The mood in Brussels Sorrow and anger, but for Scotland the fight goes on
CRAMMED into my office with a crowd of fellow MEPs on Wednesday, watching the UK Prime Minister trigger Article 50, I realised the damage Brexit has done to any credibility the UK Government had. Appropriately for a process so reliant on a trigger, many of my colleagues see the Brexit mess as akin to blowing your brains out in order to lose weight.
Of course, there’s tremendous sadness around the whole thing, not least for me personally. I’ve had the privilege of representing Scotland in Brussels since 2004. I’ve lived a life that may now be denied completely to future generations – I studied in Germany, France and Poland, worked in Spain and Belgium, and have friends throughout Europe. A whole fresh crop of Scottish youth might not have the chance to say the same. In leaving the EU we are losing something precious. Something folk had come to take for granted. Actually, not losing – something precious is being taken from us, by people we didn’t vote for, in the name of a project we don’t support, while their shills lecture us about why we should sit meekly and let them do it.
Now is not the time to stand up for your rights, apparently, despite the fact Scotland voted to Remain. Being part of the EU gives us all rights we take for granted. The right to travel, live, work, study, retire anywhere across an area stretching from the Algarve to the Arctic. EU programmes mean we can study abroad – without Erasmus there is no way someone like me, as well as hundreds of others, would have studied abroad.
Being able to jump on a Ryanair or easyJet flight has changed how we see the world – travel that is accessible to everyone is entirely because of the EU single market. People living in each other’s countries, coming to make Scotland their home, has changed our society, enriching it in every way. All that, gone. For what?
I didn’t sleep much on Tuesday, dreaded getting out of bed on Wednesday, and had no idea if I’d be able to keep a brave face on for the team. One of the challenges of the last nine months is to not feel like Banquo’s ghost at every meeting, but colleagues rallied round us. MEPs piled into the office and we watched the Prime Minister’s speech … such as it was. As one said, incredulously, “Was that it?”. That was my own feeling too. Friends and colleagues started texting and tweeting. “It feels like a death,” one said.
“After nine months of planning, all they can say is ‘let’s be friends’?!” was one of the more polite messages. Friends of mine – experienced, hard-bitten old hands who dealt with the fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the reunification of Germany, the Irish peace process or the independence of Kosovo – were reduced to texting pictures of Munch’s The Scream or trying to cheer me up with “Bye Bye Britain, Hello Scottish Republic!” because there wasn’t much else to say.
THE dominant reaction was one of genuine sorrow. Sorrow, but not surprise. The UK, in the words of one friend, has never really acted like a full member of the EU. Europe saw the front pages, the shrill headlines, the billboards of the EU referendum campaign.
“Perhaps this is the UK Government finally acting upon its real convictions?” my friend shrugged. Even the media frenzy, usually self-sustaining, was somehow hollow. Until Theresa May’s speech it was just a man delivering a letter. Objectively difficult to squeeze four hours of rolling news out of but the networks gave it a go, sending the big news teams to cover the process in portentous tones.
Never have the workings of the EU been better explained. Perhaps this kind of engagement with the EU would have been useful pre-referendum, instead of leaving the EU to be the shadowy, banana-straightening creature of myth created by, among others, the UK’s Foreign Secretary. But there was cheer amid the gloom. Ukip were delighted, with their single Scottish MEP pictured beside a banner celebrating “British toast for British toasters”. Marine Le Pen and the Hungarian fascists were cheery too.
Nonetheless, so it was that the new UK Permanent Representative, barely in post for a couple of months after the resignation in frustration of his predecessor, took his official car the 300 metres to the council building. A few hours later we received pictures of him handing the letter over. It had happened. The world had changed. The council has since published the guidelines on how the negotiations will go. This is a far more important document than the Article 50 letter. Be in no doubt – what Theresa May wants is a very small part of the picture now. The 27 EU states are well marshalled and the EU team is well drilled under Michel Barnier, a tough negotiator. The tone has changed. The power has shifted.
Manfred Weber, the leader of the largest and centre-right group in the Parliament set it out in a tweet: “Europe has done all it can to keep the Brits, now the remaining 440 million are our only concern.” Bear in mind that there is a German election on. Tough on Brits, tough on the causes of Brits, may well be a vote winner.
The reality is dawning that this UK Government holds no cards, but Scotland has plenty. Our position has never been better in Brussels and the member state capitals. Where in 2014 there was an unwillingness to get into the internal business of a fellow member state, the UK has thrown away that solidarity. Scotland are emphatically the good guys – we’re the multilateralists, the ones showing, and expecting, solidarity. I’ve spent the last nine months wondering how I’d feel when Article 50 actually happened. The answer is, “Determined”. This ain’t over.