Starmer’s EU Reset Tethers the UK to the EU’s Green Dystopia

TILAK DOSHI

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the UK-EU ‘reset’ deal on Monday, the Prime Minister said that “Britain is back on the world stage”. As Ben Habib opined in an interview, the “massive smile” of von der Leyen at the conclusion of the UK-EU summit could only mean that the UK was “taken to the cleaners”.

Speaking of the furious backlash across swathes of British communities of farmers, fishermen and the majority who voted for Brexit in 2016, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson observed in a brutal retort that “Britain will once again be paying countless millions of pounds into EU coffers for the privilege of becoming the non-voting punk of the European community”.

Will Sir Keir – “the manacled gimp of Brussels”, as Johnson branded him – prove to be the final undoing of the once great nation of the Anglo-Saxons, completing the demolition job started by, in David Starkey’s view, Tony Blair in 1997?

Tethering the UK to the EU’s Green Dystopia

The ‘Starmer Surrender’ deal made Britain a ‘rule-taker’, forced to follow EU diktats without a say over them – or as Boris puts it, a “non-voting punk” of the EU. The Labour Government agreed that the UK would restart payments to the EU budget, possibly amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds per year. It caved in to French demands to allow EU fishing trawlers into British waters until at least 2038, which is more than two decades after the majority of Britons voted to leave the EU. The UK also agreed to the ‘youth mobility’ deal which grants some 80 million young Europeans the right to live and work temporarily in the country, with access to UK’s beleaguered health and social services already burdened by uncontrolled mass migration.

On the energy and environment front, post-Brexit Britons now have the privilege of paying the EU for the pleasure of being guided by EU ‘experts’ on what to do with the UK’s energy infrastructure. ‘Mad Ed‘ – the British Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – must be getting frissons, as his vision of a green UK is now sealed with this deal with fellow climate-zealot European elites. Mr Miliband, no doubt, will revel in his now-certified brotherhood of fellow European worshippers of renewable energy.

With a shared ‘climate leadership‘, the UK Labour Government will join its Left-socialist counterparts in the EU in the noble battle against the alleged ‘climate crisis’. London’s metropolitan liberals – who include the Labour party leadership, allegedly representing working people in the country – will coalesce with their fellow European urban elites in their shared luxury beliefs and conceited green energy policies. Having signed on to the EU’s climate agenda, the UK’s ruling elite can join its intellectual European siblings in saving the world from the impending ‘climate apocalypse’.

The key documents that accompany the UK-EU deal contain much piffling waffle, the sort of meaningless verbiage typically delivered by overpaid consultants. Some examples from the joint statement should suffice: “Our shared values and our commitment to deeper cooperation against the backdrop of an evolving and complex global geopolitical landscape”; “the need to develop an ambitious, dynamic relationship which meets the needs of our citizens”; “our commitments on security, defence and development cooperation, to put people at the centre of our relationship, to strengthen our economies while protecting our planet and its resources”.

It is only in the third paragraph onwards of the second document (‘Common Understanding‘) that we get to the meat of the giveaways that the UK agreed to in its surrender to EU demands.

On energy and environmental affairs, the agreement calls for “establishing a link between carbon markets by way of a European Union-United Kingdom agreement linking the United Kingdom Emission Trading Scheme (UK ETS) and the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS)”. The agreement requires the UK to implement carbon emission constraints that are “at least as ambitious” as those put in place by Brussels. It also obliges the UK to pay towards the administrative costs of running the European scheme.

Carbon credit prices (per ton of CO₂) are currently around $80 for the EU ETS (emission trading system) while under the UK ETS they are $54.70 after having risen by 6% on Monday following the announcement of the UK-EU ETS link. The EU’s carbon prices are thus about 46% higher than those within the UK ETS. Aligning with EU carbon pricing will immediately add to UK electricity costs, which are already the highest in the developed world.

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British industry will be subject to even higher energy input prices courtesy of Sir Keir’s surrender deal. According to the Financial Times citing official data, output in the UK’s energy-intensive industries has fallen by a third since 2021 to reach a 35-year low, reflecting their exposure to high energy prices and ensuing lack of competitiveness. The production of paper, petrochemicals, basic metals and inorganic products such as cement and ceramics in 2024 was at its lowest level since records began in 1990.

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Instead of alleviating the burden on British industry imposed by the pursuit of green policies over the past two decades by both Tory and Labour governments, the UK-EU deal promises to make that burden even more onerous that it already is. The UK Government said that the linking of the country’s carbon market with the EU’s will “avoid businesses being hit by the EU’s carbon [import] tax due to come in next year – which would have sent £800 million directly to the EU’s budget”.

But this argument is fallacious and suggests a sleight of hand. It argues in effect that it is worthwhile for the whole country to pay higher energy costs, driven by the EU’s higher carbon prices, to help that segment of UK businesses which primarily exports to Europe. It is economically irrational as well as inequitable to place the burden of the carbon market alignment on those who do not stand to benefit from the EU’s carbon border tax exemption.

There is further pain for UK businesses and consumers down the road. The EU ETS will start covering buildings, road transport and small industry when the ‘ETS2‘ becomes fully operational in 2027. This new system will introduce carbon pricing for CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion in buildings, road transport and additional sectors, primarily small industries not covered by the existing EU ETS, leading to higher prices for home heating and driving.

How Much More Can an Economy Bleed Before It Dies?

Much has been written about the German economy, which progressively de-industrialised with its quixotic green energy policies since it adopted the Energiewende (‘energy turnaround’) legislation in 2010. Pierre L. Gosselin, among the country’s more perceptive commentators, published an article last year that asked in all seriousness, “The ‘greener’ Germany gets, the bloodier its economy becomes. How much can an economy bleed before it dies?” We may now well ask the same question of the UK economy.

The green policies emanating from Brussels have already led to the rise of mass opposition among large swathes of working and middle-class people across the continent. Widespread farmers’ protests in Europe escalated during 2023 and 2024– across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal – since first starting in the Netherlands in October 2019. The rise of populist parties in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and the UK – invariably dubbed ‘far Right‘ by the mainstream media – in a Europe stricken with deindustrialisation and recession has made Keir Starmer’s deal with Brussels even less comprehensible to many observers.

Economist and political columnist Thomas Sowell describes people and institutions that he calls “the anointed” as “promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations”. He argues that the anointed peddle a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision. “The anointed are seldom judged by the actual consequences of their actions but by the loftiness of their rhetoric.” He refers to “Teflon prophets” as those “who predict that there will be future social, economic or environmental problems in the absence of [their proposed] government intervention”.

Sowell’s thesis of “the anointed” perfectly encapsulates the hapless Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and his Labour Government.

This article was first published in The Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/24/starmers-eu-reset-tethers-the-uk-to-the-eus-green-dystopia

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This article (Starmer’s EU Reset Tethers the UK to the EU’s Green Dystopia) was created and published by Tilak Doshi and is republished here under “Fair Use”

IS STARMER ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST BRITAIN?

PAUL SUTTON

If we had a more robust media – one which believed in doing its job – then this possibility would be openly discussed.

The comically absurd Chagos and EU deals couldn’t be more against this country’s interests if we’d simply had the terms dictated to us. Only a country defeated and occupied could ever ‘agree’ to them. It’s no exaggeration to say people are stunned, here and abroad, that Britain would ever countenance such humiliation.

Boris Johnson’s Pulp Fiction jibe about Starmer highlights this. Johnson implies that Starmer is the ‘gimp’, a chained slave without any say in things. People laughed it off, as ‘Boris is good with words’. But he spoke in anger and was highly specific, choosing his analogy very carefully.

One also detects obvious unease – alarm – within the Labour Party, at wtf is going on. The gains from the EU deal are complete fiction. The Chagos one is positively surreal, in its utter ridiculousness. Even the toadying BBC and Europhile garbage broadsheets are unable to find any justification, bemused by how Starmer has NOTHING to show.

The Chagos deal is signed, with virtually no parliamentary scrutiny of its astoundingly unnecessary £30bn (plus) cost. The EU one is currently Heads of Terms, i.e. ‘agreed’ principles. Those are so dreadful for the UK that the blatant surrender of our national interests goes completely undisguised; there’s simply no way of hiding it. The EU has a tendency to overplay its hand like this (see Cameron’s negotiation, before the 2016 Referendum). I think the lopsided principles won’t withstand any discussion – let alone scrutiny – even in our Potemkin parliament.

That’s my only hope: this is hardly stealthy reintegration into the EU. It stinks very badly and is impossible to justify, other than as re-joining without any democratic authority or mandate.

As if our international humiliation by Starmer needed bolstering, the USA is now sending free-speech monitors to the UK. Extraordinarily, the State Department has publicly voiced its understandable concerns over political imprisonments under Starmer. Britain – which gave America its foundational belief in Free Speech – has now abandoned that basic right. Or rather, our government, judicial, educational, media and cultural establishment all have. They believe in licensed speech, as licensed by them.

Like many, I seriously worry if this country can survive four more years of Starmer’s authoritarian rule.

What will be left?

Whether this is entirely his desire, or he’s acting under some sort of duress, is surely worthy of conjecture. Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Personal pressure is being applied, and his commitment to an internationalist mindset anyway means he regards our national borders and interests as things to be destroyed.

But at the risk of being smug, a year ago I predicted that Starmer would go all-out on free speech destruction, attracting international condemnation:

PREDICTIONS FOR STARMER’S PREMIERSHIP

Last week he blatantly lied in an interview, claiming he knew nothing about Lucy Connolly’s incarceration! He wasn’t pressed on his ridiculous pretence. That’s the servile state of journalism, in Britain today.

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This article (IS STARMER ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST BRITAIN?) was created and published by Paul Sutton and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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