As the UK contemplates an imminent general election, the media rather than the main parties are alive with discussions of Brexit. Three and a half years after formally leaving the EU we are, by almost every measure, poorer, weaker and diminished. With polling data consistently showing 60% plus believing that Brexit hasn’t worked, credible predictions continue to show that this situation is unlikely to improve.
The greatest folly
The painful truth is that Brexit was not an Amazon purchase, ordered in haste based on alluring images and covered by free returns and a money-back guarantee. It is an internationally binding separation agreement between a G7 nation and, on its very doorstep, the world’s richest market. Plainly stated it is perhaps the greatest folly a nation has ever committed against itself.
So why are the main parties unanimously silent on the elephant in the room? The answer might be found in the telescope, an instrument with a lens at either end.
Through one end we find traditional British exceptionalism, slowly coming to terms with its shoddy purchase and deciding whether asking for a refund might cause it to reflect on why the original order was placed. Should the UK re-consider joining the Single Market, or the Customs Union, or both? Perhaps Erasmus or a youth exchange programme? A deal for touring musicians, or perhaps alignment with phyto-sanitary standards to minimise Brexit-created border friction? The list of UK ‘wants’ is endless, each voiced in isolation and with little regard for the levels of negotiation involved and what the UK might offer in exchange. But accept freedom of movement or the Euro? No way old chap! The jurisdiction of the European courts? You must be kidding. And so on. Hardly surprising that the main parties will not discuss it; for Labour to do so would provide a heaven-sent opportunity for Tories to turn the entire election into a Save Brexit campaign. For the Tories to mention Brexit would be to highlight its (and their) multiple failings.
But look through the telescope’s other end and consider how the EU views the UK and ask the question from their side: what’s in it for the EU?
For the EU, Brexit is done. The pain has been borne and the wound is healing. Where the UK was part of an EU-wide socio-economic network, new relationships will have been created, often excluding the UK. The regulatory arena, which often saw the UK as stabilising and pragmatic, has also moved on. The EU has seen the UK at its politically worst and has no time for Westminster psychodramas; the world, especially Europe, has grown less stable and more dangerous. The UK will need to consider its future in that world; ‘come in or stay out’ may well be the view of an EU with little appetite or patience for years of sector-by-sector negotiations with a potentially untrustworthy partner.
A truly European identity
Almost all EU member states share a truly European identity, having forsaken national sovereignty, and for many their national currencies too, for that of the wider bloc. Their proportionally representative democracies achieve inclusivity and help avoid the ‘minority dictatorships’ which the simplistic first-past-the-post system, as used in the UK, so often delivers.
From the EU’s perspective, any applicant country would not only need to see itself as genuinely committed to being part of a wider Europe and with that view settled within a stable political system, but their potential membership would need to be be of direct economic, cultural and security benefit to the bloc itself.
The UK will, if only by the enduring pain of separation, eventually come to recognise that its future is one of an integrated European nation. But over that time it will need to build an enduring case for membership, and all that that entails, both at home and also with every other EU member state, each of whom has the power of veto. It will only be at that point, and not before, that Europe gently suggests that ‘now might be a good time to apply’.
No matter how one feels about the current Brexit silence, the reality is that the UK has much to do, and to un-do, over the next few years if it is to re-join what it foolishly left. The coming election will not be fought on Brexit, but it will fire the starting gun for the nation to reconsider its future. This time looking through both ends of the telescope.
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