Conservatives (under 123,000), the Greens (180,000) and the Lib Dems (just over 83,000). In an interview with The Spectator, Farage says he is focused on the May elections next year – ‘All my time is spent on 7 May. Nothing else matters.’ This has come despite a sustained media campaign against Farage for anti-semitic remarks that he reportedly made when he was at school.
Earlier in the week two 17-year-old Afghan asylum seekers were convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa in May earlier this year. Shortly after this conviction, another Afghan national, who has lived in Britain for two years and has been granted indefinite leave to remain, was charged for the rape of two 14-year-old girls in Bolton.
Public concern is mounting as the National Audit Office released a report on Monday that revealed the asylum system has costed £4.9 billion for year 2024-25, not accounting for the cost of legal aid and the costs incurred by local councils upon upheld claimants. It also added that the Home Office does not ‘hold complete data on the number who absconded from the asylum system’ – this being, of course, the same state that is looking to go ahead with mass digital ID.
Blog
No Advantage from the Northern Ireland Protocol by Dr Esmond Birnie
Northern Ireland’s supposed Dual Market Access advantage is a triumph of rhetoric over reality
Media
Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph: Shackling ourselves to the declining European Union would be insanity
Chris Bayliss in The Critic: Britain is facing a crisis of state legitimacy
James Alexander in the Daily Sceptic: The Rest is Populism
Key Points
An emerging Leftist doctrine
The pressure to rejoin the Customs Union reflects a certain political perception. If you listen to those who speak about rejoining, you will notice the absolute certainty of their belief that Britain’s ought to be unified with Europe. One way in which this is revealed is the mental association that Remainers make where everything bad in politics can be attributed to Brexit (ie, populism – or, democracy when you don’t like it).
This pathology feeds into other political opinions, for instance that which pertains to Europe and Trump. An emerging view on the Left is that Trump’s finger wagging at the EU to get it’s act together is seen as an opportunity for Britain to realign with the EU against Trump.
The reasons given might be the tariff regime and, most recently, the National Security Strategy document. The administration has called out the
European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
And, for emphasis, ‘Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.’ (p. 25)
Responding to this in The Guardian, George Monbiot wrote a rebuttal: ‘In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.’ He goes on to argue that
Our language, science, mathematics, music, cuisine, literature, art and – thanks to the legacy of colonial and post-colonial looting – much of our wealth, originated elsewhere.
‘The roast beef of Old England,’ Monbiot notices, ‘[originating] from an animal domesticated in the Middle East…required the civilisational erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand’. Nothing in European history, according to Monbiot’s logic, can have an identity or be anything without being reduced to distant non-European origins. There can be no tradition, history, or culture, since everything exists in a state of flux. Thus, so goes the headline of the piece, ‘Europe must open the door to migrants, or face its own extinction.’
Such an argument has an air of unreality and self-parody about it. Yet it is an argument read earnestly by the Left. It is the same mentality that spurs Zack Polanski to make Green party policy to allow small boat migrants to live and work in the UK.
With the Starmer government talking tough on immigration, a cleavage has emerged on the Left which Polanski is exploiting. This emerging Leftist bloc in British politics is growing in confidence, unafraid to express a desire to rejoin the EU and to provide reasons for more immigration. The only person standing between this doctrine and policy is – for now – Keir Starmer.
