Self-hating Remainers are blind to the EU’S flaws
ITheir obsession with bashing Britain has not wavered, even as their project across the Channel crashes and burns
Current affairs magazines run long articles on the disasters of Brexit. Do they not notice what is happening in Europe?
t has been obvious for over 20 years what the European Union’s systemic institutional flaw is: the euro itself, designed to lay the groundwork for a federal state. As economists and politicians warned at the time – and were ignored – a single currency in a continent marked by deep economic, cultural and political differences would be a cause of constant tension, because it would enrich some regions and impoverish others.
As under the old Gold Standard, weaker performing regions would just have to tighten their belts and work harder. Even outside times of crises, this meant increasing inequality and migration, especially of the unemployed young from southern Europe. A German think tank calculated in 2019 that since the introduction of the euro, the average German had gained €23,000, the average Frenchman had lost €56,000, and the average Italian had lost €74,000. Italy’s economy has been stagnant for a generation. All these countries have accumulated huge national debts, while Germany has garnered the world’s biggest trade surpluses.
It is no surprise that the latest challenge to the EU comes from Italy, where the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy seems likely to head a new government replacing that of Mario Draghi, the EU’S man. Across eastern and southern Europe, parties critical of EU policies have been rising. Emmanuel Macron, the EU’S remaining champion, has lost control of parliament. Yet the eurozone straitjacket has so far made protest sterile, as the Greeks discovered when the European Central Bank (ECB) threatened them with financial meltdown.
Since then, southern European states, above all Italy, have become dependent on the ECB buying their governments’ bonds and thus supplying them with cash. The sums involved are astronomical, and no one knows how long this can continue or who might ultimately foot the bill. Following the resignation of Draghi – former president of the ECB and guarantor of orthodoxy – the yield on Italian debt has risen. In the face of sharply rising eurozone inflation, the ECB delayed raising interest rates because it would increase the debt burden on member states. But now it has had to do so, and also announce more compensatory bond buying.
How long can it keep the plates spinning? Another eurozone crisis is in the offing. On top of this chronic problem has come the sudden energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany’s choice to rely on Russian gas has made Putin’s aggression possible and gives him a devastating economic weapon. The EU is contemplating an enforced cut in gas consumption for all its members of more than 10 per cent, including those not dependent on Russia and those pretty indifferent to Ukraine. Will it work? Will it cause further political upheaval? Will the EU cave in to Putin?
Europe’s fragile economy rests on the shifting foundations of its “green” energy policy, in which Britain is supposedly a leader. Germany has ended nuclear power generation. France and Britain have allowed theirs to wither. So we have made ourselves partly dependent on wind and solar power, but mostly dependent on imported gas.
Despite promises that wind power will usher in a new era of cheap sustainable energy, basic facts will not go away: a gas-turbine generator small enough to go on the back of a lorry will produce the same electricity, faster and more reliably, than 10 offshore wind turbines the size of the Eiffel Tower. Europe has for some time been deindustrialising and has become dependent on Asia, and especially China, for most of its wind turbines and panels. The promised jobs in green energy have not materialised – except in China, of course, where “green” power equipment is manufactured using cheap energy from coal, so even the planet gets no benefit. (I am optimistically waiting for Extinction Rebellion to glue themselves to the Chinese embassy.) On its present trajectory, Europe will at best jump out of the Russian frying pan into the Chinese fire. Our present problems might then seem minor in comparison.
In the immediate future, faced with rising inflation, especially in energy and food, increasingly dependent on two aggressive dictatorships, and threatened by the side effects of likely eurozone turbulence, what should Britain do? To ask the question is practically to answer it. Rapidly increase our domestic energy resources and storage capacity. Set up a task force to accelerate modular nuclear power, as was done with Covid vaccines. Diversify our food supplies, which at the moment are overwhelmingly dependent on the EU and road and ferry links. (Why are we still imposing tariffs and quotas on imported food from outside the EU?) Ensure that our financial institutions are as resilient as possible and as distanced as possible from the euro.
There are signs that some of this is slowly beginning. But there are still many voices in politics and the media that want us to paddle back towards the EU. Project Fear is being revived. The Guardian recently showed remarkable ingenuity by managing to make the good news that manufacturing exports to the EU were increasing into a scare story about our “dependence”. Current affairs magazines such as the New Statesman and Prospect run long articles on the supposed disasters of Brexit.
Do they not notice what is happening in the EU?
I have never believed that the EU would suddenly collapse. But I thought it likely that it would gradually run out of political capacity due to lack of popular legitimacy. Many, like myself, have drawn a comparison with the Austrohungarian empire: divided, weak but unreformable, aiming at best to maintain (as one of its rulers put it) “a stable level of discontent” among a resigned population. This now seems optimistic. Not only is it unclear whether the EU can carry out its policies, it is unclear that it has any policies, or that there are any that could solve its problems. Its member states follow increasingly diverging paths. The ECB hesitates between unpalatable alternatives. Support for Ukraine is at best ambivalent. As a diplomatic player in the world’s affairs, the EU has practically vanished.
So why are there still Remainers or Rejoiners? This week I read two new books attacking Brexit, which give a clue. One thing they have in common is that they say nothing at all about Europe or the EU. All their considerable verve is spent in attacking what they see as pathological characteristics of Britishness.
This has been typical of Remainer discourse since 2016. Those 1930s enthusiasts for communism who visited the Soviet Union came back with descriptions of a workers’ paradise. True, they were blind to the starvation, the repression and the fear, but they did have a vision of what they wanted, however illusory. But I’ve never read a Remainer book (and I have quite a collection) describing how wonderful the EU is: the talents of its Commission, the friendly atmosphere of the Parliament, the spacious motorways built with regional funds.
I have read many on how contemptible Britain (or rather England) is, how weak, how isolated, how mocked by the foreign press. But not much sign of knowledge of or interest in Europe.
Their real aim is to discredit the Brexiteers by any means available. At the moment, that even includes supporting tax rises at a time of pressure on modest incomes and probable recession. Would even a collapse of the EU change their minds? No, they would blame it on their great bête noire, Boris Johnson.