Sorry, Leavers – we’ll have to keep free movement
‘DAMN – a bad day for Europe,’ tweeted Sigmar Gabriel, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats as the Brexit outcome percolated on Friday morning. Seen from Berlin, capital of our largest trading partner in the EU, the result was the ultimate perversity from the ‘Crazy Brits’.
The mood is even more vinegary in France, with the Liberation newspaper featuring a vast picture of Boris on a zip wire and the sardonic message, ‘Good Luck’.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, has since warned ahead of a fraught EU meeting this week – dubbed the ‘Bugger Off Britain’ summit by an official – that this was not the time for vengeance. Only the Germans are being so nice: plenty of other EU states would like a large dollop of told-you-so served to Britain. The result marked the unwinding of a long, grumbly relationship between Britons and institutional Europe.
This was strained by the large waves of immigration that followed the opening up of Europe to the East after the fall of the Berlin Wall – and the EU’s commitment to guarantee free movement of labour.
But a good portion of the referendum’s outcome was created by the tone-deaf nature of the powerful EU quartet responsible for dealing with David Cameron’s failed
negotiations: the German and French leaders Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, Donald Tusk, the Pole who was in the chair, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the bullish head of the European Commission.
Together, they choked off any hope for Cameron that he could bring home a deal to reassure those fretful about immigration and control of borders.
Freedom of movement has always been at the heart of this conflict. The bitterest argument to take place between former friends Michael Gove and David Cameron when the referendum was first discussed was about whether they should make a temporary check on immigration a core part of Britain’s demands.
Gove insisted the negotiation would be meaningless without that, and voters would mete out punishment. Prescient, as it turned out. Cameron insisted that he could not ‘get that through’ and would focus on welfare restrictions.
In one way, the pragmatic Prime Minister was right. Over beer in the No10 kitchen at an impromptu meeting in autumn 2015, Merkel reiterated that there was no point in Cameron even raising the matter with Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.
As a former East German, Merkel insisted her position on freedom of movement was ‘unantastbar’ (untouchable) because it was a theoretical basis of the entire post-1989 EU project.
The propensity of Poles to seek work abroad meant that Tusk was just as intransigent. France’s Francois Hollande was less fixated on the principle, more concerned by his own ratings than the impact of a Brexit. In Juncker, a narrowminded Eurocrat, UK negotiators encountered a passive-aggressive functionary who, as one source puts it, ‘always wanted rid of the naughty child in the classroom’.
There was an alternative to this, namely to offer the kind of temporary stop on migration the EU agreed member states could enact after Polish accession in 2004. Britain did not take it up – but it was at least given the choice. That lack of choice in 2015 tied Cameron’s hands. The Prime Minister – fatally, as it turned out – and the quartet shoulder some responsibility for what follows.
Of the four, the most rueful at the course of events is Merkel, who has a sincere regard for Britain and will want to retain a sound relationship. In an exchange with Cameron over the weekend, she expressed personal sympathies for his position and vowed to assist in sorting out the spaghetti junction of trade deals and transitional arrangements we must now go through. Post-Brexit Britain will still need allies, and the German relationship is paramount.
For that reason, I would urge Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to rise above any appetite for revenge and invest in their relationship with Berlin. Neither country wants a resumption of bad blood in a century after two wars and with many shared values. And frankly, the Germans are as reasonable as the EU gets in dealing with Britain.
Less than an hour after Cameron announced he would stand down, I interviewed Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary. He knows the realities and constraints of our EU dealings inside out. The price of free trade access to Europe’s large single market will, he told me, be retaining freedom of movement with only cosmetic tweaks. Without that commitment the EU has no reason to keep trade with Britain free of barriers that will do us severe economic damage. That might not be what the jubilant Brexiteers want to hear this weekend. It is nonetheless true.
‘Always wanted rid of the naughty child’