KEVIN MAGUIRE: 'Brexit was a giant con by plastic patriots – we need a plan to get back in EU'

Brexit is a self-inflicted assault on the UK economy that will prove more than twice as expensive as abolishing slavery in the British Empire.

Ending the shameful, terrible, cruel bondage of Africa’s kidnapped men, women and children branded and clapped in irons to sweat on plantations in the West Indies and Americas was undoubtedly a noble cause.

Disastrously wrenching our country out of the European Unionwas a cranky obsession of relatively few plastic patriots who hoodwinked a minor majority subsequently regretting the giant con.

I’d also wager a disturbing number of Brextremist agitators, had they been shouting their mouths off at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries, would’ve argued we couldn’t afford to free slaves earning a fortune for their owners.

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Mercifully the moral Britons won back then and on holiday in Spain I read in Adam Hochchild’s ultimately inspiring Bury The Chains, the history of Britain’s struggle to axe slavery, that scholars estimate stopping the trade then ceasing slavery itself cost the nation 1.8% of national income over more than half a century.

The bill for Brexit will be 4% in less than half that time, calculates the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the extremists who masterminded the 2016 referendum heist are unable to claim any superiority.

Highlighting any Brexit benefits is nigh on impossible, which is why the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch like to talk about almost anything else and shouldn’t be trusted on issues such as migration.

How many refugees, asylum seekers and migrants crossed the Channel in small boats before that referendum, a period when the UK could trigger the EU Dublin convention return arrangement? Zilch or virtually none.

The 40,000 or so annually arriving in small boats is, in one of those startling coincidences, around the number of seized slaves yearly transported in British ships to their dreadful fate across the Atlantic.

Before anybody, including Keir Starmer, shouts about trade deals, those between Labour and the EU, India and US are mere pennies for lost pound - as were Tory agreements with Australia and New Zealand.

Even the 10% Trump tax on exports to the US isn’t worth much more than his 15% tariff slapped on the EU when we trade twice as much with Europe as we do Donaldland. Regular exchange rate fluctuations can wipe it out easily.

Deceiving Brexitremists pretended turning our backs on our EU neighbours was freedom.

The freedom to be poorer and weaker? No thanks.

Brexit remains the elephant in the room, deliberately ignored by the Prime Minister and others.

If we want Britain to be more prosperous and stronger on the global stage then we need a plan to be back in the EU. At the moment, they’re not even making the argument.

More than one way to skin a Fat Cat

Rachel Reeves is justified in stressing hers was a dreadful economic inheritance when more than three-quarters, £111billion - which is 77% - of this financial year’s projected £143bn UK government borrowing covers interest on past debts - much of them Tory.

Labour’s Methodists want higher taxes on bookies and Marxists on banks (son of the manse and fairness champion Gordon Brown advocates both) to fund key public services and avoid breaking election promises to most workers and families.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer could do much worse than dust off advice from the likes of out-of-the-box thinkers like Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires, including 10 reforms to raise £60billion by, among other changes, limiting pension tax relief handouts for higher earners to those of average earners and stop the South’s richest paying less council tax than typical Northerners.

Just because Reeves is against a wealth tax on the few with more than £10million doesn’t mean she can’t help ordinary folk. There’s more than one way to skin a Fat Cat.

Let's hear 'up the workers!' in classrooms

The massacre of seven people during a seafarers’ strike 200 years ago in Sunderland was unknown to me, and I’m from South Shields up the road.

Bicentennial commemoration lead organiser David Scott was right: we should never let these events be “lost from the history books” because we stand on the shoulders of giants - everyday men and women who challenged grave injustices.

The seven murdered by soldiers on North Sands, now Sunderland Uni’s St Peter’s campus, were resisting pay cuts (Hello P&O Ferries in Dover) and the slain included Mary Wilson, 76, in a crowd of more than 100, including women and kids, on the beach.

People’s history, our history, is what establishment lackeys fear most in prioritising the teaching in schools of the supposed greatness of oppressive warlord kings and queens... Let’s hear more “up the workers!” in classrooms.

Labour voters entitled to feel cheated

Labour Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s landmark Renters’ Rights Bill coming into force next year bans, among other scams, landlords ending tenancies to sell properties then relisting them charging more, so now very ex-Housing Minister Rushamara Ali should’ve been sacked instead of allowed to resign.

Because the greedy extra £700 a month grab by the rentier class shamed MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney once again overshadows the great things a UK Labour government is doing and Rayner, as well as Starmer, down to every Labour member and voter, is entitled to feel cheated.

She wasn’t a distraction, as the self-serving MP claims. I’m afraid she was guilty as charged of grotesque hypocrisy.

Going up

Deporting most convicted foreign criminals immediately and barring re-entry into the UK is penny-wise Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood acting tough when it costs an average £54,000 a year to lock ‘em up with 12% of inmates in stuffed jails from abroad.

Going down

STUPID, nasty and inflammatory MP Rupert Lowe mistaking a charity rowing crew for migrants in a boat off the ex-Reformer’s Great Yarmouth constituency in Norfolk confirmed these dangerous Hard Right reactionaries speak first, think later when spreading their poison.

Speaker's Corner

“I have to say that I really have become a good friend, and David has become a good friend of mine.”

Ugh! Pass the sick bag when fishy JD Vance slavering over David Lammy, and the UK Foreign Secretary drooling over the US Vice President, turns the stomach. Vance is as vile as Trump with added menace and brains. I hope Lammy’s anti-tetanus jab is up to date.