The United Kingdom will not be able to agree \u201ca halfway house\u201d with the European Union that will significantly improve its fortunes, the UK\u2019s former top diplomat to the EU has declared. <\/p>\n
Speaking in Dublin to mark the 10th anniversary of Brexit, Ivan Rogers said he brought \u201clittle good news\u201d and that he sees little prospect that the UK could rejoin the EU.<\/p>\n
The UK\u2019s economic health \u201chasn\u2019t been improved by Brexit, that\u2019s self-evident and it would today be better off\u201d if it had remained in the European Union, said Rogers, the former UK permanent representative to the union.<\/p>\n
Exiting damaged the economy and tax revenues, he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat then leads to further pressures on public services and defence spending and everything else, because you\u2019ve got less money to spend,\u201d he told a conference organised by the European Commission\u2019s Office in Ireland. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, that exacerbates the issues that we were already feeling before we left, and it\u2019s made them harder to fix, not easier.\u201d <\/p>\n
He added: \u201cBrexit is as much a symptom of this malaise, not solely a cause of it. The United Kingdom\u2019s economic performance has been pretty grim. Productivity has been pretty weak for a sustained period.\u201d<\/p>\n
British politicians, he said, \u201care bending over backwards, and have now been for a very long time, not to relitigate Brexit and not tell the public that they were fools to have voted for it\u201d.<\/p>\n
Its supporters argue that Brexit gave \u201can opportunity to fix the UK\u2019s endemic problems,\u201d but the opportunity was \u201csquandered\u201d by those trying to frustrate the 2016 referendum\u2019s outcome.<\/p>\n
Rogers said he did not agree with this view and that Brexit made it \u201cmore difficult to tackle problems, not easier\u201d, precisely because it damaged trade links with the UK\u2019s nearest neighbours. <\/p>\n
He said it has \u201cbecome endemic\u201d for some to believe the UK can \u201ccherry pick what we like\u201d about the EU, while \u201cstill having a warmer relationship with the US, with China, with India than anybody else\u201d.<\/p>\n
The \u201cbrilliance of the Brexiteer campaign\u201d was that it persuaded a majority of voters that their \u201cfantasies of what was wrong about the world\u201d could be corrected by Brexit.<\/p>\n
Different visions of life after Brexit were promoted by Brexiteers, such as the \u201cglobalist, free-trading, buccaneering, bold mid-Atlantic\u201d version offered by Lord Daniel Hannan. <\/p>\n
\u201cRemember, \u2018Let\u2019s Go WTO?\u2019 Remember all that nonsense? How does that look 10 years on? Not terribly healthy, really,\u201d Rogers said.<\/p>\n
Reform leader Nigel Farage had, Rogers said, offered \u201ca chauvinist, nativist, and sometimes rather worse than nativist, Brexit\u201d, trumpeting the false threat posed by 76 million Turkish people allegedly wanting to come to the UK.<\/p>\n
He said Farage \u2013 \u201cthe most significant UK politician in the last 15 years, though he has never held office\u201d \u2013 was most responsible for Brexit, but his party has led in \u201cevery one of the last 300 opinion polls\u201d.<\/p>\n
A third of UK voters believe they were misled in advance of the referendum 10 years ago, including a lot of Reform voters, \u201cyet they do not think it\u2019s solely the fault of the Tory establishment that they were mis-sold\u201d.<\/p>\n
Today, Rogers said, Farage \u201cis back with a different version of a popular populism built primarily around migration and small boats, and asylum seekers\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rogers added: \u201cHe doesn\u2019t mention Europe very much any more, that\u2019s no longer his agenda.\u201d And Rogers noted that most people believe 40 per cent of asylum seekers arrive by small boats, but the actual figure is 4 per cent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United Kingdom will not be able to agree \u201ca halfway house\u201d with the European Union that will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,23935,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-551801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-common-ground","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116805344208022837","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}