Re-entry

It is a truth near universally acknowledged, that a single nation lacking possession of a good fortune, must be in want of EU membership. 

At the recent UK election, both the two major parties agreed that the rate of economic growth was too low and that improving this is a prerequisite for much needed increased spending on important public services – hospitals, schools, and green energy projects for Labour; pensions, defence, and immigration centres in Rwanda for the Conservatives.  Yet, during the campaign the principal cause of low growth was not discussed, because neither of the main parties is willing to be honest in public about the folly that is Brexit.   A recent article, The Economist estimates the cost of Brexit to be in the range of 3%-5% of GDP, which makes it, one of the rich world’s worst economic blunders.  The early impacts were to depress business investment, now they are reducing trade, and in due course, they are expected to lower productivity rates.  It might seem obvious that to stimulate stronger growth, this blunder should be reversed as soon as practicable.  Unfortunately for the UK, what is practical is not possible soon.

To understand the intractable nature of the UK’s self-harm problem, it is important to start with those groups who persist in denying that Brexit was a mistake.  They are now in the minority, but nonetheless one of the three groups — Conservative MPs,  newspaper editors, and voters over 70 years of age – is central to the re-entry process. 

The Conservative Party is now choosing a new leader and, to my knowledge, none of the candidates have mentioned reversing the Brexit decision in their campaign speeches.  Despite the fact that at the time of the Referendum, in June 2016, more than half of Conservative MPs campaigned to remain in the EU, now almost none of the parliamentary party are even prepared to say that leaving the EU was a mistake.  At most, some will say that the terms of the exit treaty could be improved, but even these are more likely to blame the EU than the previous UK government for the imperfections.  Champions of the EU within the Conservative party have died, retired, or been purged; and the residual rump of MPs, much reduced in number since the General Election, are settled in their conviction that “getting Brexit done” has been mostly successful.  I will return to this point later, since it is a material fact.  (Indeed, it is the only fact about the Conservative Party that is currently relevant to British politics.) 

British newspaper editors are ever the vanguard of the politics of nostalgia.  Rather than informing their readers about the world – as it is today and as it will become tomorrow – they elegize the nation’s past with a rose-saturated vision of British greatness, rooted in British exceptionalism.   This applies to the papers of the centre-left (in awe of Clement Attlee, dazzled by Tony Benn) as much as the centre-right (celebrating the royal family, the empire, and William Morris designs for renovating rural second-homes), but it should be emphasised that the centre-right has many more papers with which to do this work.  The Economist is an honourable exception, sometimes the Financial Times too, but for the majority of newspaper editors, along with their opinion-columnist stormtroopers, there appears to be no evidence that could change the dominant narrative, that Britain has always been at its greatest when it has stood alone, defiant of the threat of interference from the rest of Europe.  Fog in the Channel: Continent cut-off might not be a genuine newspaper headline from the past, but it is the quintessence of British newspaper headlines. 

Young people, very sensibly, choose other media to learn what is going on in the world, but older people in Britain still read the daily papers.  Older people also tend to vote Conservative – at the last election it is estimated that the Conservatives only polled higher than Labour in the age-demographic above 65.  And increasing age, along with lack of tertiary education, was a strong predictor of support for Brexit.  Older people are more likely to remember Harold Macmillan, then Conservative Prime Minister, telling the British people in 1957 that they had never had it so good, and they appear prepared to believe that this is still, and always will remain, true.  Those who judge the mid-1950s as the high point of recent British history — a new young Queen, the Empire mostly intact, continental Europe not recovered from the war, church attendance respectably high, and the transgressive sixties not yet imaginable – probably also think that getting Brexit done was a triumphant return to former British greatness.  There is no amount of evidence that The Economist could adduce that is going to change these ageing minds.

Optimistic readers might be thinking, but these times will soon pass.  Older voters will follow the late Queen into the grave.  Newspaper circulation figures will continue to fall.  The Conservative Party is too weak in Parliament to frustrate the new Labour Government.  Brexit has evidently failed and its hard-line supporters are in retreat.  What was badly done can now be undone.  I do not agree.  Unfortunately, some mistakes cannot easily be remedied.

Choosing to leave the EU was a unilateral decision of the UK government.  The method of departure was the result of a negotiation between the UK and the EU.  For the UK to re-join the EU, however, both the decision itself and the method of re-entry would be subject to detailed negotiation.  The UK could express an intention to rejoin, but it would be up to the EU to decide when and how to respond.  The UK has no unilateral power over the process.   Our future relations with the EU are much more dependent, therefore, on what the governments of the 27 member states think about the UK, than what the UK thinks about them.   It is not the continent that is cut-off.

The Brexit negotiations absorbed a great deal of the EU’s time and energy over the past eight years, as well as giving encouragement to many of the anti-EU fringe parties on the continent.  The process and its outcome has been most damaging for the UK, but it has not been positive for EU.  For these member states to embark upon another lengthy negotiation process, to allow the UK back into the Union, they would want to be sure that there was a strong and settled preference across the UK political spectrum for membership.  They would certainly not want to start a negotiation, only for it to be abandoned by the UK after an election, if that led to a change in government.  Which means, that the EU will likely only be willing to start a negotiation when there is a clear majority in support of EU membership in (at least) the two main political parties in the UK. 

This is not to say that the attitude of the fringe parties does not matter, but they are mostly pro-EU: this is true of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, so too the Scottish Nationalists, Sinn Fein, and Plaid Cymru.  On the other side, Reform are resolutely anti-EU, as are the Democratic Unionist Party.    The position of the Unionist parties probably matters less than it once did, since the majority of the population in Northern Ireland voted to remain, and pro-EU sentiment continues to be strong in Ulster.  The DUP leaders are therefore out of step with their core vote.  Reform is never going to embrace the EU, but it is also a new party, with plenty of in-built fragility.  It is not clear that it will be able to evolve into a stable and serious political party, but even if it does, it is also not clear that it can translate its voting support into seats in parliament.  It is quite possible that even if it survives, it will only do so as a small (but vocal) protest party. 

The Labour Party is supportive of improved relations with the EU, although the majority of MPs appear less passionate about this than party members and voters.  First, being monoglots they tend to follow US politics more closely that continental European politics, and second, they have their hands full dealing with the economic and social mess that Brexit has created.  Treating the symptoms will absorb all the governing energy of the Party for several years, delaying a serious consideration of how to treat the cause.  For the current leadership, rejoining is more a question of a timing than a question of principle, but they are not seeking the answer with any urgency.

Which brings me back to anti-EU position of the Conservative Party.  They are the formal Opposition, and they are the party most likely to replace Labour in government.  British political history suggests that it will be a decade before they are likely to be in contention for power.  For now, what they think and say about the EU therefore matters more in the EU than it does in the UK, for any negotiation around re-entry will be dependent on the views of EU member states and I doubt that the governments of France, Germany, Italy, and the rest, would countenance beginning a negotiation with the UK until there are clear majorities in both the Labour and the Conservative parties for EU membership.

In summary, since the UK only becomes a credible negotiating partner once both main parties, plus a preponderance of fringe parties, are committed to EU membership, therefore the main obstacle for now is the position of the Conservative Party, and at present there is no sign that it is willing to discuss the issue, let alone change its position.  Until there is a strong and growing movement within the Conservative Party to return to the policy position it took under Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and David Cameron — namely that it was better for the UK to argue for its national interests within the EU rather than pursue them from outside —  then I see no prospect for re-entry negotiations. 

Back in June, a month before the UK election, two American astronauts took a trip on the Boeing Starliner to the International Space Station.  They were due to spend eight days on the ISS but, due to problems with the Starline capsule, which has now returned to earth empty, they have been detained there on an unplanned exile from earth.  The astronauts are now scheduled to return home in February next year, on a spacecraft made by SpaceX rather than Boeing, assuming certain technical challenges can be overcome.  Eight days has become at least eight months, and perhaps longer.  

This, then, is the risk you take, if you depart the familiarity of home and head off into the isolation of space: exit is expensive but relatively easy, re-entry frustratingly slow and difficult.