Brussels can’t beat Brexit with insults

If the goal of the Salzburg summit was to humiliate the Prime Minister, it was a success. If it was to alter British opinion about Brexit, it was a mistake. The UK does not respond to insult. Yesterday, EU leaders suggested Britain hold a second referendum to change its mind – as if we need lessons in democracy from the likes of the Czech Republic (whose prime minister has faced criminal fraud allegations) or Malta (where an anti-corruption journalist was recently murdered).

Nor will the British welcome Emmanuel Macron’s claim that voters were duped into voting Leave by “liars”. Europe’s leadership needs to understand that British Euroscepticism has been growing for decades; that it’s a response to exactly this high-level arrogance; and that Brussels really needs to address the dissent in its own house. Even Mr Macron admitted earlier this year that, in a similar context to Britain’s, France would have voted to leave the EU, too.

The French president imagines he is the new Tony Blair, flying around the world, rescuing liberal democracy from far-left and Right. He should take a look at what happened to Mr Blair, who is now a byword for elitism, blamed for the social ills that helped make Brexit more likely. And when Mr Macron talks about Leave campaigners promising “easy solutions” to complicated problems, one has to ask: is he saying, by implication, that one of those problems is democracy itself? After all, Britain voted for Brexit. The Government said it would deliver it. Do the Eurocrats imagine they can stop it by throwing up objections and fuelling the Remain camp? Is that why Donald Tusk announced yesterday that Chequers “won’t work”, apparently undermining Theresa May’s plan less than two weeks before her conference speech?

In fact, the EU has been making these noises for quite a while. The astonishing thing is that the Prime Minister has stuck to Chequers so long, wasting an entire summer pushing a plan that the Europeans warned was impossible and many MPS said they wouldn’t vote for. To the Europeans, Chequers is a cake-and-eat-it Brexit, letting Britain keep access to the Customs Union but, potentially, undercutting its neighbours in taxes and regulation. To the Eurosceptics at Westminster, Chequers is the worst of both worlds: taking the rules of the Single Market without having a say in writing them and putting limits on free-trade deals. The only enthusiastic constituency for Chequers is the lady living in the eponymous house.

Mrs May’s stubbornness could have had more effect if she’d put iron in the glove. Imagine if the summer had been spent investing cash in new customs arrangements, planning tax cuts and getting the country on a war footing for a no-deal outcome. Instead, Britain endured the Chancellor of the Exchequer warning of economic crisis and the Bank of England flagging up stress tests for outcomes so dire they were just plain silly. Ultimately, the Prime Minister’s insistence that “It’s Chequers or no-deal” has turned out to be false. Not only is Chequers reportedly unworkable, but Britain hasn’t really laid the groundwork for a no-deal outcome either.

The next two weeks will now be critical for the future of Brexit. Whether or not a commitment to a second referendum is the outcome of next week’s Labour conference remains to be seen. Many in the party want it; Jeremy Corbyn appears to have ruled it out, prefering to call for an election. His ambition isn’t stopping Brexit: it’s forming a government.

This awful prospect is another reason why Mrs May has to write a conference speech that regains initiative. She has to explain how Chequers can work (if she still thinks it can) and what a no-deal outcome would look like. What Britain is crying out for – regardless of Brexit – is a Tory vision for the economy that combines tax cuts with deregulation and a renewed sense of opportunity for all. People are tired of deadlocks and red lines, of this constant back-and-forth with the Europeans.

Mr Macron is wrong if he thinks the British went into Brexit believing it would be easy. But they did enter it with a clear sense of purpose. For the UK, Brexit is about recovering sovereignty and opening up our economy. We want to be good neighbours: this tit-for-tat is alien to the British nature. Mrs May has to articulate all of this and make it 100 per cent clear we won’t be bullied into serfdom.