Starmer’s EU-Temptation

“When, not if,” is how the Manchester Guardian describes the prospect of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation. “A casualty of the Epstein fallout?” the Spectator muses. The latest straw for the premier is the disclosure that the former envoy to America, Peter Mandelson, failed vetting for the post, yet was appointed anyway. Sir Keir denies knowledge of the failure. Curtains for the premier, though, could prove a boon for the cause of British independence.It is “staggering,” the premier asserts, that his underlings omitted to inform him of Lord Mandelson’s security screening debacle. The sacking of a Foreign Office official, Oly Robbins, suggests an effort to designate a scapegoat. The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, calls Sir Keir’s denial “completely preposterous” and contends “all roads lead to resignation.” Sir Keir, in her telling, is “so blinded by his own righteousness that he cannot see what everybody else can see.”It’s not our intention here to predict that Sir Keir will end up resigning. Yet if he does step down, less than two years after a landslide general election victory for Labour, his reversal of fortune could vindicate our columnist Julie Burchill’s appraisal. She wrote weeks ago that Hemingway’s quip — “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly” — had “never seemed more applicable to a contemporary politician” than to Sir Keir.Ms. Burchill savored, too, the idea that Sir Keir was entangled in the coattails of, in Lord Mandelson, a stalwart of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Labour movement, which had sought to chart a course away from the party’s hard-line socialism. Lord Mandelson had famously crooned: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” Yet Ms. Burchill reports that his “mania to mix with the super-rich” was part of his undoing.Lord Mandelson opposed Brexit and encouraged Sir Keir to betray the will of the voters by rejoining the European Union sooner than the premier imagined was possible. In recent weeks, Sir Keir has shown signs of taking this advice to heart. Using the pretext of the Iran war, the premier has been mooting the need to “reverse parts of Brexit,” the Independent reports, and vowing that closer ties with the Brussels superstate are in Britain’s “best interest.”Hogwash, we say. Even if Sir Keir is reportedly eyeing what are known as “Henry VIII powers,” or executive regulations, to ink a series of agreements with the European Union that would impose Continental regulations on the British economy. “All that will be needed is an order written by civil servants and initialled by a minister,” Swansea Law School’s Andrew Tettenborn reports. “The plan should worry us, and needs to be resisted,” he cautions.Nearly ten years after the Brexit vote, Sir Keir, too, just restored a tie to the EU by rejoining the Erasmus student exchange program at a cost of some $750 million a year. That could prove a kind of canary in the coal mine signaling Labour’s eagerness to backslide toward membership in the EU. These columns have cautioned against such incremental steps, calling them “siren songs” down “the slippery slope that would lead to the reversal of British independence.”Sir Keir laments that “Brexit did deep damage to the economy.” It’s more accurate, as Prime Minister Liz Truss has averred, that failure to capitalize on Brexit is what plagues Britain today. If Sir Keir resigns, the chance beckons for new leadership of an independent Britain to fulfill the promise of what the Sun has called a “hard, complete, unambiguous, permanent, irreversible exit from Europe and a stronger relationship with the pro-liberty democracies.”

Starmer’s EU-Temptation

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