Keir Starmer has never made any secret at all of his wish to “reset” Britain’s relationship with the European Union. That is, of course, merely a euphemism for taking us back into its power and its rules.
Such is the PM’s enthusiasm for the EU that he is prepared to overlook the obvious dangers and that applies especially to defence where he is rushing headlong into the European Defence Union regardless of Ursula Von der Leyen’s clear statement that she wants a veto-less procurement policy, which could harm the interests of British firms such as BAE or Harland and Wolff.
Nay, such is his desperation to join and surrender our control over our own defence policy that he is apparently prepared to make concessions on our fishing rights and visas for young people. You would never think we were the ones with the nuclear weapons!
No man can serve two masters, and the choice is between NATO, which has kept the peace in Europe since 1945 and which now protects those member countries bordering Ukraine and the EDU.
Obviously, Trump has cast some doubt over the future of NATO but that has been to compel the less conscientious members to pay their dues and it cannot be any sort of reason to exchange the protection of America’s vast nuclear arsenal for the bossy uncertainty of an EU determined to raise its own army in pursuance of its ambition to become a superstate.
They fought for OUR freedoms - not EU ambitions. Starmer's stealth Brexit reversal must stop - Ann WiddecombeWe should be expanding our own capacity, not repeating in defence the mistakes we made in energy, which has left us dependent on other countries. Neither fishing nor young people’s travel has anything to do with Defence and security. Such issues should not even be on the table and indeed would not be were Starmer not hell bent on reversing Brexit by stealth.
Actually, these days it is fair to say that he barely bothers with the stealth, and one can understand why the EU thinks it worth trying to extract all it can from a weak, crawling sycophant.
With Putin and China and terrorism, the world is hardly a safe place, and it is one in which our defences must be rescued from their decline under all governments, Conservative, Coalition and Labour. Every statistic screams our complacency: the decline in our regular army, in the Reserve, in ships and armoury.
That is what we need to focus on, rather than giving up our right to take our own decisions over our own defences. The brutal truth is that for the next four years, Labour will accept more and more EU demands, heedless of the decision of the British people in 2016. It is therefore incumbent on the Opposition to make it clear that its own policy will be in turn to reverse that, but the Tories do not do so and indeed make very little clear in their increasingly shambolic and profoundly uninformative approach.
The last of The Few has died recently, and the remaining veterans of the 1939-1945 conflict are either centenarians or nearly so. They fought that we might be free, but freedom needs strong defences and those in turn require the ability to make decisions in the interests of Britain, not to feed the ambitions of the EU.
