1 February 2023
Allister Heath.
Allister Heath.I'm sorry to disappoint the over-excited EU revivalists on Twitter but Britain won’t be rejoining Brussels any time soon. Brexit hasn’t delivered anything like enough of a change yet, but that won’t be sufficient to reverse the great revolution of 2016.
There was one fundamental reason why the British establishment sought to join the Common Market in the 1960s. We were the sick man of Europe: our GDP per capita had grown much less quickly than that of the then EEC’s core members since the end of the Second World War. There was a sense that Britain was out of date, that the Westminster system of government and Common Law were obsolete, that Europe was modern, shiny, culinarily and culturally superior. European integration seemed inevitable, the end point of the Continent’s bloody history, the cure to “the British disease”. Our ruling class was craving a post-imperial outlet for its own technocratic dreams, and felt that it would shine in Brussels.
It was a disastrously wrong call. By the time we actually joined in 1973, the period of European outperformance had already ended. Europe’s “30 glory years”, as the French call it, were over, and la crise had begun with the oil shock. Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder was petering out and Italy’s last growth spurt – the misleading Il sorpasso of 1987, when it supposedly overtook Britain before sliding back again – was a false dawn.
Britain’s economic renaissance from 1979, our radical opening up to the world in terms of culture, trade and migration, combined with the progressive scleroticisation of Europe, had turned the tables: the UK was shooting ahead of the Continent for the first time since the 19th century. This paradigm shift took years to sink into a British psyche conditioned to believe that the grass must always be greener elsewhere, as per the Gastarbeiter brickies of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Eventually, however, Europe’s slide down the league tables, the eurozone’s near-implosion, the brutal put-down of Greece and the migrant crises shifted popular perceptions. The public realised the Continental lifestyle was no longer superior to ours and this made Brexit possible: there were no great upsides from remaining, so the voters focused on the many downsides.
Almost seven years on, there are again parallels with 1973. Britain is in decline once more, governed by a second-rate nomenklatura that can’t get anything done, refuses to reform and does not really believe that we either can or deserve to succeed. But the situation is also very different to what it was 50 years ago: today, for all their lies, delusions and misrepresentations, Rejoiners cannot credibly claim that the EU is in any better condition than we are. It remains a declining, unreformable basket case; all of its institutional and cultural pathologies are just as bad as they were in 2016.
We are useless but so are they; we are in a mess but their mess is even greater. Europe as a whole, not just Britain, is the sick man of the world. We may be strike-ridden but so is France, with its protests against pension reforms. Our politics may be broken but what about the far-Left and far-Right gains across Europe? Our crime rates may be out of control but try strolling through a Belgian banlieue at night.
Or take the economy. We aren’t doing well but neither are they: rejoining an equally poorly performing Euro-technocracy won’t help us. Total UK growth since 2016 has been about the same as Germany’s (5.7 per cent), even though our hit from Covid was much larger, Julian Jessop, the economist, calculates; in 2022, real wages fell a lot more in Germany than in Britain. Our GDP grew faster than that of France, Italy and Germany last year. Since 2019, food prices are up 19.9 per cent in the UK but 21.1 per cent in the eurozone and 24.1 per cent across the whole of the EU bloc.
If being part of the single market were the most important – nay, the only – answer to our lacklustre growth, as per the question-begging, “counterfactual” models constructed by Rejoiners, why are EU member states not growing any faster than us? Why was our economic performance so poor after the financial crisis of 2008, even though we were in the EU and the recipient of record numbers of European migrants? The single market is at best marginal and at worst useless or a net negative. Domestic tax, monetary, capital and regulatory policies are what truly matter.
As it happens, leaving the EU has, so far, probably had a small net economic cost as a result of the punitive, illiberal protectionist policies introduced by the EU (under the pretence of “protecting the single market”). However, this could easily become a net economic gain with the right domestic reforms.
The EU, meanwhile, remains committed to the same rigid integrationist, post-democratic ideology that locks it into endless cycles of failure, with no mechanism to solve problems. The euro is still a one-size-fits-all construct. The European Commission’s incompetence and nastiness was exposed during Covid when it tried to seize supplies of vaccines and even blockade Britain. Regardless of the legalities, we wouldn’t have run our own vaccine programme had we still been EU members, and many more Britons would have died.
Contrary to Guy Verhofstadt’s witterings, Europe’s disastrous foreign policy was laid bare by the Ukraine war. It has showcased how an independent Britain, psychologically unencumbered by EU membership, can shine. Meanwhile, Germany’s energy, military and trade strategy towards Moscow and Beijing lies exposed as catastrophically misguided and threatens its future as an industrial power. And Brussels remains a cesspit – the latest scandal in the European Parliament concerns claims of corruption and vote-selling.
Imagine a new referendum and all of this being scrutinised once again. There would be no majority for rejoining, especially if an improved Northern Irish deal shows that we can have a relationship with the EU that isn’t either surrender or hostility. Brexit also reduces the chance of Scottish independence.
Why would we suddenly start to hand over billions to the EU again, or allow our laws to be written by others, or have hostile bureaucrats take crucial decisions on our behalf in the early hours, after endless humiliating talks? And, crucially, we would have to pay a steep price to rejoin that would probably mean adopting the euro.
Non, je ne bregrette rien, and neither should you. DT.
