Brexiteer anger at Keir Starmer's 'EU reset' is 'ludicrous and unpatriotic', says Andrew Marr

19 May 2025, 18:37 | Updated: 20 May 2025, 07:45

By Andrew Marr

@AndrewMarr9

I am a pretty gentle, relaxed, herbivorous kind of woodland creature. I don’t get hot under the collar about much.

But I’m getting hot this evening and it is at the ludicrous, offensive and unpatriotic language being thrown around by the Brexit right against this new deal with the EU.

Surrender. Humiliation. Sell-out. Betrayal. And all this, note, because Keir Starmer has agreed to continue the fishing deal first struck by Johnson in his Brexit heyday for another dozen years.

Boris Johnson now regards that as apparently so disgraceful he’s resorted to spewing out bizarre sexual metaphors about the prime minister. Maybe he’s trying to tell us something. Anyway.

Yes, fisherman are angry, and yes, they would like to exclude French and other European trawlers from more British waters.

But this is a deal which should make the whole country better off, will bring good industrial jobs, give us better energy security and in the shops, more choice and lower prices. It will make it easier to get through passport control and do deals to help combat illegal migration. Betrayal?

Fishing accounts for 0.03% of our output and the deal will, anyway, make it easier for British fishermen to sell their produce abroad. Talking about surrender and betrayal is the language not of deal-making but of war.

That is deranged. We’re not at war with the European Union or France, we have been negotiating with them, give and take to increase prosperity. The Brexiteers have cost the economy - that is, you and me - around 4% of our GDP, according to the office of budget responsibility.

Bloomberg Economics, not exactly a wing of the Socialist Workers Party, suggests it has cost Britain £100 billion every year in lost output.

Brexiteers have been arguing today that the extra boost to the British economy from this deal, 9 billion, is nothing like enough - but they are also arguing and just the same time it goes too far. Do a smaller deal for a bigger result?

None of this makes sense. But, for our friends on the hard-core Brexit side of the argument, Nothing would.

Try to soften the damage. Try to mitigate it and bring better jobs back home. You are surrendering.

It’s a betrayal. Again, this isn’t a war. When I was a small boy, I was brought up with war comics full of brutal, cowardly foreigners fighting brave and cheery Tommies.

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