As Kemi Badenoch said: "Quietly, shamefully, deliberately we are being dragged back in. A future Conservative government will not let this stand"
Nearly ten years ago the British people voted to leave the European Union.
That vote was the biggest democratic mandate in our nation’s history – a clear instruction to take back control of our borders, our laws, and our future.
It was a demand for sovereignty, a belief that, freed from Brussels, Britain could shape its own destiny.
And yet, under Keir Starmer’s Labour Government, we are not moving forward. We are being dragged back. Quietly, shamefully, and deliberately.
Starmer has reopened the old wounds of Brexit. Not to heal them, but to surrender ground we had already won.
At the start of Starmer's negotiations with the EU, the Conservatives laid down five simple tests to protect our national interest. They were not abstract principles. They were red lines – clear, measurable, and rooted in the mandate of the 2016 referendum.
No return to free movement. No new payments to the EU. No loss of our fishing rights. No dynamic alignment with EU rules. And no compromise on Nato’s primacy in European defence.
The deal he returned with failed every single one of these tests.
But it got worse.
Despite once-upon-a-time ruling out a Youth Mobility Scheme, we now learn that they’re pursuing exactly that. A return to EU free movement - including the possibility of admitting migrants from some of the poorest parts of Europe, potentially along with their dependents.
At a time when net migration is already unsustainably high, and public services are under intolerable strain, this is reckless in the extreme.
Then we had senior cabinet ministers in open warfare, calling for a return to the customs union, severing all of our post-Brexit trade deals for zero gain.
And now we learn that he is planning to introduce new Brexit legislation that will give ministers the right to hand rule-making powers back to Brussels, all to appease those in his own party threatening to oust him.
Its first use is planned to be locking us into the EU Net Zero rules, but is expected to ensure that the UK will be brought back into “dynamic alignment” with the EU on a number of other Starmer capitulations.
Britain is poised to become a rule-taker once again – subject to EU regulations without any say in how they are written. It means French politicians will have more control over the laws affecting British farming than our own MPs.
And while British farmers struggle with Labour’s disastrous Family Farm Tax, they’ll also face rules written in Paris and enforced by Brussels. This is not sovereignty. It’s subservience.
On fisheries, we’re in a weaker position than the Faroe Islands, who get to negotiate access to their waters every year. Our fishermen, by contrast, have had their rights signed away for twelve years.
And on food and farming we are in a worse place than New Zealand, who have an agri-food deal without comprising their ability to set their own laws.
Worst of all, Keir Starmer has given all this away and is paying the EU for the privilege. To save his own skin, he’s selling out every one of us.