Howard: Brussels is treating us like a defeated country
EU CHIEF negotiator Michel Barnier has been accused of treating Britain like a “defeated country” in a scathing attack from a senior Tory.
Lord Howard claimed the Brussels diplomat’s demands for a multi-billion divorce fee from Britain sounded like “reparations payments” frequently imposed on losers in war.
The senior peer also called for independent arbitrators to be brought in to settle the deadlocked row over the exit Bill.
Lord Howard’s outspoken broadside against Mr Barnier came in a speech at a Westminster reception organised by the Brexit Central website on Wednesday.
Disappointed
It follows growing anger among Tory Euro-sceptics that the chief negotiator is refusing to allow talks about Britain’s future relationship with the EU to begin until “significant progress” can be made on the size of the country’s exit payment.
Lord Howard, a former Tory leader and Home Secretary, said: “I had hoped we would be able to sit down with our former partners in the EU and have a friendly discussion and construct an amicable divorce. I’m afraid my hopes have been disappointed.”
He added: “Mr Barnier seems to be acting as the representative of a country that has just won a war and is determined to exact the maximum amount of reparations from a vanquished, defeated country. But we are not a vanquished, defeated country.” Lord Howard suggested the issue of the divorce bill could be put to an independent arbitration process that both sides would be legally bound by afterwards.
Lord King, the former governor of the Bank of England and a supporter of leaving the EU in last year’s referendum, said: “I don’t think the negotiations are going in the way that we might hope.”
The Crossbench peer thought ministers had been inadequately prepared for the talks with Mr Barnier’s team. He told BBC2’s Newsnight: “If you’re going to enter a negotiation it’s very important to make sure the other side of the table knows you have a fall-back position that you’re capable of delivering. That requires you to make clear what the fall-back position is.
“We’ve been waiting for over a year now and I must say I’m not terribly impressed by how much of that fall-back position has actually been stated and whether it’s actually been managed properly within the Government.”
EU Exit Secretary David Davis is due to resume the Brexit wrangling with Mr Barnier in Brussels on September 25.
Their last round of talks broke up with some tetchy exchanges, with both sides admitting they were at loggerheads. Relations worsened after minutes of a private Brussels meeting revealed that EC president Jean-Claude Juncker questioned whether Mr Davis had the “stability and accountability” needed for talks.
Mr Barnier has denied wanting to “punish” Britain.
Mrs May is expected to try to break the deadlock with a speech in Florence on September 22.
ONE of the strongest arguments that the Remain camp could muster during the EU referendum campaign was that we were better off with the devil we knew. At least we would know what we were getting if we stayed in the EU, rather than taking a leap into the unknown.
On Wednesday, with Jean-Claude Juncker’s “state of the union” speech, we found out what a dangerous delusion this was. There never was an option to stay in the EU as it currently is. The choice lay between leaving the EU and being subsumed into the superstate into which the EU’s leaders still want it to evolve.
During the months leading up to the referendum we heard very little from Juncker, Donald Tusk or anyone else about the next steps towards the “evercloser union” that is written into the EU’s statutes. There was a good reason for this. They knew there was nothing more guaranteed to persuade Britons to vote to leave than the EU’s grandes fromages airing their latest megalomanic dreams.
But with Britain anyway having voted to leave they no longer feel any need to hold back. On the contrary, with troublesome Britain now out of the picture they see an opportunity to push ahead with less opposition.
TO GIVE Jean-Claude Juncker his due it takes some chutzpah to stand up and say, “The future of Europe cannot be decided by decree” and then, as an unelected official, go on to issue, well, a decree on the changes he demands of the EU.
“If we want the euro to unite rather than divide our continent, then it should be more than the currency of a select group of countries,” Juncker said. In other words, Britain was not going to be allowed to stay outside the eurozone indefinitely. We would have been under huge pressure to join the single currency, never mind the misery it has wrought on Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland.
The euro crisis may seem to have abated over the past couple of years, thanks to endless bailouts in Greece. But you can be sure that it will be back thanks to the euro’s fundamental problems. It forces a single, inflexible exchange rate on very different economies with varying rates of growth, and takes away the ability to correct the values of currencies used in those economies. Had the pound not been allowed to fall last year we would not now be enjoying a recovery in manufacturing.
Juncker went on to reassert his ambition to establish a single EU social policy, saying: “If we want to avoid social fragmentation and social dumping in Europe, then member states should agree on the European Pillar of Social Rights as soon as possible.” In other words, were we staying in the EU we would be forced to sign up to a supercharged social chapter, inevitably with a more protectionist attitude towards jobs – and an end to Britain’s flexible labour market.
If you want to know where that would lead, just look at the relative rates of unemployment across the EU: 4.5 per cent in Britain compared with an average of 7.7 per cent across the EU, including 9.8 per cent in France, 11.3 per cent in Italy and 17.1 per cent in Spain.
Juncker’s great blueprint for the EU didn’t end there. He also demanded a single EU minister of economy and finance – effectively downgrading the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer to enacting the policies of an unelected official in Brussels.
He also announced that there must be a European Defence Union by 2025. Of course, it is a good idea to pool military resources where needed to defend against a common threat but we already have such a union, called Nato, which has helped keep the peace in Europe since 1949.
To try to reinvent it under an EU badge is wasteful and unnecessary, a symptom of an institution – the EU – which is trying to worm its way into every area of global politics.
IT ISN’T hard to imagine what the next few years would have been like had we voted to remain in the EU. As has happened with every expansion in EU powers since the Maastrict Treaty in 1993 our politicians would puff their chests and tell us they wouldn’t possibly let it happen.
Then, when they failed to do this they would have tried to reassure us: don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter, it is just a little tidying-up exercise on the part of the EU – and anyway, the government has won us some concessions.
Next, we would discover that Parliament was voting through new laws which were being imposed on us through the new EU treaty. Then we would be told: it is too late to do anything. Before we knew it, the EU would be talking about doing away even with Britain’s miserable little concessions and opt-outs.
That is how the great EU bandwagon has rolled along for the past quarter-century – with Britain being dragged along behind, screaming, trying and usually failing to dig its heels into the dirt.
Thankfully, the vote for Brexit has freed us once and for all from this agonising journey. Again we will be able to make our own laws, debated on the doorsteps and in Parliament.
If the rest of the EU wants to forge ahead and become a superstate, let it. But there will be a great number of people elsewhere in the EU who will have listened to Jean-Claude Juncker’s state of the union address and wondered whether Britain has it right – and that they, too, would be better off not being part of Juncker’s grand vision.
‘Brussels is trying to build a superstate’