Brexit Reset Was Always Inevitable – The Damage Demands Repair

Prime Minister Keir Starmer's tentative steps toward repairing Britain's relationship with the European Union have sparked fierce criticism from the very architects of Brexit.

- TDG NETWORK

Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, exposes the political hypocrisy and national cost of a project that, from the beginning, was doomed to economic and diplomatic regression.

Now, as the dust settles on years of missteps, the painful process of reconnection begins—not as a political betrayal, but as a necessity born of reality.

HYPOCRISY AND WASTED BILLIONS Tory outrage over Starmer's Brexit reset is steeped in irony. The same government that pushed a hard Brexit spent £4.7 billion on post-EU border infrastructure, most of which is now obsolete. The Sevington checkpoint in Kent, hailed as a symbol of sovereignty, stands as a testament to bureaucratic excess and futility. Jenkins suggests memorial plaques be placed on these abandoned structures to mark the folly—and the former Prime Minister who inspired it.

STARMER'S OWN ROLE Yet Jenkins is no blind defender of Labour either. He recalls how Starmer, as Jeremy Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary in 2019, helped scuttle Theresa May's softer Brexit proposal. By siding with ideological purism over pragmatic compromise, Labour enabled Johnson's ascent and the entrenchment of hard Brexit. This allowed a narrow, extreme vision of departure to define the next decade of British politics.