In a word, you can’t. Not if you proceed from any rational criteria or such outdated notions as sound economics or democratic choice.
If you still stubbornly cling to those obsolete ideas, you’ll never understand why Labour is visibly pushing Britain towards customs union with the EU and, eventually and inexorably, some sort of sub-membership.
A customs union is a time-dishonoured trick for dragging countries into a single superstate. It was first used and refined by Prussia in the 19th century, when the lesser German principalities were either seduced or coerced to enter the Zollverein.
That was sold as a customs union, just as the EEC was sold as merely a way to realise economies of scale by close cooperation among European countries. In both cases, that was a lie. The real purpose was political, to create, respectively, a single pan-Germanic state and a federal European superstate.
Considering that we already have a free trade agreement with the EU, there seems to be no conceivable economic reason to relinquish the sovereignty won, and since then abused, by Brexit. But I did tell you Labour isn’t about the economy.
It’s about Marxist longings that include the urge to exact revenge on the upper classes and an equally powerful craving to create a single, communist world state. As The Communist Manifesto says, “working men have no country”, which commandment gave rise to a particularly vile form of internationalism.
If you wonder about precise definitions, don’t. For Marxists, such as Starmer and his gang, words mean whatever they want them to mean at any given moment. Thus, their current definition of the upper classes includes even people at the lower end of middle-class incomes, while their ‘working people’ are what used to be called lumpen proletariat.
As typical Marxists, they disregard the wishes of the very demos in whose name they supposedly govern. Britons voted for Brexit in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, and most did so out of their dislike of uncontrolled immigration.
The previous Tory governments were socialist too, but they weren’t Marxist. That’s why they went through the motions of trying to keep those criminal cross-Channel boats at bay, a pretence that Labour has since abandoned.
Whatever loose controls the Tories tried to impose have fallen by the wayside, and one understands why. Swarms of cultural aliens landing on our shores inflict damage on traditional Britishness, something Marxism loathes. They also swell the welfare rolls, which serves the dual purpose of beggaring the economy (aka ‘the rich’) and bringing more people under state control.
Edging closer to Europe won’t make our trade with the EU any freer, but it’s practically guaranteed to scupper any chance of a trade deal with the US. Say what you will about Trump, but he detests Marxism and surely he can see through its crypto variety favoured by Labour.
He also hates the EU and was a great fan of Brexit (I detect a causal relationship there). Moreover, he likes to be known as an Anglophile, a passion he evinces mainly by his affection for Scottish golf courses and the royal family.
That’s why Britain has so far not figured among the targets for the tariffs Trump has imposed already or plans to do so shortly. But ‘so far’ are the operative words. If Trump detects that the Starmer government is acting in character by indulging its Marxist instincts and edging closer to the EU, he may – almost definitely will – slap the same tariffs on Britain.
Even if he doesn’t, we can kiss any hope of a trade deal with the US good-bye. That grim prospect becomes even more real when Starmer reiterates his reluctance to raise our defence spending beyond its current suicidal level.
However, whatever happens, it’s wrong to regard the Labour government as a failure. I looked up ‘success’ in the dictionary and found out it means “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Since, unlike Marxists, we use words in their proper meaning, we must declare Starmer’s government a rip-roaring success.
They are doing exactly what they set out to do: turn Britain into a fully, as opposed to quasi-, socialist country, run by a Marxist nomenklatura, whose “aim or purpose” is to shove its perverse dogma down the people’s collective throat. If the people become impoverished as a result, so much the better.
After all, Marxists proclaim their undying affection for the downtrodden. Hence it stands to reason, their kind of reason that is, that they must increase the number of the downtrodden. This is a task socialists of every kind accomplish with invariable elan, making them a success on their own terms.
Take it from someone who had to study eight compulsory Marxist disciplines at university, the only way to understand Labour is to assess it by Marxist criteria. This isn’t to say that they too had to scrutinise recondite communist texts at university (those of them who, unlike our Deputy Prime Minister, actually went to one).
In all likelihood they never advanced past incendiary leaflets or, in extremis, The Communist Manifesto. Yet the way they’ve lived their lives, the company they’ve kept, the papers they’ve read, the meetings they’ve attended have all conspired to inject Marxist toxins directly into their viscera, bypassing any rational cognition.
Brace yourself for the worst: it hasn’t yet come. But any student of Marxism knows it will.