Keir Starmer is no 'alternative' to the Tories on Brexit, he's the same

However, it is also the exact moment that the Leader of the Opposition has chosen to entrench one of Johnson’s most toxic legacies of all: a hard Tory Brexit.

Keir Starmer’s announcement that under his leadership Labour would no longer even attempt to re-join the EU’s single market or the customs union was not just badly timed, it was also extremely weak. And it tells us a lot.

It is worth remembering that leaving the single market is such a damaging prospect that even leading Brexiters like Daniel Hannan dismissed the idea that it would follow a Brexit vote. Nigel Farage (below) pointed to Norway and Switzerland as models for Brexit – both are in the single market.

Many Labour supporters will remember Starmer’s role in pushing for a “People’s Vote” and how strongly he and many of his shadow cabinet campaigned to remain in the EU. They must now be incredibly disappointed. A cynic would say that they were using it as a stick to undermine the previous leadership rather than as a point of principle.

With his speech on Monday, Starmer broke with his opposition, casting it to one side and effectively backing the broken fundamentals of the UK Government’s awful vision. A vision he has claimed to oppose for so long.

What he offered instead was a very vague five-point plan to “make Brexit work.” It included woolly and meaningless pledges to “support Britain’s world-leading industries”, “ensure we keep Britain safe” and “invest in Britain” which are all things Boris Johnson could have said. He provided little in the way of clarity or substance and none of it added up to any kind of coherent plan.

It was a shameless and glaring U-turn. When Keir Starmer ran to be Labour leader he made a series of pledges, including one to “defend migrants’ rights” with a specific commitment to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”. It has clearly been cast aside like so many of the promises he made only two years ago. We know how damaging it is to have someone who lies about what he believes as Prime Minister – it seems Starmer is cut from the same cloth as Boris Johnson.

The reality is that there is no way that Boris Johnson’s Brexit can be ‘made to work’ because it has always been a bad idea. Right from the start it has been based on a cocktail of lies, incompetence, scaremongering and bigotry. All of this was baked-in right from the start, with it following one of the most reactionary, regressive and racist political campaigns in living memory.

We are already seeing the catastrophic impact that it has had. Prices are skyrocketing amidst a cost of living crisis that Brexit has exacerbated while our exporters are being hammered. Some businesses in the North East region that I represent have told me that they have stopped all international business due to Brexit.

According to a report by Professor Swati Dhingra from the London School of Economics, who will join the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee next month, Brexit will leave average workers £470 a year worse off by the end of the decade. This isn’t something that can be tweaked away.

Brexit has removed the right for people to work, travel and study across Europe and created new and needless bureaucracy.

This has been particularly damaging for businesses in the North of Ireland. If the UK Government follows through with its plan to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol then it will make things even worse.

It has also increased austerity here. The UK Government’s so-called “shared prosperity fund” has exposed the cuts that Brexit is providing a smokescreen for.

READ MORE: What does Boris Johnson's resignation mean for Scottish independence?

We were told that it would result in more investment in our communities, but Downing Street is allocating less than half of the worth of previous EU Structural Funds in Scotland.

The race to the bottom will continue. Only last month the UK government published plans to scrap over 2000 pieces of retained EU law, including many that relate to workers’ rights and environmental standards. Starmer has said nothing about restoring these.

Following Starmer’s speech, which has been endorsed by his cabinet and by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, it is even clearer that the Labour Party cannot be trusted to mitigate the damage.

Scotland didn’t vote for any of this, and we don’t have to go along with it. Almost two thirds of people here voted against Brexit, and there is no evidence that their view has changed. In fact, a recent YouGov poll found that 72% of people in Scotland think that Brexit has gone badly, the worst polling anywhere in the UK. And nothing that has happened since is likely to have convinced anyone otherwise.

The longer that Boris Johnson’s Brexit endures the harder it will be to reverse. That is why it is utterly vital that we use next year’s independence referendum to take a different path.

Across the EU, governments are finally starting to talk seriously about the climate emergency and commit to the kind of renewable energy expansion that is needed. With a quarter of Europe’s total offshore renewable potential, Scotland can play a pivotal role in driving that change. In contrast the UK Government is still committed to new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.

The party may be over for Johnson, but there is no reason to believe that his successors will be any better, or that they will break with the cuts, austerity and xenophobia that have underpinned his vision or the Brexit he has delivered.

Next year’s referendum offers a crucial opportunity to secure a better future. Scotland can be a fairer, greener, more prosperous and outward looking European nation. And it is increasingly clear that the only way for us to do that will be as an independent country.