Britain cannot rush to reclaim a European future

The journey back will be a long one. Geopolitics, economics, security, prosperity, cultural exchanges. Each year that passes since Britain wilfully detached itself from its own continent serves only to measure the depth of the self-inflicted wound. The natural response is one of impatience. Keir Starmer’s government should be banging on the doors of the Berlaymont to be let back in. Sad to say, it will be some time yet before reason can be confident of vanquishing populist illusion.

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This month Starmer took a step in the right direction. Predictably enough, the nativists of Nigel Farage’s Reform party and the English nationalists of Kemi Badenoch’s rump Conservatives, cried surrender and betrayal. It was the BBC’s top political journalist, however, who gave vivid expression to the Euro-neuralgia that haunts Britain’s relationship with its neighbours.

Starmer had just signed an agreement with Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission. The accord, promising to deepen security and defence co-operation, remove restrictions on trade in food, agriculture and energy, and allow freer travel for young people, sought to lessen the Brexit harm. One of the conditions sought by Brussels was an extension of the fishing rights for EU trawlers agreed some years ago by Boris Johnson’s government.

Britain’s European story, though, is rarely told in hard facts. Witness the opening question posed by Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor and a presumed-to-be- impartial journalist, at Starmer’s press conference. It wasn’t really a question. More an assertion that even though Britain has left, the EU remains a plot against its nationhood. “Isn’t the truth”, Mason sneered, “that you’ve sold out British fishermen”. Sold out! Gotcha! Such is the psychological crevasse into which Britain has fallen.

Never mind that the fishing arrangements were originally the work of Johnson. Nor that they pale into insignificance against the urgent need for Europe, with Britain part of it, to rearm and reorganise itself against the military aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Forget that a closer alignment of regulatory frameworks will make trade and investment much easier for British companies employing millions of workers. In the all too prevalent Mason mindset there is no such thing as give and take with the EU. Only “sell-outs”.

There is not new. In, and now outside, the club, Britain’s emotional relationship with the EU has often veered between arrogant exceptionalism and panicked insecurity. The former kept Harold Macmillan’s government out of the original common market – Britain was a global, not a merely European, power. The latter obliged the then prime minister to change his mind a few years later when he realised that notional freedom outside the bloc would leave Britain weak and isolated.

More than 40 years as a member never quite dispelled the fear that the EU was a continental conspiracy, not least because politicians, Labour and Conservative alike, habitually treated negotiations with its partners as a zero sum game. National and mutual interests were by definition in conflict. If an agreement was good for France, or Germany, it was necessarily bad for Britain. Outside the union, the Brexiters have become if anything even more shrill about the supposed threat. Any deal with Brussels is by definition a sell-out.

By contrast, for those who call themselves pro-Europeans, Starmer’s accord was almost painfully unambitious. Most of it comprises promises of future collaboration collaborate rather than signed and sealed commitments. Many, looking at the opinion polls showing a majority now agree that Brexit was a grievous mistake, charge the prime minister with political timidity. At very least Britain should be rushing back into the single market and customs union.

Putting aside the fact that the rest of the EU might not be quite so forgiving of their prodigal former partner, such hopes are premature. If Britain is ever to make a success of working with its neighbours, as it surely must if it wants a prosperous and secure future, the starting point has to be a more fundamental shift in worldview.

A Whitehall civil servant got it right more than 75 years ago as the nation’s political leaders sought to shrug off the grievous cost exacted by the second world war on Britain’s global standing. Britain remained a great nation, Sir Henry Tizard quietly observed to his masters, but it needed to accept that it was no longer a great power. The Brexiters, even now still trumpeting their nonsense about “Global Britain”, never signed up to such realism.

There is no other route for Britain to secure its place as a prosperous and internationally significant nation than by rebuilding the broken bridges. Donald Trump’s America First unilateralism has finally exploded the long-cherished myth that a “special relationship” with the United States is a credible alternative. The threat from Putin’s war against Ukraine and protectionist facts of geoeconomics have likewise put paid to the little England fantasy that Britain could somehow carve out a new role as a buccaneering free trader.

For all that, Britain’s return to the European fold has to be made to last. That means the progressive accretion of new agreements grounded in the pragmatism of mutual interest – and openness from the government about the necessary trade-offs in any particular deal. Pro-Europeans will not find a substitute for this in a dash for a quick referendum that, while likely to reverse the 2016 decision, would leave a sizeable number of voters in the grip of the prejudices of the BBC’s political editor.

Dear Inside-Out reader

This latest column is about Britain’s European neuroses. In late August Faber will be publishing a book I have written on another difficult relationship. I hope that in These Divided Isles, Britain and Ireland Past and Future, I have managed to tell the often tortured story of a relationship marked almost as much by intimacy as enmity – and shown how the century since Partition will inform Ireland’s future. For those interested, Faber have agreed a 20 per cent pre-publication discount for (free) subscribers to Inside-Out. The discount code is dividedisles20

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