Time for Starmer’s moment in history

There will never be a better time for United Kingdom Opposition Leader Keir Starmer to put his mark on history.

The Government he opposes stumbles from one crisis to the next. Dogged by a drumbeat of corruption, led by a law-breaking Prime Minister and reeling from one of the biggest by-election defeats in modern times, it is ripe for a knockout blow.

True to their name, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are obsessed with conserving their hold on power, but with inflation heading towards double figures and industrial unrest spreading, their options are limited.

Johnson’s buffoonish behaviour and clown tricks were amusing at first, but the joke is wearing thin. People have tired of government-by-slogan and look for competent and inspiring leadership in what is becoming an increasingly dire national emergency.

So far they have found it to be alarmingly lacking.

Against this background, Labour’s Starmer should be streets ahead in the polls and while his party does lead the Government, it is not by a decisive margin.

Starmer has been forced to defend himself against some of his own colleagues who see him as ‘flat’ and ‘dull’, but as I have said before, that should not be a disadvantage in the frenetic atmosphere the Government has created.

People are increasingly ready for a steady hand, but Starmer should take this further by inserting into Labour’s platform now a confirmatory referendum on the 2016 decision to leave the European Union.

Of course the Johnsonian Brexiteers would jump on this, claiming that Labour was taking the country backwards. “Brexit is done and dusted”, they would claim, “time to move on to the glorious future that awaits us as a sovereign independent nation”.

Yet it would also galvanise the UK’s truly forgotten people; the 48 per cent who voted to remain in the EU in 2016, who saw through the litany of misrepresentations and downright lies peddled by the Brexit camp that eventually won them their narrow victory.

There were all those millions that were to come to the National Health Service the moment the country left the EU. Then there was the invasion of Islamic militants that would occur with Turkey’s imminent membership of the bloc.

Where is that money now? Where is Turkey’s membership now?

Labour and Starmer would not have to be supporting a return to the EU. They would simply be giving the people an opportunity to have second thoughts after all that has happened since.

There is even a precedent – the 1975 confirmatory referendum on membership of the European Community after the UK’s entry three years earlier.

Those who voted to Remain in 2016, and I suspect the millions who might now regret their vote to Leave, have been doubly betrayed — first by then Prime Minister David Cameron who walked away after calling what he later claimed to have been only an “advisory” referendum, then in 2019 by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to take up the cause of Remain at the General Election.

In his earlier role as Shadow Brexit Minister, Starmer was at the forefront of making the case for a confirmatory referendum to stop a “damaging Tory Brexit”. While there was some opposition to this within Labour ranks, at the time the majority of the party supported it. 

Starmer was only too right about the damage Brexit could cause; now Labour should at least give the British people the option of repairing it.