Keir Starmer’s EU reset deal has won overwhelming approval from small and big businesses, yet fossils like Jacob Rees-Mogg continue to sound off like an out-of-touch end-of-the-pier act, says Mirror columnist Brian Reade
The best part of the UK’s new deal with the EU is how dated and decrepit it made Brexit feel.
The howls of betrayal from the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mark Francois at Labour’s attempt to rebuild bridges with our European allies sounded like the last croaks from a pair of dying toads. The attempts at cutting insults from Boris Johnson and Daniel Hannan landed like rehashed gags from a clapped-out, 1950s, end-of-the-pier act.
The front-pages of right-wing papers screaming “Starmer’s Surrender” “Done Up Like A Kipper” and “Kiss Goodbye To Brexit” felt like yellowing relics unearthed in a time capsule.
In fact, the whole bitter reaction to a deal with our biggest trading partner that has won overwhelming approval from small and big businesses, was an embarrassing reminder of a futile civil war that everyone but ideological fanatics realises was a deluded act of self-sabotage.
A YouGov survey this week found that 66% of voters now favoured closer ties with the EU, 62%, thought Brexit had been a failure, and only 13% viewed it as a success. That’s about one in eight of us. Which, coincidentally, is roughly as many of us who have any faith left in the party that inflicted this costly mistake on us.
A day after Kemi Badenoch called the EU reset a “surrender deal” YouGov found the Tories in fourth place nationally, with 16% of Brits saying they would vote for them. Which is the lowest Tory score ever recorded by the pollster.
This notion of Remainer surrender, of Labour metropolitan elitists undemocratically reversing a referendum, is a delusion clung on to by a shrinking group of backward-looking navel-gazers. As polls show, the majority of British people realised long ago that right-wing con-artists, most of them obsessed with the myth of British supremacy, others like Boris Johnson consumed solely with their own ambition, sold them a pack of lies.
They know the phrase Brexit Betrayal is an oxymoron. A contradiction of terms. Because you can’t betray something that has turned out to be an act of betrayal from the Tory politicians who ushered it in without a clue about how it would work.
An act which has failed so abysmally that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility estimates it has brought about a 4% reduction in the size of the UK economy, equivalent to £100billion a year. There’s the gaping economic black hole that Rachel Reeves is charged with fixing today.
The truth is that back in 2016, Brexiteers narrowly won the vote but in the years since they have majorly lost the argument. And if the referendum was re-run today it would be a very different result. With US economic isolationism, Russian aggression and Chinese technological domination being the new world order, Britain being on its own is no longer an option.
Which is why it’s blindingly obvious to most sane minds that our national interest lies in closer defence and trading ties with Europe.
As for Brexit, few outside of the political and media class that orchestrated it or the vein-busters on Question Time, care about it.
And the easier it becomes for young people to work in Europe, families to travel there and businesses to trade there, the more the howling Rees-Moggs and Johnsons will be deemed irrelevant. It couldn’t happen to a nicer shower of fossils.
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