Can there be EU life after death?
I don't have faith, but I do have hope
Still haunted?
Do you never escape the shadows of past bad dreams? This week we have seen wings of the Conservative Party again dominating the news agenda and the national discussion with their insistence that the only choice of an asylum strategy for Britian is between the bad and the mad. Having hoist themselves on the unworkable, expensive (and also, to my mind, immoral) crane of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda they have now turned the airwaves into a dispute about how best to make the unreal somehow real. And once again are indulged by many of our political commentators who lack the will to ask what evidence exists to support the notion of 100 deported boat people deterring tens of thousands of others from making the dangerous trip across the Channel.
As it that wasn’t bad enough they are busy now rerunning the pandemic as having been a choice between a little more Death and a lot more Economy. How many times does this have to be restated: there WAS no such choice? More death would have meant less economy. Listening to the businessman Luke Johnson on Radio 4 this week suggesting that the NHS was never under any threat (and then being completely unable to support his thesis) is a reminder of the avenues that Sunak’s Covid Inquiry “healthy debate” of the autumn of 2020 partly led us down.
We seem to have been trapped in this spiral since 2010, with the formation of an internal Conservative ideology partly shaped in opposition to the traumatic experience of being shackled to the Liberal Democrats. Every major discussion except one – Ukraine - has been distorted into a version of the battle between backsliding post-Cameroons and Tory ultramontanists. Anyone else has been sidelined.
A new dawn is about to break, is it not?
But soon we should be able to shake off this horrid Spectator- Telegraph,-Mail-Tufton Street colonisation of our heads and think new thoughts. Such as, what would a sensible government - facing the need to restore growth and productivity to the UK economy and to lever Britain’s influence in the world - do about the European Union? And what would a discussion between intelligent people thinking about this actually sound like?
In that spirit the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf wrote a column a few days ago looking at whether there was any realistic possibility that at any time in the foreseeable future Britain might rejoin the EU – and absolutely ruling it out. Wolf is certainly no Brexiteer so the piece can best be read as a sort of warning to fellow-minded pro-Europeans not to get their hopes up just because the government may well change.
For me this piece was a clarifying bit of writing, not because it was so convincing but because in some ways it simply wasn’t. And I don’t mean by this to sound dismissive, it’s just that parts of Wolf’s reasoning were far more persuasive than others.
To create a visual metaphor for this argument between us, imagine a road stretching in front of you with a signpost marked ‘Re-entry. Along that road someone has placed all kinds of obstacles, dug ditches, erected barbed wire with “Danger, landmines!” warnings attached. Can you seriously contemplate setting out on such a perilous journey?