BORIS JOHNSON: I call on everyone who cares about democracy – and the economic salvation of this country – to fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms that the people voted for in 2016 and believed were guaranteed .

There are many reasons to be dismayed by the news that Keir Starmer is about to break his word to the people and drag this country back into the sweaty grip of the EU.

There is the sheer duplicity of this man, the blatant lies he told us during the July elections.

He said he would respect voters and there would be no turning back on the Brexit referendum. He was adamant about what that meant: no return to the single market or customs union, and no return to free movement of EU nationals.

Maybe we were crazy to believe it. Perhaps we should have recalled the dozens of times he tried to prevent Brexit in Parliament or demand a second referendum.

Maybe we should have called him out last July and said he was lying just to get elected. But somehow he seemed so impassive, so outraged by any challenge to his rectitude, that we gave him the benefit of the doubt.

European Council President Antonio Costa and Keir Starmer meet at No 10 this week

Millions of people went to the polls, sincerely believing that Brexit was safe under Labour. It is clear that Starmer took them for fools.

As The Mail on Sunday revealed, he has set up a giant negotiating team within the Cabinet Office, bigger than the team of civil servants who initially implemented Brexit. Their mission is clear: slowly bring us back into the EU's orbit to the point where Britain is effectively a colony, a vassal state, the orange ball-chewing moron of Brussels.

Negotiations with the EU are due to start in February and the demands from the other side are appalling. This is not a reset. It's not about improving the atmosphere in discussions with our friends and partners.

If Britain accepts any of these suggestions, our feet will slip hopelessly on the waterlogged sloping bridge, and we will soon be back in the jaws of the European machine. We already know three key proposals from the EU.

Firstly, they want to reclaim Britain's fisheries at the very moment when, under the terms of the Brexit deal, all of the UK's spectacular marine wealth will return to this country. From 2026, we alone will decide who fishes in our waters and for what fish.

It is we, not the EU, who will decide our quotas and how to manage our stocks. We will decide whether or not to allow foreign supertrawlers to vacuum the bottom of the Channel or the North Sea. We will finally atone for the betrayal of 1973, when the Heath negotiations abandoned the rights of Britain's fishing communities; and of course the EU is dreading this moment.

They want the legal and perpetual right to take our fish, especially the French, and it is vital that we not surrender. Remember what is really at stake here. It’s only partly about fish.

It is fundamentally about legal authority; it’s about control; it's a question of power.

When Britain left the EU we restored full national independence and so the strategy for Starmer and the Labor Party is clear. They must bring us back into the EU, little by little, destroying this principle, eroding this independence and restoring control.

This is why the next EU demand concerns a return to the free movement of people. This is presented as a modest measure, a youth mobility program for all 18-30 year olds. But have you counted EU nationals who are in this age group?

This concerns around 70 million people. If we accept this, we will be telling 70 million people on the continent that they can come and live and work in this country, without permission or hindrance, and benefit from our hospitals, our social services and everything else. Is this a way to solve the problem of mass immigration? Are you still opening the doors wide?

Of course not. This is madness; and it would be madness to accept the EU's final demand that we become decision-makers, accepting the vast and sometimes crazy body of EU food and agricultural law, without having a say in the matter. development of this law.

In fact, the EU goes further. They want us to be in dynamic alignment with the EU, so that we continually click our heels and bow respectfully to the new EU rules, no matter how infuriating, just as we were forced to accept the EU rules on attached bottle caps.

The Prime Minister at an anti-Brexit rally with Camden Council leader Georgia Gould in 2019

With European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in October

Of the three EU demands, this is the real nightmare, because it takes us way back towards the single market. By giving up our control over agriculture, we lose much of our freedom to enter into good free trade agreements, such as with the United States.

By accepting the judgment of the European Court without even having a judge on the ground! we have abandoned one of the fundamental principles of Brexit. And for what purpose?

What is Starmer really trying to achieve by bringing this economy closer to the EU, at a time when the European model is so obviously failing?

It seems to be a Labor article of faith that membership of the EU somehow constitutes a kinder, kinder, more idealistic future for Britain. But has Starmer stopped to examine what the Brussels system actually achieves?

France and Germany have both just recorded negative growth; the euro is under pressure; and across the continent we are seeing such discontent with the EU's record of stagnant gloom that the far right is beginning to make real inroads, for the first time since the 1930s.

In Romania, a pro-Putin right-wing thug was on the verge of winning the presidential election, so the Romanian court abruptly canceled the vote, while Brussels coughed and looked the other way.

No, we cannot say that the EU is working. As I have highlighted several times in this article, the United States is the country to learn from, as it is widening a truly astonishing gap with Europe in terms of wealth and productivity.

France is now poorer than Arkansas, the poorest state in the United States. If things continue like this, just ten years from now in 2035, the relative poverty gap between America and Europe will be as wide as the current gap between Europe and India.

We must learn from the United States, with its culture of innovation and enterprise, and its low taxes, and not from the EU, with its culture of welfare and regulatory sclerosis driven by Brussels.

At a time when Starmer and Rachel Reeves have already managed to kill economic growth with their disastrous tax-raising budget, this EU renegotiation is taking Britain in the wrong direction.

Crucially, Starmer has no mandate to do so. He has no mandate to create the Whitehall Surrender Squad, nor for these negotiations, any more than he had a mandate to raise taxes. He lied about both.

Labor took power by deception. We must of course respect the law and the constitution.

But I call on all those who care about democracy and the economic salvation of this country to fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms for which the people voted in 2016 and which they believed were guaranteed.