Brexit: diary of a divorce foretold | thearticle

We are running out of time and out of clichés: level playing field, cliff-edge, car crash, last chance saloon. Boris Johnson has less than a month to choose between possible outcomes of the

Brexit negotiations: no-deal or a bad deal, presented as a triumph of British bulldog spirit. There is no point in deploring political leaders’ conflation of national interest and party

interest at times like these – though they are clearly different. But in weighing up the two interests, assuming he considers interests other than his own, the Prime Minister will be

thinking about how he can keep his job. Despite variations in estimates of our GDP loss from Brexit, he will know the Government’s own figures: a further 7.6 per cent decline in our GDP over

the next fifteen years in the event of no-deal or, in the event of some sort of “fair trade deal”, a 4.9 per cent decline. This is on top of the shorter term, and shocking, projections of a

plunge in GDP, and precipitous growth in unemployment, caused by the Covid pandemic. Some kind of settlement is on the cards. Johnson may well throw enough of “our” fish into EU nets for

the French fishermen. There would seem to be enough wriggle-room with existing EU exemptions to allow state aid to parts of the economy — though Conservative ideology has always shunned such

interventions. Johnson will blather about regaining national sovereignty to obscure the lose-lose reality of his deal. He will hope to blame any subsequent economic collapse on the

pandemic. His backbenchers — who want, at all costs, to curtail economic damage caused by lockdowns — have promoted significantly greater damage than the pandemic through hard-line Brexit

lobbying. No-deal means rolling economic decline continuing until the next election, with Johnson’s chances of survival less than that of Channel cod.  It will be bad enough with an agreed

apology for a deal on the table. In addition to economic disaster and burgeoning domestic poverty, the UK will have absolutely no say in the workings of the Single Market, the market which

geography determines is our principal, largest and most lucrative trading partner. And without the heft of EU membership Britain will be weakened in far more than its economic power. Would

understanding how we got to this position, the history of UK-EU relations, make this act of self-harm less painful and depressing? Not really. But it seems an appropriate moment to look

back.  Sir Stephen Wall’s Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit gives the reader the intellectual pleasure of good readable prose, unparalleled expertise and

an historian’s gift for narrative. Wall worked on UK-EU relations in a variety of ways with successive Prime Ministers and was in near constant negotiations with the EU as a civil servant

for 35 years. He offers revealing glimpses behind the curtains of high office, and a balanced, subtle analysis of how governments and negotiations actually work. Britain was always the odd

one out in Europe. We misjudged the importance of the European Economic Community in its early days and it took us a – lost – decade fighting De Gaulle to get in. And once we were in, we

contrived to be only half in. There was the Commonwealth to consider. New Zealand butter did not grease the wheels of British membership. We rightly thought the dysfunctional Common

Agricultural Policy, which swallowed 90 per cent of the EU budget and mainly benefited France, was crazy.  Ted Heath was our first true Europhile. But then there was our “special

relationship” with the US. That was notably enhanced by Margaret Thatcher, who infuriated the EU Commission with her strident demands for the return of “our money”, resulting in the budget

rebate. Tony Blair, much appreciated in Brussels until the Iraq war, imagined himself as “the bridge” between the EU and the US. But to all intents and purposes, traffic across the bridge

was one way, piling up in the Berlayment building in Brussels, the EU headquarters. Behind such policy questions, however, lay the fundamental bone of contention – three words that would

never go away: “ever closer union”. Britain promoted a liberal trading order within a Common, later Single Market and consistently pushed its vision of a European Union as an

inter-governmental organisation governed by the deliberations of the state leaders within the Council. Our commitment to enlargement by admission of newly-freed eastern European countries

was aimed at supporting their democratisation and the development of a human rights culture. But enlargement also made a federal EU more difficult to imagine and create. Nonetheless, Britain

reluctantly joined in, or was drawn into, the supranational structures as they developed: the EU Commission and EU Parliament. When Blair was prevented from joining the Eurozone by his

Chancellor, Gordon Brown, the dye of British exceptionalism was cast. Britain, with its accumulated opt-outs, could not lead the EU or even be “at its heart”, as it said it wished. Nor had

it ever really been able to break the bond between France and Germany to become a member of a leadership triumvirate. Hostility to “ever closer union” was the perennial stumbling block. EU

enlargement came back to savage the UK. Blair’s imprudent acceptance of unrestricted numbers of eastern European migrants, though an overall plus for the economy, alienated those who

resented what they saw as interlopers taking their jobs and housing. So UKIP was able to morph the “immigration problem” into hostility to the EU. Antipathy to concepts of shared sovereignty

grew into outright rejection of EU membership, fed by the Murdoch-led Eurosceptic press. Wall makes the case that before the referendum vote, Cameron brought back a better package of

concessions from the EU Commission than the British public were allowed by the Murdoch press to consider.  Throughout the 2016 referendum “Take back control” and “Project Fear” trounced

Remain’s repeated warnings about the economic dangers of Brexit. Clever half-truths, sometimes flagrant lies about the alleged financial deficit that we accrued from EU membership, plus

spurious threats of massive Turkish migration did the rest. Stephen Wall’s _Reluctant European_ charts these choppy waters with insight and skill. We never got to hear about the many

positive EU achievements and developments, several led by the UK. Nor about the social, scientific, artistic and security benefits of membership. Though, of course, some — like the Social

Chapter, from which Major got an opt-out – with its advancement of workers’ rights, were not necessarily seen as positive. Negativity prevailed, though the latest polling confirms that

public opinion has swung away from Brexit since 2016. What has not changed is the perennial uncertainty. But we are where we are and stuck with yet another cliché: “a perfect storm”. Or, as

Isaiah once put it, “our sins blew us away like the wind”.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution

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