Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Keir Starmer of trying to undo the results of the EU referendum with his Brexit reset.
Speaking on GB News Sir Jacob said: “The Prime Minister is facing new questions about the UK’s relationship with Europe. Keir Starmer is reportedly committing another billion pounds a year to secure closer ties with the EU as part of his post-Brexit reset.
“Britain has already recommitted to the Erasmus scheme, costing up to £8 billion over its lifetime, to fund foreign students coming here with little reward for our own citizens.
“The Prime Minister says more integration would boost jobs, support Ukraine and strengthen the economy.
“They’re just squandering money. Surely they should pay us? Because we have a huge trade deficit with them. Free trade is much more useful to them than it is to us.
“We voted to leave the club, so he does want to rejoin.
“We didn’t apply extra rules. We allowed them to carry on trading with us freely, and we’re now able to get cheaper food stuff from Australia and from the United States.
“We’re saving all the costs that we used to have on doing all that for our own supplies, which we didn’t need to do. So we’re saving money domestically. We’re just not protecting European market anymore.
“We don’t cumulatively have more trade with the EU and where we’ve really been doing well is our trade is in services and where we’ve been growing rapidly since we’ve left with the whole of the world.
“We can import more cheaply from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Brazil and so on. We buy much more from them than they do from us.
“Any costs that we impose were voluntary by us, and I actually had Ministerial responsibility for this for a bit. I opposed any of those extra costs.
“I said Europe was as safe yesterday as it is now today, and what’s the point of these costs? And we didn’t put those extra costs on, they’ve come later, but that’s idiotic.
“[Rejoining the EU] is what Starmer wants, and he’s doing it by stealth. We’ve got to get rid of tumble dryers to meet the EU requirements. We’ve got to throw away a whole load of honey. We’ve got to re label marmalade. It’s all this bonkers stuff coming from Europe, which we then pay for. It’s mad.
“The German economy has declined relative to our economy, by 8% since we voted to leave. The idea that we would massively have outperformed Germany if we’d remained in the European Union is just for the birds. It’s not true.
“Companies can’t afford wages as they are. If they’d been another £400 higher, all our businesses would be out of business. We’d have even higher unemployment.
“There’s every economic miracle opportunity for an economic miracle, if only we didn’t have a socialist government.”
