PM's red lines on Europe are still holding the country back

Keir Starmer is being accused of betraying the 2016 Brexit vote” by seeking, in his Brexit Reset” today, a closer relationship with the EU in an effort to improve our economy. And here’s why we shouldn’t care.

- FEMI OLUWOLE

The Brexit vote was nearly 10 years ago. We voted on it before we’d even negotiated what Britain’s new relationship with the EU would be. Everyone, including the parties who supported it, thinks the new relationship is a disaster. And we’re in a poverty crisis that matters a lot more than all of the above. The only betrayal would be tolerating that poverty by not going far enough against Brexit.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has said for years that it would not take us back into the EU single market or customs union. The single market is the system by which EU countries have the same rules for products and services, so that anything made in one country is automatically legal to sell in another. The customs union is how the EU negotiates trade deals as a single bloc.

Both mean that EU countries can sell products and services to each other without the need for checks or paperwork, which keeps prices down. And leaving the single market and the customs union was not on the ballot paper in 2016. Norway, for example – a non-EU country – is in the single market.

In fact, Daniel Hannan, a member of the committee for the Vote Leave campaign, said: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” And in each of the following elections, the majority voted for parties that promised to retain all the benefits of the single market.