Suppose that David Cameron had returned from Brussels in February 2016 with something tangible. Perhaps he had acquired the right to deny benefits to new EU immigrants. Or perhaps he had recovered control of fisheries policy. Or maybe Britain had opted out of the EU’s criminal justice system.
The details don’t particularly matter. A single win would have been enough, because it would have allowed him to show that the transfer of powers was not a one-way street. “I have set an important precedent”, the PM could have announced on his return. “I have shown that sovereignty doesn’t only shift from the nations to Brussels, that it can come back as well”.
Can anyone seriously doubt that he would have carried the ensuing referendum? OK, maybe not by a landslide. Plenty of people would have crossed a four-lane motorway to put their crosses in the Leave box. But, given the closeness of the result, it strikes me as incontestable that some repatriation of power, however slight, would have tipped the balance.
Instead, EU leaders, irked by what they saw as British demands for special treatment, were almost performatively dismissive, refusing to give Cameron any concessions that he could sell as substantive. Many undecided voters, stunned by the EU’s high-handedness, broke for Leave. Brussels had, in the most spectacular way, vindicated the central Eurosceptic contention, namely that being a member meant being on a conveyor-belt to full amalgamation.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s CDU, has now acknowledged as much. “I remember that David Cameron asked for changes to EU social policy and came back to London empty-handed,” he says, in an implicit criticism of his predecessor, Angela Merkel. “The Continental Europeans were not entirely blameless when it came to Brexit.”
That observation is undeniable, but it doesn’t suit anyone to admit it. Eurosceptics like to present the referendum as the end of a bad dream, a réveil national, when Britain shook off its sleep, realised how many of its freedoms had been handed away, and took back its self-respect.
Europhiles, for their part, can’t bring themselves to blame Brussels for anything. As far as they are concerned, the referendum was a spasm of petty insularity. The idea that a modicum of flexibility from the EU might have made all the difference doesn’t fit either side’s narrative.
Eurocrats themselves, perhaps understandably, were at first in total denial. I recall one Commission official, a German, mournfully muttering just after the vote, “If only we had spent one per cent as much time addressing Britain’s concerns as we did with Greece and the euro.”
But his was a lone voice. For everyone else in Brussels, the only permitted response was contemptuous anger. The result, in their version, was delivered by unscrupulous demagogues lying to credulous oafs who must be made to pay for their arrogance.
More than six years were to pass before a senior Commissioner could admit the obvious, namely that, as Ursula von der Leyen put it last September, “We goofed it up”.
This refusal to see Brexit as the product of normal politics, subject to the same coincidences, miscalculations and close-run things as anything else, continues to distort our debate. For one thing, it has made it hard to have a meaningful discussion of economic policy.
One side says that the UK has grown faster than comparable EU economies, and the other that it has grown less fast than its previous trajectory. Neither acknowledges the clunking fact of the lockdown, next to whose catastrophic impact all gains and losses associated with leaving the EU are rounding errors.
For what it’s worth, I think our policy choices since Brexit have been disappointing. Yes, we have improved our terms of trade with some fast-growing countries, notably in the Pacific. But our commercial policy has been built around the demands of a sector that accounts for less than half of 1 per cent of our economy, namely agriculture. We have failed to sign an ambitious deal even with an ally as close as Canada, because we insist on sticking to the EU’s unscientific ban on some beef imports
At the same time, we have been far too slow to deregulate. A combination of producer capture, official corporatism and surreptitious Civil Service Rejoinery means that we have not diverged in areas where we could have significantly cut costs, from chemicals to fine arts.
Indeed, in some areas, we have gone backwards. Instead of removing the more burdensome financial services regulations, we have loaded so many costs onto our banks that they now have every incentive to debank their customers.
Instead of cutting energy prices and poaching industries from the Continent, we have pursued more eco-zealotry than we did as members, and are now mimicking the EU’s ludicrous carbon border adjustment tax – a sure way to export production overseas.
The culture war means that any attempt by either side to address these issues on their merits is met by catcalls from the other. “Ah, so now you’re admitting that Brexit is going well/badly!”
Ministers have therefore fretted more about symbolic than actual gains, leaving the single market but replicating it from the outside. Having paid a high negotiating price for the right to diverge, they have refused to exercise that right.
Perhaps the single oddest aspect of the Brexit culture war, though, is the indifference among self-declared Europhiles to what is happening in the EU. For many Remainers – and thus, by extension, for a big chunk of our media and cultural elites – the EU is less a supranational bureaucracy than an ideal.
To put it another way, they are less interested in the goings-on in Brussels than in what your support or opposition to Brexit supposedly says about you.
Thus, for example, a writer called Rufus Wainwright was able, without irony, to blame the early closure of his play on the referendum result. “Since Brexit, England has entered into a darker corridor,” he said.
One hears variants of this argument all the time. Brexit has supposedly turned us into philistines and xenophobes. But maintaining this line requires you not even to glance at what is happening on the Continent. For the awkward fact is that the UK is an outlier in not having a populist anti-immigrant party in its parliament – a distinction in shares with only one of the EU’s 27 members, namely Ireland.
And Ireland, like the rest of the EU, may well cease to be an exception at the European elections in three weeks’ time when, as The Guardian reports with a shudder, “far-Right parties could finish first in nine EU states”.
Perhaps, as some Leavers maintained throughout the campaign, Britain simply has a stronger liberal tradition. Or perhaps the very fact of taking back control served in part to assuage people’s concerns.
In any event, something is now happening that almost no Remainers could have imagined in 2016. Just as Europe turns to the authoritarian Right, the UK, almost uniquely, is set to give a large majority to a party of the traditional Left.
Indeed, just as Europe explores various Rwanda-style return schemes, Sir Keir Starmer is repeating his promise to scrap ours. Where does that leave the progressivist Remainer conceit? More immediately, where will it leave illegal migrants? Which country, in a reversal of the current trend, are they likely to find the most attractive? Funny how things work out, eh? DT.
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