Seven years ago I would have jumped at EU market-only membership – but now it’s impossible
If the market-only deal now being proposed by France and Germany had been on the menu before 2016, Britain would never have left the EU. Had it been offered immediately after the referendum, a needless culture war might have been forestalled. Seven years on, though, the moment has almost certainly passed.
The campaign to overturn Brexit left Britain captious and polarised. Associate membership has become unacceptable to both sides, while those in the middle shudder at the prospect of reliving those hideous rows. In any case, going back into common structures after you have paid a steep exit fee is not the same thing as keeping them.
To be clear, the associate membership proposal has not come formally from the EU, but from the Franco-German working group on institutional reform. Still, what France and Germany say matters a great deal, even if the old axiom that the rest of the EU follows them is less true than it used to be.
To listen to the response from British politicians is to see how utterly the atmosphere has been transformed since 2016. The Conservatives have unsurprisingly ruled the proposal out. But so has Labour, at whom it was presumably aimed, coming as it did on the day that Sir Keir Starmer met Emmanuel Macron in Paris. The party that wanted to rejoin has dismissed this much softer idea as “a non-starter”.
It takes quite an effort to recall that, pre-2016, most Eurosceptics wanted economic rather than political links to the EU, a position summarised in their slogan “a common market not a common government”.
Now, too late, such a deal is finally being mooted. The Franco-German blueprint is for a Europe of four concentric circles. In the innermost circle would be the states that want to be part of a country called Europe, with its own army, police force, money and courts. The second tier would be for those broadly content with EU membership as it stands.
The third (which is where the authors envisage Britain, Switzerland and others) would be within the single market, with a shared budget to cover the institutional costs, but outside everything else. The fourth would be for countries that are geographically in Europe, but want nothing more than regular summits.
I set out a similar scheme in Why Vote Leave, which extolled several of the territories, from Switzerland to Guernsey, that are largely inside the single market. That book spent the referendum campaign in Amazon, Sunday Times and WH Smith bestseller lists. No one then thought the notion of returning to a common market outrageous.
Nor was it unusual. Martin Durkin’s superb film, Brexit: The Movie, which was downloaded millions of times during the campaign, featured the presenter padding around Zurich and rhapsodising about what an enviable position the Swiss were in.
Indeed, the Franco-German proposal could have been lifted almost word for word from David Owen’s 2012 book Europe Restructured, which envisaged a political union nestling within a much wider pan-European market:
“All countries should remain full members of a single market, which would continue to operate under qualified majority voting, and would hopefully include Turkey as a full participating member, as well as other members of the European Economic Area. Such a grouping of 32 or more states could be called the European Community.”
Lord Owen’s plan would, I suspect, have been acceptable to 80 per cent of the country. A few Euro-zealots might have longed to join the euro and the Schengen Zone, and a handful of Bennites might have rejected the whole concept of a European market. But most Eurosceptics would have cheered.
Trade without political integration had, after all, been the souverainiste aim all along. Peter Shore, Enoch Powell, Michael Foot and, later, Margaret Thatcher – all wanted an EFTA-type arrangement. That view, dismissed as impossibly hardline before 2016, suddenly came to be seen as downright wimpish.
What changed? Several things. Theresa May came late and ham-fistedly to the Brexit cause, evidently believing the Remainer caricature that Leavers cared only about immigration. On the other side, European leaders were so affronted that they were prepared to suffer pain themselves rather than allow a mutually profitable deal.
Immediately after the referendum, the EU’s in-house think tank sketched out a settlement similar to the current Franco-German proposal, but it was swiftly slapped down by Eurocrats who wanted to punish Britain for its arrogance. Attitudes hardened on all sides – especially following the 2017 general election, when pro-EU MPs sought to reverse the referendum result.
Culture wars foster negative polarisation. People start to care less about the details of policy than about socking it to the other side. Politicians, like voters, can be moved by unworthy feelings: vindictiveness, stubbornness, peevishness, envy.
If every country were led by Mr Spock, a cool logician, some kind of associate status would have been hammered out years ago. Europhile grandees used to claim that “we can’t be half in and half out”. In fact, such a status is suggested by our history and our geography, and by the 52-48 referendum result.
But the world we inhabit is human, sublunary, messy; and our political leaders know it. Sir Keir would love to rejoin the EU, but he is aware that anything called “associate membership” would be seen in the Red Wall as proof that Labour scorns ordinary people.
At the same time, he knows that the best way to hang onto the numerous voters who have spent the past seven years blaming every personal unhappiness on Brexit is to get a good press in Brussels, and that the best way to get a good press in Brussels is to show the EU that the UK will not adopt a more competitive economic model.
Hence his remarks at the Leftist love-in in Montreal last week: “Actually, we don’t want to diverge, we don’t want to lower standards, we don’t want to rip up environmental standards, working standards, food standards and all the rest of it.” And hence his insistence, against all the evidence, that if only Britain were a bit more positive, the EU would reciprocate.
On Friday morning, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was asked to give concrete instances of the closer cooperation Labour wants. She replied: “For example, making it easier to trade agricultural goods or helping our services sector with a mutual recognition of professional qualifications, helping our fantastic cultural industries tour round Europe.”
In all these areas, it is the EU rather than Britain that is blocking a deal. Britain pushed from the start for mutual recognition in food and veterinary standards, but Brussels insists that we should agree to copy whatever standards it adopts. It was the EU, not Britain, that limited the trade deal to goods rather than professional services. Britain puts no barriers in the way of performing artists from the EU.
Again and again, we see the UK making concessions that are not reciprocated: allowing EU tourists to use our passport e-gates, granting equivalence to European financial services, minimising checks on EU goods imports.
But, in order to go along with the FBPE pretence that the real problem is British standoffishness, Starmer now proposes to remain outside the single market while unilaterally adopting the EU’s standards. It’s an utterly crazy position. And to think he accuses the Tories of being dogmatic.