A month before her dread budget, with businesses closing and jobs in freefall, the chancellor has hauled out the B-word. Nearly a decade after the referendum, Rachel Reeves tells the IMF that our economic and productivity failures are connected to “the way in which the UK left the European Union”.
Brexit is the villain, not the immigration Boriswave, savage lockdowns, stubborn MPs turning down deals or the Trussonomics earth tremor. Reeves certainly doesn’t blame the damage her own autumn budget did to business, or her leader’s panicked U-turn over welfare cuts. Big, bad Brexit carries the can.
A few will rejoice in this willingness to grieve the referendum. Others infuriatedly point at other reasons we’re in the soup. But it is a good moment to reflect on conflicted feelings about Europe and be inspired by the remarks of Marina Wheeler KC (who, incidentally, dismisses the Reeves tactic as backward-looking, “a cowardly, timid strategy”).
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Her specialism is mediation and in that field she finds that “compromise is a strength, not a weakness”. Her forthcoming book A More Perfect Union discusses how our relationship with the EU might be reworked: “Both sides need to change gear mentally and stop sulking … A more perfect union is only possible if both sides have the courage to face their own imperfections and create something new.”
This is a serious and practical thinker. She is also, of course, Boris Johnson’s wife of 25 years, mother of four of his children and a close witness — before their separation in 2018 — to his Brexit conversion, the referendum shock, his leadership betrayal by Michael Gove and, though she was by then distracted by cancer and a family loss, the battle between a stubborn backbench and Theresa May’s attempted Euro deals.
Alongside all this come reflections on her own mental and emotional attitudes to Europe. Wheeler says, sadly: “I will always mourn that we couldn’t bridge our differences.”
For she was once an enthusiast, a cosmopolitan liberal sophisticate moved by the great postwar project. But professionally she had to watch the slow encroachment of EU law into British society, employment and law and see national decision-making shrinking. She feels strongly about the wise old principle of “subsidiarity”: that decisions should be taken where the effect is felt, centralised power used only for matters which cannot reasonably be ruled locally.
By 2007 she was clear that the relationship should change. Boris Johnson, then her husband, was less Eurosceptic and “struggled” to find a position. It was, we now learn, she who suggested he write the two opposing columns before the referendum, to clear his mind. His coming-out for Brexit was, she charitably says, not a cynical career move because everyone thought the Leavers would lose.
Her own views got her vilified and friendships were strained. Remainer rumour played at least one dirty trick on her. But a decade on, the mediator in her asks for mutual respect, Britain remaining an independent state but close ally. “There are other ways of co-operating than being in the EU project.”
I feel a sympathy, which after nine chaotic years others may share. I was a bilingual schoolchild in France for three years, a temp typist in a Hamburg bank for a year, a diplomatic daughter and, like Wheeler, raised Catholic. Never underestimate the power of old Eurocatholic sensibilities: civilised, gentle, communitarian Christendom seeming to chime in every church bell and street name.
As a student I scorned “Little Englanders” and rejoiced in the approach of the Common Market, despite knowing little about trade. To be linked not only to Shakespeare and Milton but to their great cultural and artistic European hinterland felt right. It was enlivening to feel like a citizen of Mozart’s Salzburg, Victor Hugo’s Paris or Don Camillo’s rural Italian parish.
But as EC became EU and ever more powerful, like Wheeler (though without the legal experience), I grew uneasy. There was the European Court of Auditors, forever dismayed by its confusion and misused funds, and the way that Brussels seemed to be a job-creation scheme for unloved domestic politicians: a smugness of Kinnockry year after year.
I respected the EU’s common regulation and financial help for “less favoured areas” and, loving rural Ireland, I watched the Common Agricultural Policy lift farming friends out of hardscrabble survival, never mind the milk lakes and butter mountains.
But beyond that came fury at the failure of this vast, rich central organisation to get a grip on the refugee and migrant crisis, first in the Mediterranean and then the Channel. The EU of which I dreamt, an efficient brotherhood of states, would have been right on the case, building processing camps like the Allies after the Second World War only better, with interpreters, educators and nurses to help decide who could make a new life where. Instead, though Germany stepped up alone, Brussels dallied, gazing at its navel, confecting prissy new rules and bickering while Greece, Italy and Spain struggled and the Calais jungle grew.
I never became a Brexiteer like Wheeler, from a mixture of cowardice at the complication of it and suspicion that Dominic Cummings, Boris and the big bad bus were rascals. I did damage some friendships, though, by mocking the hysterical overreaction to the vote. Having grown to adulthood outside the EC, I couldn’t share their noisy distress. Now, as a decade of Euro-orphanhood draws to a close and Donald Tusk rebukes our “biggest mistake”, I concede that it is a mess.
But Wheeler may be right. Time moves on, humans can stop sulking, find strength in compromise and create something new. So prost, santé, salud, zivjeli and cin cin to that.