After a disastrous decade in which they blew up Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe, shrank trade and made life miserable for cross-Channel travellers, the Tories can’t leave office soon enough for most continental Europeans.
“Good riddance!” is the cry from Lisbon to Helsinki as London’s erstwhile European partners hope that a new Labour government will start to rebuild relations with the neighbours that have suffered the most severe damage since the end of the second world war.
Seen from Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw, the Conservative party will for ever bear the mark of Cain for having trashed the UK’s membership of the EU through a mixture of negligence, arrogance and incompetence. David Cameron’s monumental miscalculation in calling an unnecessary referendum he was certain he would win caused a crisis of confidence across Europe and shunted Britain on to a siding of relative economic decline and diminished global influence.
European governments watched with dismay tinged with a little Schadenfreude as the Westminster political system descended into chaos, with five prime ministers and revolving-door, feuding Tory governments between 2016 and 2023, putting severe strain on the unity of the UK and spooking financial markets.
While Rishi Sunak has at least stopped digging the hole and steadied ties, notably by negotiating the Windsor protocol on trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, only a government without the toxic Tories can begin to rebuild trust by putting practical cooperation ahead of sovereigntist ideology.
The return of Nigel Farage, who did more than anyone to spook Cameron into promising the disastrous referendum, as a parliamentary candidate and leader of Reform UK on a mission to outflank the Tories and pull Britain still further to the nationalist right, is a reminder to everyone on the continent of the formidable obstacles facing any cross-Channel rapprochement.
The EU has moved on since, recovering its poise and taking further steps in integration – from joint vaccine purchases to collective borrowing to fund post-Covid economic recovery – which the UK would doubtless have opposed had it still been a member.
It’s hard to remember it was the Conservatives who took Britain into the European Economic Community and were a driving force in creating the single market, implemented by majority voting, and the eastward enlargement of the EU that brought those now unwanted migrant workers.
So much water has flowed under the bridge since June 2016 that it’s worth recalling just how destructive were the forces unleashed by Cameron’s surrender to the “swivel-eyed loons” in his own party who, as he put it, kept “banging on about Europe”. Not only did many Tories treat the liberal democracies of Europe as if they were a greater threat to British sovereignty and liberty than Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, but they also attacked the human and educational bonds linking the UK and the continent.
British youth were robbed of opportunities to live, study, work and play freely across Europe. British scientists were robbed of the chance to work with their European counterparts for years before the Tories finally relented last year. British artists and orchestras were prevented from performing on the continent.
Boris Johnson turned his back on plans for a “deep and special partnership” extending to foreign policy and defence sketched by Theresa May’s government. He rejected any institutional cooperation with the EU on international affairs until he was mugged by the reality of Putin’s war in Ukraine. Suddenly, even the most bombastically Brexiter of Tory premiers realised he needed to work closely with Brussels on sanctions, arms supplies and diplomacy. But no one trusted him, especially since he alternated between consultation and public hectoring of the Europeans.
It’s not quite true to say that no one in Europe will miss the Tories. Viktor Orbán, the illiberal pro-Russian Hungarian leader, lost a useful partner in obstructing EU decisions. Jarosław Kaczyński’s conservative nationalist Law and Justice party, which tramped on the rule of law and media freedom in Poland before being ejected by voters last year, lost a valued buddy with whom it had tried to build an alliance against France and Germany in the EU.
While no continental government shares the hostility to the free movement of workers within the EU that was a big factor in the Brexit campaign, several have a sneaking envy for Britain’s efforts to deport irregular migrants to third countries, where their asylum claims would be processed: 15 EU governments wrote to the commission last month calling for proposals to offshore the handling of asylum claims in “safe third countries”. However, unlike the UK’s Rwanda scheme, the claims would be examined by European officials and successful applicants would get to stay in the EU.
Moreover, Nordic and Baltic countries miss the UK’s influence as a free-marketeering, Atlanticist player in the EU and a champion of eastward enlargement, though they can blame the Tories for undoing that valued British role. In Britain’s absence, the EU has become more protectionist in trade policy and more dirigiste in industrial and competition policy. But then so too has the UK, in the wake of Chinese and US trade and subsidy policies.
The current Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, who studied in Oxford and was a member of the Bullingdon Club in the early 1980s at the same time as Johnson and Cameron, warned the Tories in a prescient 2012 speech delivered at Blenheim Palace: “Britain today is living with false consciousness. Your interests are in Europe. It’s high time for your sentiments to follow.”
Many European states, Sikorski forecast, would hold a grudge against a country that, in their view, had selfishly left the EU. They do, and they will not bend over backwards to waive the bloc’s rules for an incoming Labour government that has set out red lines including refusing to rejoin the single market or a customs union, and recently even rejected a seemingly innocuous proposal by the European Commission to facilitate youth exchanges.
There is much that continental Europeans still look up to Britain for – pragmatic common sense (what ever happened to that?); fair play (French and German both use the English word); a strong commitment to defence; parliamentary democracy (tarnished by the chaos of the post-Brexit years); as well as its science, culture and universities.
But Keir Starmer shouldn’t expect a discount on trade terms or cooperation just because the Tories are gone. The next British government will have a lot of damage to repair and will have to make the first moves in proving its goodwill to sceptical Europeans.
That will be a particularly urgent task if Russia gains the upper hand against Ukraine, and a protectionist, Nato-sceptical Donald Trump storms back into the White House.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
