Interesting things are afoot in the U.K. as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fights for his political life against a not very popular, but “at least he’s someone different” Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

I’ve written about Sir Keir and his off-the-wall Green fanaticism several times over the course of the spring as his candidacy gained traction, thanks to Sunak’s stumbles. Though, to his credit, the man is willing to define a woman, how long that stance lasts is anyone’s guess if he truly looks to be zipping past Sunak in polling. He won’t want anything to stem that momentum.

Another thing Starmer has done is cozy up to one of my favorite villainous Germans – the menacingly icy Teutonic President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen.

Taking advantage of the constant harping, regrexit, and derision focused on the Brexit of 2020, Starmer has taken it upon himself to seize on that ill informed and manipulated discontent to start a rapprochement with the haughty Europeans holed up in Brussels. And don’t worry – winkwinknudgenudge – he “won’t reverse Brexit.”

Of course not. Silly thought.

British opposition leader Keir Starmer says he will seek a closer relationship with the European Union, but won’t reverse Brexit, if his Labour Party wins a national election that’s due by the end of next year.

Opinion polls put the left-of-center party as much as 20 points ahead of the governing Conservatives, who have been in power since 2010.

Starmer told the Financial Times in an interview that the U.K.-EU trade and cooperation agreement negotiated by the Conservatives is “far too thin.”

“We will attempt to get a much better deal for the U.K.,” he said, adding that the two sides “can have a closer trading relationship as well.”

Britain’s departure from the EU in 2020 remains a divisive political issue. Starmer campaigned to remain in the bloc during the 2016 referendum campaign that was won narrowly by the “leave” side.

Mind you, I said much of the sentiment about Brexit has been “manipulated,” because, while acknowledging things since COVID and the Ukraine invasion have not been easy with the Brexit decoupling complicating matters, the “Remain” side never quite threw in the towel. They’ve been dutifully crying gloom, doom, and DAMN BREXIT, LOOK WHAT YOU DID at every misfortune that has befallen the British economy from tomatoes to turbines. One only has to look at Google search results for the prevailing winds.

I’d be depressed, too. How many times can you read “disaster” or “mugged, “and still walk away happy?

But that’s by Remain design and that lobby controls the flow of information. In the first place, notwithstanding its affect on the UK, Brexit was also a “disaster” for guess who?

Germany.

Well, sorry about that.

Brexit has been an “economic disaster” for trade and investment ties between the United Kingdom and Germany, leading to a fall in German direct investment and seeing the UK decline in importance as a trading partner, German economists said.

Britain voted on June 23, 2016, to exit the European Union and it left the EU’s single market at the start of 2021.

“Brexit is an economic disaster for both sides of the channel,” Volker Treier, head of foreign trade at the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), told Reuters on Thursday.

Last year, Germany exported goods worth 73.8 billion euros ($80.57 billion) to the UK, 14.1% less than in 2016. The year of the referendum, the UK was Germany’s third most important export market, but by 2022 the country had slipped to eighth place, Treier said.

That really need not have too many British feeling sorry for the Germans, who would shiv them in a heartbeat. But it did upset the powers that be in the EU. Germany was sputtering its way from manufacturing powerhouse to putz and the last thing they needed on their journey to self-immolation was the Brits handing them a match with their economic emancipation.

So the media, Labour and, quite frankly, inept Tories kept the “Brexit is a disaster” narrative alive and well. Sunak himself had people apoplectic in July, as he went on bended knee to von der Leyen, signing agreements for Britain to officially rejoin the EU’s Scientific™ “Horizon Europe” research program.

There goes hope of merit-based research & innovation in the UK 🇬🇧 . Doctrine-based only allowed.

— Philip Heiner (@Australian4Ever) July 11, 2023

The message from every side was “We need the EU.”

A funny thing happened on the return to serfdom, though – “revised figures.” Biden’s job numbers tumble with every revision, but the UK’s GDP?

Zoom zoom.

Awkward

…Britain’s GDP figures, in particular, have long been weaponised to the end of undermining Brexit. Mainstream media outlets have relished reporting the UK’s relatively slow recovery from the Covid pandemic, compared with other advanced economies. BBC News analysis from January this year claimed that ‘The UK is the only major rich economy that remains smaller – poorer – than prior to the pandemic and Brexit may be a factor’. In December 2022, the Financial Times sneered that ‘Britain is the only G7 economy that remains smaller than it was before the pandemic’, which apparently suggested that the ‘damage inflicted to the economy’s supply side by Covid and Brexit is even larger than previously thought’. Also from the FT, in a slickly produced video called ‘The Brexit Effect’, public-policy editor Peter Foster pointed to ‘the gap between the UK’s performance, which has uniquely suffered Brexit, and the performance of other economies which have not’. In fact, as recently as mid-August this year, it was believed that the UK had still not recovered from the pandemic, unlike every other G7 country.

Except last week, Britain’s GDP figures were radically revised. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.

These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.

The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’

The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.

And, as one would suspect, UK residents won’t be hearing about the facts if media and Remain boosters can possibly help it.

…Of course, given the pervasiveness of anti-Brexit bias, we probably shouldn’t expect those Remainstream broadcasters and broadsheets to change their tune following the revised GDP figures. For instance, Sky News’ analysis of the revision, published on Friday, makes no reference to Brexit. The FT’s coverage only mentions Brexit to warn that the new GDP figures do ‘not change the big picture of an underperforming UK economy since the Brexit referendum in 2016’, even though they quite obviously do challenge this narrative.

So what’s to do in the meantime if your heart is really in Brussels?

Make sure that all those nascent ties to the EU are locked on, just in case the Brexit good news does leak out, and folks rethink the underlying roots of their current unhappiness. Sir Keir was on the move for negotiations no one asked him to undertake, and in anticipation of moving into 10 Downing Street in the near future.

The EU is gearing up to rope Keir Starmer into their plans for outer tier EU countries which are integrated with the bloc, allowing Labour to bypass a second Brexit referendum.

France and Germany are thought to have drafted plans for “associate membership” for certain countries, including the United Kingdom.

The plans are said to be aimed at a Labour Government and would not require the UK to undertake another EU referendum, as it would stop short of full membership.

…The EU hopes to enact the plans by 2030.

A European dimplatic source told the Times: “It is carefully balanced politically to be a potential place for Britain without the need to ever rejoin the EU or to hold a referendum.”

Someone was paying attention to the underhanded preemptive play, and, hopefully, will get the word out far and wide.

…Jacob Rees-Mogg told GB News that Starmer’s planned renegotiation of Brexit would be the equivalent of a second referendum on Brexit but this time, done “by stealth”.

…”Because renegotiation leads to dynamic alignment. Essentially, we would shadow the EU without becoming a member. So we would be like Norway – a rule taker without the democratic accountability that we now have for our laws by being an independent nation-state. So it would restore the democratic deficit.”

Meanwhile, a Conservative Party insider told GB News that Labour would happily “creep back to EU”, even if it meant heading back into the Euro.

Liberals are so quick and happy to surrender national sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats, every single time, and the media is their Praetorian Guard paving the road to hell.

It’s the oddest, most dangerous thing.

UPDATE: HO, boy. If Starmer thought he was going to slide this by quietly, he’d best think again.

'The betrayal of 17.4 million leave voters is coming. But we're not prepared to go down without a fight'.@DanWootton rips into Labour's plans to 'rewrite Brexit deal'. pic.twitter.com/nJSOcQTbeS

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 19, 2023