Well, switch December 24/25 for March 29 and in one respect Brexit is very much like a child’s Christmas: none of us, not convinced Remainer nor convinced Brexiteer, has the faintest clue what the outcome will be. Certainly the sky won’t fall in overnight from March 29 to 30, and nor will Britain again be in a position to rule the waves. The result of Britain leaving the EU will only become apparent over the coming months and years.
There is, of course, any amount of prognostication from all sides. For example, British biscuit manufacturers who are banking on imported foreign biscuits becoming too expensive for most consumers and a substantial rise in sales of their products have predicted, are rubbing their hands in glee. I understand the Daily Mail has already
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I happen to have voted Remain, but with one important reservations (and I’m sure I’ve said this before): the EU is essentially a great idea, but of late has sometimes been trotting up an alley I didn’t always much like and regard as more than a little misguided.
Migration into the UK from EU member states - or immigration as purists choose to call it - doesn’t bother me in the slightest, and this country can thank the Lord for the extra work being done by the many Baltic states citizens and the French, Italians, Poles, Bulgarians and all the rest which our homegrown workforce is often unwilling to do. But I’ve always been wary of (and usually downright disliked) ostentatious zeal, which is simply the more polite word for zealotry, whether it is for the latest diet (don’t eat any carbs at all, just protein/eat nothing but diary products for five days, then drink nothing but tomato soup/always stand up when you are eating, only eat in short five-minute bursts, then take a laxative) or for those bores among us who claim to be ‘convinced Europeans’ and profess that they ‘love the EU’.
Well, I am neither a ‘convinced European nor an ‘unconvinced European’ and I neither ‘love the EU nor do I ‘hate the EU’. What I like and shall always support is co-operation, simplicity and pragmatism, and but for a few glitches - remember all those wine lakes and mountains of butter we were supposed to pretend didn’t exist to the EU could keep French farmers happy? - the EU is, as far as I am concerned, far more often than not a useful and essentially admirable institution. But what does leave me at the door and wringing my hands in despair is this ongoing zeal in Brussels for ‘ever-closer political union’.
On paper it makes perfect sense: were there - eventually - one European state with one European parliament which could bring in Europe-wide laws and, crucially for the long-term health of the Euro, impose a Europe-wide tax system and set a Europe-wide budget, the world - well Europe - would be a simpler place, at least on paper. As it is . . .
Anyone naive enough to believe that in a matter of years the vastly disparate nations in the EU will willingly sign up to resigning their sovereignty in an ‘all-for-one, and one-for-all’ gesture of solidarity is a directive short of a paragraph. That doesn’t mean it will never happen or even that it couldn’t ever happen, but it will not be for several centuries. Yet the notion of ‘ever-closer political union’ leading up to one de fact ‘United States of Europe’ is still one apparently at the top of the wish list for the EU’s top brass. Why? Can’t they see just how unrealistic it all is?
Often trotted out is the ‘fact’ that ‘the EU has preserved peace in Europe for the past 73 years. Well, put aside for the moment that ‘the EU’ has not existed as such for more than 25 years (the ‘EU’ was established by the Maastricht Treaty but let me be generous and say that the notion of a potential European Union has existed since our very own Winston Churchill called for a ‘United States of Europe’ in 1946 and the idea was started to be given tangible form with the formation with the Treaty of Paris in 1951), it is a bit of a stretch to claim that the absence of war in Europe since the end of World War II is down to the fledgling EEC/EC/EU. I think it is more down to the fact that after the horrors of World War II - horrors experienced not just by those who fought in that war but by every European born before 1939 who in some way or other was affected by it and its aftermath, no one had much stomach for any form of warmongering. The undoubted prosperity ushered in by increasingly tariff-free trade in Europe also helped, but it is not in the slightest churlish to add, for example, that the UK’s membership of the then EEC crippled the economy of New Zealand (whose trade links with Britain were more or less cut overnight). Once again the truism was demonstrated that for every winner, there’s a loser.
(Incidentally, if you’re the kind of idealistic lad or lass who likes world peace with your cornflakes, bring it on, though whenever I hear the phrase ‘world peace’, I am reminded of the toe-curling anecdote trotted out by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. What do you want for Christmas? he informed the world he had asked his then eight-year-old daughter Amy. No doubt through teeth braces and a winsome smile the little Carter replied: ‘World peace, daddy.’ Me, I’m very much looking forward to the day when rain is far less wet.)
It is the unflinching zeal for pushing through notion of ever-closer political union’ in the EU which in part helped persuade a majority - actually a small majority at that majority, so it wasn’t as though Britain is wholeheartedly behind it - to vote for Brexit, although I suspect only a small minority of the Leave voters did so for that reason. The rest - well, the rest voted Brexit for any number of reasons, some quite rational, others batshit crazy. Many of them are on record for voting Leave ‘because there are to many foreigners in Britain’. That, as I pointed out above, most of those foreigners do sterling service for their adopted country - i.e. Britain - seems to have passed them by.
Having said that, when I listen to why many chose to vote Remain, I’m equally unimpressed with their thinking and dislike equally in too many of them a supercilious ‘we, the intelligent ones, voted to Remain’ tone.
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This has all been a bit of a ramble, so let me rein myself in and try to get to what brought me to write this entry in the first place: no one, but no one, not Remainer nor Leaver, has the faintest clue what the state of Britain will be come March 2020, March 2022 and March 2025. I’m not sanguine, but . . .
More to the point I don’t think anyone bar a few pointy-headed civil servants in Whitehall and Brussels has the fainted understanding of ‘the options on offer’. None. ‘Canada-plus, Chequers, backstop, the Norway solution, the Swiss relationship - they could all be arcane sexual practices for all we understand about what they mean and what they entail. Every news bulletin brings ‘the latest develpments’ but I doubt I am the only one who can make neither head or tail about their significance.
But there is one detail we are all aware of and which I think we here in Britain all understand, one debate which pretty much symbolises just how dangerous this whole exercise is (apart from the fact that if Britain is a loser through Brexit, so is the rest of the EU, which is why they, too, want a reasonable deal). And this one detail is the nub of it all: will there, can there, should there be a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That is the nut no one has so far been able to crack.
After 30 years of murder and misery, jointly caused by the Irish Republican Army and the various Loyalist paramilitaries, the island of Ireland has enjoyed a well-deserved few decades of peace. All that could - and might - well be lost if the EU and Britain don’t get it right.
I have sympathy with both sides: the EU is completely right that once the UK is out of the EU, its ‘customs union’ must be properly defined and that can only be with some kind of ‘hard border’. Its compromise more or less amounts to Northern Ireland still being in the ‘customs union’ while the rest of Britain is not, and customs checks being made on goods travelling between the mainland and Northern Ireland.
On the other hand Britain says simply ‘that’s not on, because it can’t be on’: Northern Ireland is a part of Britain and cannot be separated. And it, too, for very practical reasons - that it doesn’t want to see a resurgence of fighting in Northern Ireland - knows that the current arrangement of a ‘soft border’ between the two parts of Ireland is essential. But do the Remainers and the Brexiteers give a shit about that (and the majority in Northern Ireland voted for Brexit, without thinking through the consequences. In fact, when it came to the Brexit referendum, I don’t think anyone thought through the consequences - not David Cameron who called hoping it would calm matters in the Conservative Party, and not the voters with all their ‘fuck foreigners/I love the EU’ posturing.
So: Happy Christmas (if you know what I mean).
As for the EU ‘having ensured peace in Europe for the past 70 years, if - if - they have ensured nations won’t go to war in Europa, ‘ever-closer union’ will simply - in my cynical view - merely ensure that there will sooner or later by rather more civil wars than we have experienced in the past 70 years.
