I have spent the last four years, as most
of us in the UK have, on one side or the other of the deep divide that has opened up in
British society, in my case in utter perplexity and confusion at why anyone
would want to leave the EU and give up our membership of a truly remarkable
project in international co-operation, and the rights and freedoms we have
accrued through our membership of it. I have had to admit that many thoughtful,
well-informed, liberal people, many of them my friends, voted to leave for
reasons that seemed compelling to them. But I have struggled to reconcile this with
the “leave” campaign’s mendacious mischief, its relentless misinformation and
(let us be honest) a certain amount of dog-whistle xenophobia that had sufficient
resonance with, probably, a small fraction of voters, but enough to make a
difference. (It should also be said that the “remain” campaign was equally dire,
and managed to pull just about all the wrong levers and take all the wrong
turnings in its slow-motion car crash towards defeat.)
And that is really where I have been
rather stuck. Good people have voted for what seems to me to be appalling, and
I have had no idea why. So it is good to read a thoughtful and I think not
unfriendly analysis from someone now at the heart of constructing a new
relationship with the EU, in the form of David Frost’s speech at ULB Brussels
University on Monday: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/full-text-top-uk-brexit-negotiator-david-frost-on-his-plans-for-an-eu-trade-deal/
Even though in the last analysis my
response is one of disagreement, I can find points of recognition and
understanding in David Frost’s argument. I – sort of – get where he is coming
from. His citing of Burke is particularly helpful in this. Burke’s view of the
nation is indeed compellingly attractive, more than just “a partnership
agreement in a trade … It is to be looked on with reverence… It is a
partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every
virtue, and in all perfection.”
Frost’s Burkean view of the EU is that
it moved from being “a partnership agreement in trade” – with which the UK was
perfectly happy – to being more like the thing of reverence and partnership in
science, art and virtue that for Burke exemplifies the nation state and nothing
else. And, Frost argues, that shift happened in the collective consciousness on
mainland Europe, but not in the UK, hence the parting of the ways that has now
come to pass. The EU, in Frost’s argument, must understand this, and not keep
trying to co-opt us into a project we have disowned. We want a partnership in
trade, and nothing more. All the heart-stirring identity stuff is to be ours
alone.
That is part of the problem, as Frost
sees it: the EU has simply taken over what in the British consciousness belongs
to the nation alone. In addition, for Frost, the EU project is simply too
organised, designed, and intentional for it to fit in the British way of doing
things. We prefer government to evolve in a more organic – and therefore
haphazard and unpredictable – way.
So I do sort of understand where Frost
is coming from, and I understand that many of my leave voting friends will have
found great resonance with his argument.
But, there are three major problems that
I see with his approach.
The first is that organic evolution of
government is not necessarily benign. It doesn’t always go well and has, not
always, but too often, given rise to revolutions and wars. And the EU is very
much a response to that, an intentional, long-term peace project that marks a
line in the history of Europe after which the countless wars that have devastated
the continent down the centuries simply end. Full stop. No conflict, anywhere
within the borders of the EU, since it started. The success of this peace project
is astounding and inarguable. By locking together economic development and
trade with other nations war was made economically unfeasible, and from that
flowed closer partnership in institutions, work, education, culture, freedom of
movement and so on. The shadow of the past that so often had come back to haunt
Europe in a repeating cycle of conflict, exhaustion and all-too-brief recovery
had, it seems, finally been laid to rest. The fact that most of the former
Eastern bloc nations, after the fall of communism, embraced democracy and human
rights, when they might very well have gone the way of Russia or Belarus
instead, is entirely down to the success of the EU as an international project.
The second problem for me is that Frost’s
argument poses a false dichotomy. It is, I think, perfectly possible to hold
together a “partnership in trade and… every virtue” in a club of nations in
harmony with the national sovereignty of its members; these do not have to exclude
each other. The EU is not a state or an empire but something sui generis, and very modern: a
commonality of interest freely entered into, a democratic partnership of
sovereign equals that was inconceivable in Burke’s day and that his worldview simply
doesn’t map on to.
If Frost is right about the underlying causes of Brexit, and I think in this
he has a point, then it is this interpretation of the EU as a rival to the claims of the
state that is part of the longstanding problem that has now derailed the UK’s
participation in the project. But it is, I would argue, a fundamental misinterpretation. It is also, of course, the foundation of the
long Eurosceptic narrative that has been such a feature of wing of the
Conservative party (now the only part of that party that is still functioning),
as well as being also, I freely admit, a narrative
in Labour as well, albeit a minority and even rather eccentric once since the
Blair/Brown years. I can understand the attraction and force of that narrative,
but I think it is fundamentally anachronistic and basically wrong. It just
doesn’t fit with what the EU is, or with what a sovereign nation is in a modern
interconnected world.
The third problem is that the Burkean
Eurosceptic Conservative view is by no means the whole picture of the British
mindset. It can hardly even be said that it is held by all of those who voted
to leave – certainly there was very little of such high-minded argument in the “leave”
campaign. And, on the other hand, there are plenty whose support for the EU,
and desire to remain a member state, was precisely founded on the “partnership
in all science… in all art.. in every
virtue” that it enabled. We really did get the point of this organised intentional
project, and very much wanted to remain part of it.
And we remain deeply divided. On 31
January, roughly half the nation let off fireworks and cried tears of joy into
their English booze, and roughly half found some quiet corner to weep tears of
sorrow at all that we were losing. For me, it felt like the oft-raged-against
but inevitable end of a terminal illness.
There will, of course, be considerable
disruption and friction consequent on leaving, particularly with the hard, cold
distance that this Government is seeking to put between the UK and the EU. At
least David Frost is being honest about this, which is more than can be said
for the “leave” campaigners who formerly and glibly promised “the exact same
benefits”, “frictionless trade” and so on.
The disruption will be greatest for
those, both UK and EU citizens, who have built their lives, education, careers,
families and retirement plans around the freedom of movement that we have now
lost. For some it will be completely life changing, and they will face very
hard choices. Did those who voted to leave, I wonder, stop to think that they
were renouncing EU benefits not only for themselves, who didn’t want them, but
also for everyone else who did, including those who depended on them?
For most of us, the disruption will be
more on the level of inconvenience. It will make travel, work, study and
residence abroad more difficult. Holidays will be more expensive, and so will
have to be curtailed somewhat. In my little suburban parish, I will no longer
be able to ship Mass wine direct from Italy without prohibitive customs checks
and duties (up till now, cheaper and better quality than anything sourced in
England).
But really that isn’t the main wrench
that I feel now we have left. What I grieve for most is the loss, to us, of that
thing of reverence, “a partnership in all science… in all art... in every virtue”, the
intentional, international, organised project of peace, harmony and
co-operation, a common purpose to build a permanently better world. This project
did not at all undermine our sovereignty and independence but, rather, reinforced
the freedoms necessary, not only nationally but also internationally, for mature
sovereignty and independence to exist in a complex and uncertain world. In my
book, and for these reasons, the EU is one of the most outstanding achievements
of human civilisation that the world has ever seen. That is precisely why I
voted to remain, above all considerations of economics and convenience, and my sorrow
that we have now left is profound.
It should be relatively easy for a
future Government of a better mind, be it Labour or Conservative, to negotiate
a closer trade relationship with the EU than the present Government is willing
to envisage (driven as it is largely by the brilliant but maniacally obsessive anti-EU
agenda of an unelected bureaucrat – oh, the irony…). But recovery of freedom of
trade and movement, if it comes, will be something of an empty shell. A deeply
divided UK has, by a slim majority, renounced the beating heart of the European
project, and as we diverge along our separate paths over the coming years the
chance of ever recovering it will get all the more remote. Within the UK, too, the
Union will come under increasing strain from trade borders with Ireland and
Scots nationalism, and though the danger will probably be measured in decades
rather than years the continuation of the Union seems by no means certain. We
have lost Europe, we may well have begun the end of the UK. Even if David Frost's optimism about our economic future outside the EU turns out to have some substance, I think we have had
the best time in our history, and it will not come again.
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