Labour Approaches the Moment of Truth on Europe

BRUSSELS: A quip still doing the rounds in Brussels is that “Paris thinks Brexit is the best free gift England has given France in 1000 years.”

Liz Truss when asked about President Macron said “The jury’s still out” and Boris Johnson sneered at the French president “Donnez-nous un break!” in one of his juvenile outbursts of Francophobia.

It is one thing for the Daily Mail to rubbish EU leaders but when British prime ministers join in people notice. But as Brexit crawls to its tenth anniversary the most striking response across the Channel is indifference.

In the summer of 2016 Marine Le Pen covered her social media pages with the UK union flag but as she decided she wanted to make a serious bid for power she wiped away all her previous Nigel Farage-style hostility to the EU.

She dropped all talk about quitting the Euro or holding a referendum on EU membership. The same was true for Giorgia Meloni and most other anti-EU populist nationalists.

No-one across the Channel or Irish Sea has the slightest interest in following England out of Europe.

Equally “it is rubbish that everyone in Europe is happy with Britain outside the EU. Most would like to see the UK back in with its global savvy, its City and financial sector, and just adding a lot of weight to Europe”, says Dan Dalton, a former Conservative MEP, who now spends time in Brussels advising firms on the workings of the European Parliament and Commission.

That general wish is true but when I was asked senior officials, ex-ministers, or top journalists in Brussels on a visit before Christmas if anyone was talking about Brexit, the answer was an indifferent “No”.

Hope is being placed in London in the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly. Its 47 full and substitute MP and peer members chaired by the Battersea Labour MP Marsha da Cordova who said in June “The Tories' Brexit has been disastrous for businesses in Battersea and I have continually spoken out against its impacts” will meet with a delegation of MEPs chaired by the former Italian Minister for Europe Sandro Gozi.

Stella Creasy, the energetic chair of the Labour Movement for Europe in on the delegation along with other Labour MPs and peers who know how European politics work. Kemi Badenoch has nominated ageing Europhobe Tory warhorses like Lords Lamont and Frost, darlings of the Rupert Murdoch press and Daily Mail/Telegraph stable but whose main audience today is elderly Tory and Reform members who dream of the new dawn when the isolationist rupture with Europe unleashes growth, and good-pay jobs in an England with few, preferably no immigrants are to be seen as in their imagined 1950s.

In the end any question of a new post-Brexit relationship with the EU will be what the Germans call a Chefsache – something the chiefs – prime ministers, chancellors, and presidents decide not MPs and MEPs.

In 1965, the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Comdmittee was set up.

Sixty years later Turkey is no nearer EU membership than Britain is. The difference between Britain and Turkey, the two major bookend ex-imperial nations of Europe is that no Turkish leader has ever pretended that being outside the European Community, now Union, was advantageous to Turkey.

By contrast in London, huge swathes of the political and media class who told the public that cutting links with the EU would unleash a new economic dynamism in Britain and in the words of the Tory Brexit minister, David Davis, “there would be no downsides only upsides” if voters said No to Europe are not yet able to admit they were mistaken.

There is as yet no minister, let alone the Prime Minister, who can bring him or herself to say Brexit was a mistake. Nations make mistakes. France spent the first decade and a half after 1945 mired in late imperial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Spain was unable to shake off fascist dictatorship until Franco died.

Every opinion poll this year shows a majority of British voters agreeing their 2016 vote was a mistake and in recent months there have been clear majorities for rejoining the EU. Only half of Tory voters now say Brexit was a good idea.

This finds no echo in the political class. Government ministers always look as if they are suffering from a bad attack of piles when they are asked to opine on Europe.

The political class in Brussels has no illusions about the Government’s nervousness. “We understand Sir Keir Starmer’s caution. Since the Conservative Party went down the anti-EU road when Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997 the EU question has convulsed British politics. No-one expects a full return and rejoin in the near future,” says Giacomo Filibeck, an Italian educated in Italy and France who is the general secretary of the Party of European Socialists.(PES)

However there is growing frustration that clever minds in the new government in London do not see that declining trade with Europe and overseas investors coming to the continent in preference to a Britain that opens no doors to doing business in Europe is as the Bank of England says ‘a weight on the economy.’

“If Britain were still in the EU the Labour government could have nominated a Commissioner to a senior post in Brussels where the weight of centre-right nominees from the European People’s Party to which the Conservative belonged is now very evident,” adds Filibeck.

One idea being discussed in Brussels is Britain joining with other non-EU nations like Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Lichtenstein in the European Free Trade Association as well as Turkey to form a trading block that could remove barriers that the hard Brexit Boris Johnson negotiated.

But again and again the question of reciprocity quickly comes to the fore. European leaders ask why they should make concessions to Britain while London opened its doors in 2023 to more than a million immigrants from India, Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria and other countries with malaria and dengue fever epidemics but refuses to allow Polish IT experts, Portuguese or Romanian nurses or Bulgarian agricultural workers into Britain.

The Mail on Sunday claims that Sir Keir Starmer has a secret plan to re-enter the EU and has created a “surrender squad of 100 civil servant” working to get the UK closer to Europe. Given the British government consists of 24 ministerial departments, 20 non-ministerial departments, and 422 government agencies a total of 465 departments 100 extra civil servants won’t go far.

Boris Johnson hired an extra 16,000 civil servants “to make Brexit work” as Theresa May put it but clearly the task was too much for them giving the abject failure Brexit has turned into.

It remains to be seen if the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire can rekindle their relentless half-truths and open lies about Europe that led to the 2016 vote. The anti-European propagandists like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are now discredited. Nigel Farage is approaching what would be retirement age in many jobs even if he has only just managed to get into the Commons after losing 7 parliamentary elections.

He is not yet in Donald Trump territory of semi-senile mumbling and mis-speaking but 40 years of non-stop drinking and smoking takes its toll.

The anti-Europeans face an uphill battle in that no-one under 60 will believe their line that a new shining future for Britain is just over the horizon.

There is not a single Labour, Lib-Dem, SNP, Green or SDLP MP who believes in Brexit. At some stage a young Tory MP barely in nappies when Boris Johnson was allowed by Sir Max Hastings, editor of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, to turn Britain against Europe will break ranks and say a Tory Party that wants again to win power must dump oldies like Farage and Johnson and start telling the truth on Europe.

That MP will become famous overnight. The 529 Tory candidates who in 2029 will want to become MPs will ditch the policy that lost them the 2024 election.

That at least is one scenario. But nothing can happen until Labour decides that its refusal to talk sense on Europe is no longer a sensible precautionary and protective measure on what since the era of Enoch Powell has been seen as a vote-loser but will now cost Labour votes.

Denis MacShane is the former Labour Minister of Europe.