The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
No Brexit? Just imagine
Something shifted last week. I detect a hint of continental drift. I think Europe is on to something. I think European Union leaders detect a chink in the preposterous, clunking armour with which British Government negotiators have girded their feeble loins.
I think Europe thinks that Brexit is coming apart at the seams.
Suddenly there is an undercurrent of conversation there to the effect Brexit may not, after all, mean Brexit; it might mean instead that parts of what the British Prime Minister still likes to refer to as “the United Kingdom” (united – in what way?) temporarily took leave of their senses and believed a series of political lies cooked up by the far right wing of the right wing of British politics in a desperate and corrupt last throw of the Brexit dice.
In Scotland, where we don’t really believe the utterances of the right wing of any political beast at all, common sense prevailed, and much good did it do us – yet. Mutterings But what manner of stage whispers have they heard in Brussels?
Why, for example, did the Netherlands’ Anglophile Prime Minister Mark Rotte say on TV: “I hate Brexit from every angle.”
Then why add the explicit hope Britain would come to “some form of continued membership or relationship with the internal market”?
That was the day before the president of the European Council Donald Tusk made what is surely the most remarkable utterance of all the tonnage of utterances made in the unholy name of Brexit, in answer to a question about the possibility of Britain changing its mind: “The EU was built on dreams that seemed impossible. So who knows? You can say that I’m a dreamer.” Pause for effect. “But I’m not the only one.”
No, Mr Tusk, you’re not. And neither are you, Mr Rotte.
It was singularly unpolitical language to emerge from the mouths of two men at the epicentre of European politics. The words of John Lennon! Imagine! And of course, there was the unspoken implication of the next two lines: “I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”
It may be a little late in the day but as the catastrophic (what was your phrase, Mrs May – coalition of chaos?)… as the catastrophic coalition of chaos that is the British Government’s negotiating team becomes the laughing stock of newspaper cartoonists all across western Europe, and the rest of us are no wiser about what a postBrexit Britain will look like, the very case for Brexit itself unravels before our eyes. America? It is increasingly apparent our government thinks the only possibility for Britain’s post-Brexit salvation lies in America, which as things stand would mean an unhealthy union of the world’s two most shambolic basket-case governments.
But as former Guardian editor Peter Preston writes in new book Brexit, Trump and the Media, it’s not where we are.
He goes on: “Nor, when you look at its underlying assumptions about the safety nets of society, is it where we want to be. Europe may seem a forbidding home base: too many tongues, too many impenetrable backstories, too many damned complications and bits of bureaucracy. But it is who we are and where we are.”
And there is the nub of the argument. Europe is where we are and who we are. And yes, the EU was built on dreams that seemed impossible.
Our world is in a dangerous place right now. In the Far East, the Middle East, North Africa, Russia, and God alone knows what the short-fused president of the United States might unleash before his reign is over.
In the midst of all that, a Europe that seeks to bury old divisions and grow closer as a family of nations is a kind of miracle.
Britain should be strengthening its ties in Europe, not cutting them; bringing its influence to bear deeper within Europe than ever before, not casting itself adrift in the mid-Atlantic where our brave new political world is based on a doctrine of turning friends into enemies. Un-European I remain quite baffled by what is surely the most thoroughly useless British Government of the last 70 years, quite baffled by what it thinks it can achieve by pretending it can become un-European.
Preston writes: “There ought to be some grasp of how and why the EU works. There ought to be some effort to see how countries, overrun time and again in war, have a different order or priorities for partnership. Economics? Pounds sterling, euros, profits and losses? Naturally. But don’t for a second think that this is all you need to know.”
Donald Tusk went out on a limb for us. He made us a remarkably gracious offer. Our government should gather together the shards of what little grace it can muster, and say thank you.
Just Imagine.
“And there is the nub of the argument. Europe is where we are and who we are