Brexitwatch: The speech Keir Starmer should be making

Instead of running around the Labour Party like some demented John Cleese tribute act, shouting: ‘Don’t mention the Brexit!’, here is the speech Sir Keir Starmer should be making:

‘Today I am calling on Boris Johnson to respect the result of the EU referendum, and deliver what people voted for.

A lot of you voted to leave the EU, but you didn’t vote for the Brexit disaster that Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are imposing on us. We were promised by the Prime Minister and his Leave Campaign colleagues that we would have frictionless trade with the EU, that we would hold all the cards, that Brexit was all upside and no downside.

Instead, we have British fish, meat and flowers lying rotting because the so-called ‘deal’ that the Tories have negotiated means that they can’t any longer be sold in our biggest market, Europe. We have trade drying up between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have British businesses built up by hard-working entrepreneurs over decades collapsing because the deal the Prime Minister agreed inflicts strangling red tape on them. We have more Brexit red tape stopping British musicians, technicians, architects working in Europe any longer.

We have British people no longer able to send presents to their loved ones across the Channel, and we have the obscene spectacle of Boris Johnson’s government advising British businesses that if they want to survive, they need to go and set up in Europe instead.

This is not what people voted for. So Labour is calling on Boris Johnson’s Tory government to start dismantling today the unnecessary barriers they have put up between the UK and its biggest, nearest market, to tear up the unnecessary red tape, to stop putting dogma above jobs, and to set our country free.’