‘The UK is no longer part of the EU. It’s not for us to take back the people who land in the UK.” So said a European Commission official about the impasse in this country’s relations, or non-relations, with our former European partners.
As abject poverty and wars feed the seemingly endless flow of desperate asylum seekers, it becomes clear that the migration crisis is not going away. But the callous response of British ministers – a remarkable proportion of whom are themselves descended from immigrants – really sticks in the craw.
It seems obvious that the migration problem will in the end require an international solution, demanding serious cooperation on a UN scale. But the point I wish to make here is that the impasse with the rest of our own continent is just one of many reasons why this country should acknowledge its historic error in leaving the European Union and, not to put too fine a point upon it, think again. Soon!
As the nightmarish experience of failing to take back control (indeed, actually losing control) inhibits the dealings of more and more British citizens and businesses with the EU, I sense that the public is way ahead of politicians in general, and of the leader of the Labour party in particular.
The extreme right wing of the Conservative party is never going to admit its Brexit errors – indeed, it shows every sign of digging the nation even deeper into the Brexit mire. But I have to confess to being wryly amused by the stream of reports in the press recently about Britons with property on the continent who voted leave and now find, to their evident consternation, that this means they have left – with all the loss of control that leaving brings with it.
Now, there is hardly a political commentator who does not use the mafioso word omertà to describe the conspiracy of silence in public debate about the bitter experience and drastic consequences of Brexit.
I fear that for a long time this affected BBC interviewers. More recently, I have noticed that interviewers on the Today programme have been summoning up the courage to include the subject of Brexit when questioning ministers. However, they seem so cowed by fear of what a nasty, so-called Conservative government will do to the corporation that they are all too easily brushed off.
The classic ministerial response is on the lines of: “The country made a decision in 2016.” (Alas, this tends to reflect the abysmally timid Labour party responses too.)
I don’t know how much history the modern breed of third-rate Tory politicians has, but I should like to point out to them that the country made a decision in 1945 to elect a Labour government; in 1951 it made a decision to elect a Conservative government; then in 1964 it reverted to Labour, saying goodbye once again in 1970, then re-electing Labour in 1974.
In 1979, the country made a decision to elect another Tory government, waiting until 1997 to elect another Labour government. Then in 2010 it made a decision to throw out that Labour government – the rest being recent austerity and Brexit history.
Put quite simply, it is pretty obvious that it is time for the country to make another decision, learn from the experience of what Brexit is really like, and recognise, in the words of a former Brexiter recently quoted in the press, that those who listened to the egregious Boris Johnson and his ragtime band in 2016 were deceived. “Most people think we are racist or uneducated,” he said. “That might be the case for a percentage of leave voters, but I think most of us were just conned.”
One of the most farcical aspects of this sorry business is that the extreme rightwing supporters of Brexit claim to be Thatcherites. Yet membership of the single market was, in former chancellor Kenneth Clarke’s assessment, Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement.
As I have pointed out before, two of the people who were closest to her in Downing Street, Charles Powell, her private secretary for foreign affairs, and Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, both believed that Thatcher herself would not have voted to leave the EU.
In his book The Slow Downfall of Margaret Thatcher, published shortly before his death, Ingham observed: “The conduct of the Brexit debate has demonstrated all too clearly that the elite’s loss of confidence, which assailed Mrs Thatcher in 1979, is still with us.” A Brexiter himself, Ingham goes on: “The majority of our parliamentarians – Labour as well as Tory – seem bereft of any belief that [the] British might, just might, recover their nerve and verve outside the EU.”
Well, in my view the British need to recover their nerve by admitting their mistake.
