Outweighing The Cost?

Keir Starmer asked where he could best help Labour’s electoral campaign this week. He is now in Armenia. There, he is begging that Britain be allowed to pitch in to a £78 billion “loan” to Ukraine, over and above the three billion pounds that we had already pledged to pay it every year for the next hundred years, three hundred billion pounds in total. On the day that Starmer signed up to that, his Government’s official consultation on the predetermined conclusion of three billion pounds in cuts to disability benefits was found by the High Court to have been misleading and unlawful. This time, the context is the dismissal of the pensions triple lock as “unaffordable” by the only British member of Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace.

Ursula von der Leyen is pushing for military decisions to be made by Qualified Majority Voting, before possible election results in several countries made it possible for Péter Magyar to make good his promise that the next President of the European Commission would be Viktor Orbán. Lucky old Germany, to be losing at least some of the troops Commanded-in-Chief by Trump, and with them quite possibly the medium-range ballistic missiles with Trump’s finger on their button. But it is going to be getting this instead, and Starmer wants the same for Britain, except not instead. Starmer wants a lot of things for Britain.

The stocks are sold, the Press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared for the only thing even worse than being back in the EU, namely being bound by its rules without having so much as the tiniest say over their content. We are to be a colony, a satrapy, a vassal state, back in the Customs Union and in Margaret Thatcher’s Single Market. If Switzerland is indeed to be the model, then we are even going to be joining the Schengen Area. There will of course be no referendum. We are ruled by people to whom the vote is a nice thing to have, but who got their way by other means every day, so they did not really need it. If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. We have been telling you this forever.

And what are we offered instead? Entertaining though it is that this policy has been announced on the same day as the death of Shirley Porter, what are the Greens saying when they accuse Reform UK of “threatening” to locate migrant detention centres in their constituencies and in their council areas? And what about, for example, the 10,578 Reform voters in the Green seat of Gorton and Denton? What would they have done to be so “punished”? Never having claimed to be a trade unionist, Malcolm Offord says that he would donate his Holyrood salary to something that was rather amusingly called the Badenoch Trust. But that charity has precisely two trustees, namely Lord Offord himself since its registration in 2007, and only since 2021 his PA at his private equity company. Last year, that Trust’s total income was £1252. The basic annual salary for a Member of the Scottish Parliament is £77,711. Out of the public purse, Offord’s election would increase sixty-twofold the income of a charity that he had completely controlled for the whole of its existence. And then there is the Reform candidate at East Kilbride, an anti-vax doctor called Tim Kelly, who has resigned from the party far too late to be taken off the ballot paper, and who says that he will sit as an Independent if elected.