Me and EU, EU and Me

Back in June 2016, I wrote a blog about the upcoming EU referendum. I wanted to state a few of my opinions and talk about what might happen following the narrow ‘Remain’ win that I was predicting. It received a few Likes and a comment from a friend (who I have not seen in nearly thirty years) that it was interesting.

I hardly need to mention that my prediction was wrong or, at least, if that is news to you then you really are disconnected from the news (do not laugh, recent focus groups found a hard core of people who agreed with the comment ‘since the referendum, I haven’t heard anything about Brexit’). There was a certain amount of wishful thinking in a lot of conversations at the time – I remember a woman from an opinion polling company (not running an opinion poll on the EU referendum) talking to me about how she looked forward to everything ‘getting back to normal’. Popular racism and everyday crises could be seen as just a phase brought on by the most unBritish procedure of a referendum and everything could go back to how it used to be. There is an irony in that sentence because you could say that all political visions since then have been built on a vision of the past rather than the future.

My experiences immediately after the referendum result were instructive. I was on holiday in north Wales and I sat in a hotel in Llangollen scrolling through news stories on my phone about the sudden increase in violence and hatred towards minority groups and women. The news tends not to tell us just how far this went – that week, a friend of mine was harassed and intimidated in the street for speaking Welsh and that was just one example of anyone who ‘stood out’ being targeted. Anyone who read about the recent riot in Chemnitz where protestors attacked ‘anyone who looked foreign’ need not say that it could not happen here, it has already happened.

Sitting with the Quakers in Oswestry that weekend was instructive too. It was hard to feel positive, especially as a well-paid, highly-skilled engineer explained that he and his family were going to return to the Netherlands after an adult lifetime in the UK because although they loved the UK, they wanted to live in the EU. I reflected at the time that these were the ‘immigrants’ who would leave and that those who hate immigrants would still be wondering why their coffee was being served by a woman with a Polish accent. Indeed, do you remember the Leave online poster claiming ’76 million Turks’ were going to come to the UK? Two years later we are negotiating a trade deal with Turkey and whereas the EU has the political clout to ignore Turkish demands for visa-free access to the EU, it looks as though the UK will have to cave on that point. Those who voted Leave to stop immigration may well have increased immigration to the UK.

I could write a lot more about these immediate effects. There was the organisation in Germany that pulled out of a partnership with my employers because they wanted to work with organisations in the EU and we would no longer be one. There was the friend with a teenage child whose offers of a university place came from those enterprising Dutch and Danish universities who marketed courses run in English for those who wanted to study somewhere with a promising future. There was the gloating Leave voter who turned up to my house for a party, ignored attempts to get him off the subject of Brexit and then told me that as a Quaker (a subject he knew very little about) and therefore a pacifist, I should have voted Leave to ‘stop the European Defence Force’. Funny how the arch Leavers in the European Research Group are talking about increasing military spending as a result of leaving the EU and not embracing pacifism.

However, my point really is only to set the scene and to say that amid all that, I tried to be practical. In Oswestry, we had the conversation about how many years of economic misery it would take before the UK rejoined. I was pleasantly surprised to read in George Lakey’s excellent ‘Viking Economics’ that the ‘Norway option’ of EU membership (being part of the economic arrangements without being part of the political institutions) came about because the Norwegians rejected EU membership in a referendum by 52% to 48%. Their politicians came up with a solution aimed at satisfying as many people as possible rather than descending into puerile ‘you lost’ point scoring. It seemed to me that there was going to be a reasonable solution to a situation that had not gone the way that a lot of people expected.

It is worth noting here one other interview I read while sitting in that hotel in Llangollen. It was with a young woman in Ebbw Vale. At the time, Ebbw Vale was flooded with journalists trying to ‘make sense’ of why a town that had benefited so much from EU support had voted so decisively against it. It started with the usual scene for these articles, the woman jogging around a running track built by EU funding, talking about how the EU had never done anything for Ebbw Vale. So far, so patronising you might think. However, what struck me was her answer to the question about whether the UK government would care about Ebbw Vale if the EU did not. Her answer was that David Cameron did not care about Ebbw Vale. ‘Do you think that Prime Minister Johnson will?’ asked the reporter, to which the young woman replied, ‘No, he doesn’t care about Ebbw Vale either. None of them do’.

It is not particularly new for me to say that the Leave vote in many areas was a cry for help and a kick against everything. However, I do think that this analysis has been carefully pushed aside, especially by some of those campaigning for a second referendum. It seemed to me that just as the UK was embarking on an impossible task of turning the clock back to the 1950s (or an imagined version of it), so there were people embarking on an impossible task of turning the clock back to June 2016 (or an imagined version of it). As I wrote earlier, people all around you are trying to sell you a vision of the past.

In the two and a bit years that have followed, the new normal seems to have become a particularly ugly version of bullying. That video of John McCain telling off a member of a meeting for describing his opponent in the 2008 US Presidential election as an Arab seems to have been taken in another age. Could you imagine any of our senior politicians defending an opponent?

With the disappearance of sense and rational debate has gone talk of compromise. At the end of June 2016, it seemed likely that the UK would scrabble together some kind of Single Market membership compromise that would at least keep the economy ticking over and the country trading. However, those campaigners who once talked of how Norway did well outside the EU are suddenly describing this as ‘betrayal’. Indeed, there is a sound argument for the ‘two speed Europe’ made up of the Eurozone countries developing the economic institutions to keep their currency stable and workable and the rest of the EU forming an ‘outer ring’ of trading and economic partnership as part of the Single Market. There are many who believe that the EU has lost its way somewhat since the time when it was a guarantor of workers’ rights and common ideals. There were many other possibilities that the UK could have proposed. Instead, we have spent two years ‘repeatedly punching ourselves in the face for no discernible reason while the rest of the world looks on in confusion’ (Polly Toynbee).

On the way to Proms in the Park last weekend, a group of musicians were handing out EU flags. You may have seen the Daily Express story about these ‘traitors’ trying to ‘sabotage the Proms’ with EU berets in the Albert Hall. Their point was that the free movement of musicians has been valuable to the UK and so the Last Night of the Proms was the opportunity to make that point. The Daily Express thought it was ‘an insult to Britain’.

I took a flag and planted it in the ground near my picnic spot in Hyde Park. I saved waving it for when ‘Rule Britannia’ started. No-one commented about it to me, but I did see others who were asked why they were not waving a ‘British’ flag. The idea that the EU flag and the UK flag might be perfectly complementary had clearly not occurred to some people, even though they were the people most likely to tell Welsh or Scottish people that they ought to be ‘British’ as well.

I was never convinced of the idea of a second referendum. I saw it as a way to give the Brexit-supporters a ‘betrayal’ to cherish and to play in to their hands when it came to the ridiculous argument that Denmark and the Republic of Ireland had been bullied into having more than one vote on ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish example is worth reading about. After an initial referendum rejected the treaty, the Irish government worked with civil society groups and the wider population to establish negotiation points which were then put to the EU and used as the basis for amendments to the final treaty as accepted in a second referendum eighteen months after the first. Contrary to the myth of being bullied, the Irish demonstrated how to do grown-up policy-making that treats the population as intelligent. However, you would not hear that explained in a second referendum campaign. I still thought that the most likely outcome was a period of economic misery and the coming of age of the European generation that would take us back into the EU (our elder statespeople constantly under-rate the degree to which people under the age of 30 take Europe and especially European travel and opportunities, for granted).

I have been intrigued to see the growth in the second referendum campaign. Who knows, they may yet get what they want and, if they do, I am sure that I will be one of many people who will be a lot more active in the next campaign. However, there is a question I would want to ask of any of the possible scenarios.

Let us say that the UK might leave the EU with no deals done and years of legal acrimony over our financial obligations towards programmes in which we are already involved. A second scenario might be some kind of middle way – Norway or Canada- which allows a close relationship with the EU without full membership. What though if the second referendum people get their way and a wave of enthusiasm and youthful optimism takes them over the 50% mark and we end up saying ‘oops sorry, can we come back in now?’?

Here is my question – in any of those scenarios, is the life of the woman on the running track in Ebbw Vale likely to be improved? I am not sure that it would be, for all the grand claims on all sides that their solution means milk and honey for all. For me, perhaps that is what is really missing from all our political debate ever since June 23rd 2016.