THE BIG BREXIT MESS
Ranjeni Munusamy reports from Brussels
Boris Johnson, the person responsible for influencing much of the euroscepticism in Britain, once displayed rare reticence in the most unusual of circumstances.
Standing in a brothel in Antwerp, Belgium, in the early 1990s, he was apparently reluctant to enter the room of a young sex worker. He hung back, allowing other journalists to inspect it.
Johnson, a reporter at the Daily Telegraph’s bureau in Brussels at the time, was among a group of journalists who had gone to Antwerp to cover a demonstration by sex workers.
“He was always very boisterous but that day he was very, very shy. He didn’t want to enter the room. There was a very young girl inside and he seemed moved that she had to do such work to make a living,” says Maria Laura Franciosi, a journalist who was at the time working for the Italian news agency, Ansa. Franciosi is the founding chair of the Press Club in Brussels and knows many of the journalists who pound the pavements to cover the work of the EU. Johnson, obviously, sticks out more than most.
It is now crunch time on Brexit — a phenomenon he was instrumental in spawning, first through his reporting, then during a political career that culminated in his blundering stint as British foreign secretary.
Johnson’s anti-Europe stance is somewhat peculiar, says Franciosi, as he studied at the European School of Brussels and his father was a European Commission official. But as a journalist covering EU institutions, she says, he was “always monopolising with questions critical of Europe”.
Franciosi, who spends much of her time supporting journalists working in and visiting Brussels, says the media is partly responsible for the “wrong information” that influenced the “Leave” campaign.
Johnson was adroit at blowing information out of proportion and even “inventing stories”, she says.
The “straight bananas” issue is perhaps the best example of the “euromyths” punted by Johnson and other Brexiteers.
In the run-up to the 2016 referendum that began the lumbering process of Britain’s withdrawal from the 28-member EU, Johnson claimed unnecessary regulations were being imposed on the UK.
He said it was “absolutely crazy that the EU is telling us how powerful our vacuum cleaners have got to be, what shape our bananas have got to be, and all that kind of thing”.
Franciosi says this was a distortion of regulations to classify fruit and vegetables.
“Nobody ever says the EU wants straight bananas. It was just about standardising things.”
There were also claims that the EU was chewing up British funding that could have been used on essentials like the National Health Insurance.
Johnson and Nigel Farage, the member of the European parliament who stepped down last year as the leader of the right-wing populist UK Independence Party, used such scaremongering tactics to heighten pre-existing anti-European prejudices, she says.
When the Channel Tunnel was under construction in the early 1990s, for example, fears were stoked in Britain that rabies-infected foxes and rats would walk over from France.
As with the recent controversy over migration, the British also feared back then that there would be a dilution of their culture and language due to the new access route into their country.
Scare stories
Brussels-based historian and Brexit commentator David Price says there was a major debate raging in British newspapers, on radio and on television at the time about the negative effects of the tunnel.
“I don’t think it was illegitimate for people to consider the spread of disease, for example, but the scare stories were simply not realistic. French foxes would have had to run 30km through the tunnel to bring the disease to the other side,” says Price.
The media throughout Europe took positions for and against Brexit.
In Britain, however — according to Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture — 82% of articles scanned in the UK ahead of the 2016 referendum were pro-Leave, showing the extent of media bias towards Brexit.
Price says newspapers owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, in particular, were strongly antiEuropean and played a major role in influencing public perception around Brexit.
He says he believes Murdoch’s Australian roots shaped his publications’ pro-Commonwealth stance. The Commonwealth community is being touted as an alternative platform to the EU for Britain to use its former colonial muscle to show it still has political strength and influence.
Price says Britain’s withdrawal from the EU will not only result in major financial losses for both sides, it will also pose a further challenge to multilateralism.
He says historically, Britain has had a major impact on democratic concepts in Europe.
“The European parliament was modelled on the British parliament. The basis of democracy has always been Britain,” says Price.
While Britain is in a state of convulsion ahead of the crucial vote on the Brexit deal in the House of Commons on Tuesday, in Brussels there is an air of resignation.
The task team headed by Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator for the “EU 27” (all member states except Britain) has done extensive research and preparations under article 50 of the Treaty on European Union for the UK’s exit from the community on March 30 next year.
At a media briefing on Wednesday, European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis announced that two proposals had been adopted to go to the European Council for a decision on the conclusion of the agreement on the UK’s withdrawal.
Asked about the implications should the deal not be approved in the British parliament, Dombrovskis said while they were gearing for an agreement, contingency planning had been done and a backstop plan was in place should this be needed.
A major sticking point now is the implication for Northern Ireland, because the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast peace agreement requires continued support and financing from the EU.
A policy analyst at the EU parliament says the possible destabilisation of Northern Ireland was not thought through during the Brexit campaign and the peace process remains fragile.
“It can be an explosive situation if a hard border is introduced between Ireland and Northern Ireland,” she says.
The focus now is on a framework for future relations between the EU and the UK.
Both sides have agreed to remain in close partnership but everything needs to be negotiated, including trade, security and military co-operation, the analyst says.
But uncertainty on the UK side means there is no clear direction on how exactly this will unfold, especially in the case of “no deal” or a second referendum.
An EU diplomat involved in the negotiations says while the British government had no idea what was in store when it invoked the withdrawal notice, the rest of the European community did not want the issue to divide them.
“The negotiating team under Mr Barnier is very experienced and understood the job to be done. It was very important to keep the EU 27 together,” he says.
“We were clear that we had to safeguard the interests of the citizens of Europe and of the single market.
“On the British side, they overestimated their weight and did not envisage the type of divisions that arose inside the British government.”
The diplomat says while there were many political statements made to campaign for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, “no economist has ever said Brexit will have benefits”.
“We have to make it work as well as possible, even though everyone knows it will leave us and them worse off. This is a damage-limitation exercise,” he says.
Pedro López de Pablo, the head of communications for the European People’s Party (EPP), the biggest grouping in the European parliament, says Brexit’s bumpy ride has served as a deterrent to populists in other member states who previously campaigned for withdrawal from the EU.
“Two or three years ago, parties in France, Italy and other places were also proposing leaving the EU. But now that they see the pain that the Brits are going through, they don’t talk about it anymore,” says López de Pablo.
He says while the Brexit process has improved cooperation and unity among other EU nations, the issue of immigration is still a dividing factor.
“Opposition against migration goes beyond political lines and we still do not have a European migration system because people don’t agree on it,” he says.
Although a UK withdrawal will have an impact on everybody in the EU, López de Pablo says it will be business as usual without the British MPs.
“The EPP group is real proof that life continues after Brexit,” he says of his party.
Mount Olympus
Franciosi was working in London in 1973 when the UK joined the European Economic Community, the forerunner to the EU.
Even then, she says, there was carping in Britain about being part of Europe.
“People were complaining about things like the price of butter had gone up and that Europe had imposed olive oil on them because it became available in supermarkets,” says Franciosi.
A referendum had to be held in 1975 on whether the UK remained in the community, and 67% voted yes. But the anti-European sentiment has a long, complicated back story and all it required was people like her old reporter colleague, who must have left his discretion behind in the Belgian bordello, to fan the flames.
“The British have never considered themselves European. They believed they had conquered the world and were above everyone else,” she says.
Whatever happens in the British parliament on Tuesday, the global order is in for a seismic change with or without a deal.
The 12 stars on the EU flag symbolise the 12 ancient deities of Mount Olympus, representing unity, stability and eternity.
But the world is now faced with a key moment in history. This major shift in power shows that unity and stability can be ephemeral, and nothing is forever.
✼ Munusamy is in Brussels as a guest of the EU Visitors Programme
Before the 2016 referendum Boris Johnson said it was ‘absolutely crazy that the EU is telling us how powerful our vacuum cleaners have got to be, what shape our bananas have got to be, and all that kind of thing’