A pro-EU lobby is forming but it faces a long march
This Christmas you must take the family to Frostworld. It’s an alternative reality existence where everything is going swimmingly as we bask in the freedoms that Brexit has granted us. But book early, just in case envious Europeans beat you to it.
But look, it’s not my purpose to relitigate Brexit. Or even the extreme form that Brexit eventually took. Let’s put all that behind us. For now, my starting premises are twofold. First, had you told the averagely informed person back in the 1980s that the movement to leave the European community would succeed, they would have wondered what you’d been imbibing. Second, far from “ironing out” the difficulties of transition, the myriad barriers, obstacles, petty vexations and lost opportunities resulting from Brexit are likely to become more obvious, not less, as the pandemic recedes.
Yesterday morning, landing with a pixelated thud in my inbox was a helpful missive from a car rental company advising me on four ways to beat the new curbs on working and travelling in the EU. Number two was “apply for citizenship” and number three amounted to become a billionaire and buy a “golden visa”. So ta very much.
Even so, for the foreseeable future there is no chance of the European issue being reopened in British politics. Indeed, there is an almost comical reluctance to mention Brexit as a big factor in our current travails. Because Get It Done also meant Stop Talking About It. Lest you be seen as a bore, or as that last Japanese soldier to surrender 30 years after the war ended. In his otherwise fanciful speech in Lisbon, Lord Frost said one very true thing: Britain was not, as some were suggesting, obsessed with Brexit. “Actually,” he said, “there is no electoral dividend in endlessly talking about Brexit – quite the reverse. That is why the PM barely mentioned it in his party conference speech.”
And, he might have added, no more did the leader of the opposition. In fact, Sir Keir Starmer’s European references went exactly like this: “A botched Brexit has left a big hole. The government is learning that it is isn’t enough to Get Brexit Done. You need a plan to Make Brexit Work.” And that was it. All the pressure Labour feels is on its anti-European flank. The red wall is all; the European dream is dead.
There was a time when membership of the EU was a done deal. The dissidents, consisting largely of the Labour left and the residual imperial nostalgics of the Tory right, were marginalised. True, there was also a kernel of parliamentary sovereigntists: Enoch Powell, Michael Foot. And Bill Cash. But their concerns seemed eccentric. In 1990 support for withdrawal stood at 19 per cent.
I am not going to argue that it was the effort of the Eurosceptics alone that altered the course of our history. But it couldn’t have happened without them. All through their wilderness years individuals and networks worked assiduously to draw attention to what they saw as the fatal flaws of the European project.
Take, for example, Cash, the oldest MP in the House. Uncharismatic, seemingly obsessional in his close scrutiny of EU matters, dismissed as hopelessly tedious, Cash stuck to his theme. He was also always courteous, serious, ready to debate. And usually better informed than his opponents. They took things for granted. Bill didn’t.
Out there in the desert with him were people such as Alan Sked, the academic who founded the Anti-Federalist League, which, in 1993, became Ukip. He was also a member of the Bruges Group, a Conservative ginger group whose emissions filled early email inboxes. The year after Sked begat Ukip, the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith set up his single-issue Referendum Party, into which he poured millions and garnered huge publicity. In the 1997 election the party spent more on press advertising than either of the two main parties. The press officer was one Priti Patel.
By then John Major had suffered the revolt over the Maastricht bill but seen off a Eurosceptic leadership challenge from John Redwood. Labour came to power and any prospect of a referendum, let alone a withdrawal, was dead.
Yet in defeat the “long march through the institutions” of the Eurosceptics now succeeded. Bit by bit, insurgents inside the establishment, they captured the ideological soul of the Tory party with the argument (the impossible argument in my view) for total sovereignty. Once precariously in power, and to secure its own right flank, not least from Ukip, the Tory leadership conceded a referendum.
So, and this is my question: who is prepared to be the Bill Cash of the pro-Europeans? And can they do what Bill did?
In many ways the task for such a movement might be easier: 48 per cent is bigger than 19 per cent, the EU has resisted all predictions of its collapse (indeed Brexit seems to have solidified support in member countries) and its supposed disasters such as the vaccination rollout have ended up with more people vaccinated than in Britain, usually with fewer deaths.
But my sense is that it will have to be a generational matter. The older cohort of pro-Europeans in Labour are largely exhausted and demoralised. Existing EU-friendly bodies are moribund. There isn’t enough useful anger around.
But among younger people it’s different. There are fortunately a few Cash-like obsessives who are prepared to tend the flame and take the scorn. The young activist Femi Oluwole, for example, had 20 Twitter followers at the start of 2016 and now has 320,000. Politically unaffiliated, his energy in appearing on broadcast media, writing articles, generating online video arguments and just generally taking people on, is remarkable. He sees himself as being under a moral obligation to keep going.
One of his objectives is to make Europe a problem again for Labour on its Green/Lib Dem flank. In which case he might expect to find a hearing with a younger generation of Labour MPs, people such as Peter Kyle, Thangam Debbonaire, Wes Streeting and Darren Jones, as well as the cadre who will become Labour’s future parliamentarians. Like most of their cohort, internationalist by temperament, they are likely to feel far more keenly the thousand vexations that being out of Europe will cause. The argument will be there to be had.
But it’s a long haul. There’ll be no section of the media unquestioningly rooting for them. They’ll be short on quixotic billionaires. And I’ll probably be dead.
he Times
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