George Soros is right: Europe faces an existential crisis, not least because of an addiction to austerity that has certainly contributed to Italy’s summer of discontent. This makes it all the more urgent that the time-and resource-consuming wastefulness of Brexit be brought to an end, and the sooner the better. There are huge problems facing Europe: in addition to the domestic damage the prospect of Brexit is causing, it constitutes a huge distraction from the reforms the EU requires.
It is no use waiting several years. The damage to our economy is manifest already, and the Treasury, Bank of England and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are not employing empty threats in concluding that things are set to go from bad to worse, as the investment so vital for productivity is postponed and the public and private sectors suffer recruitment problems.
The follies of Brexit are impressively outlined in a new book, Saving Britain, by my colleague Will Hutton and my former colleague Andrew Adonis. They link the outcome of the referendum less to concerns about immigration (although there is no denying that was a factor) than to the cumulative impact of austerity – yet note that prominent Brexiter Lord Lawson is on record as saying that Brexit would help to complete the “Thatcher revolution”.
They provide us with a gripping account of how, through his influence on the public debate, “Mr Farage became leader of the Conservative party” in all but name, adding: “The genius of the Eurosceptic right was to take none of the blame for its own domestic policies, but to offload it instead onto the EU and immigration.”
Sometimes it takes outside observers to add that extra insight into the social damage successive British governments have inflicted on areas of this country. Occasionally this service is provided by the New York Times, which did it last week in a report on a northern English town that exemplifies the ills identified by Soros.
It was a front-page story – a piece of reporting that, despite objections to it from some quarters, brought home the impact of the drastic cuts in public spending, especially in central government grants to local authorities, since 2010. Its message could be summarised thus: after eight years of budget-cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the US, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.
Notwithstanding the travails of Italy – not least the terribly high unemployment in the south of the country – European values still matter. Given the appalling state of so many of our public services, we as a nation need to take note of the way Scandinavian countries recognise that good public services have to be paid for by realistic levels of taxation.
Alas, leaving the EU would only compound our problems. David Cameron made a potentially fatal commitment in his notorious Bloomberg speech of 2013: bowing to relentless pressure from Ukip and Eurosceptic MPs, he promised a referendum, in the hope of appealing directly to the people and overcoming the obstacles posed by the Tories’ internecine strife. Harold Wilson did this in 1975 over Labour party divisions on Europe and succeeded. Cameron failed lamentably.
Then came two serious mistakes by the government: first, they did not get across to the public the degree to which the smooth running of our economy depends on the results of 45 years of integrating into the EU. Second, having messed up the referendum, they did not take nearly seriously enough the advice from our former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, about how Brussels actually works, and how our negotiating strategy was based on an unfortunate blend of ignorance and fantasy.
Of course, being a good – indeed outstanding – civil servant, Rogers did not put it quite like that. But that was the gravamen of his message.
These “negotiations” are getting nowhere, slowly. There is a train crash coming, probably in Northern Ireland, which to my mind poses an insoluble dilemma for Theresa May’s “Brexit means Brexit” strategy.
Bespoke “have your cake and eat it” arrangements? As Rogers said in a lecture in Glasgow recently: “There is no legal status of being a third country, which used to be a member, and therefore can be treated radically better than other third countries.”
In the first John le Carré novel in which George Smiley appears, the great man remarks of one character: “He was one of those world-builders who seem to do nothing but destroy.” For me, that sums up the typical Brexiter.
