So Long and Thanks For All The Fish

I’m feeling low today. There are multiple reasons for this, some of them are professional and some of them are personal. I don’t propose to trouble any readers I may have with those matters. They are my problems and I will deal with them. Overarching them all though is an issue that millions of others are dealing with today. At midnight tonight Central European Time the UK will cease to be a member of the European Union and as far as I can see this is simply a bad thing.

Since David Cameron gambled the future prosperity of his country on a wild bid to control the more Neanderthal elements of the Conservative party I have been trying to find anyone who can describe to me a single concrete benefit of leaving the EU. So far the responses I have had have ranged from the deluded to the downright lunatic. Is it straight or bendy bananas that the Eurocrats have prevented us enjoying? I never was sure and of course the answer is neither. “We are taking back control of our laws, our borders and our money”. Well, as far as I can see our money has remained pretty much the same since 1971. The UK never joined the Schengen agreement and so maintained full control of its borders at all times and the European Union Withdrawal Act 2018 effectively copied and pasted the entirety of EU law onto the UK statute book.

“We are ending freedom of movement”. That’s the big one. Let’s keep out the foreigners. Let’s put up walls around our offshore island home. Let’s live in splendid isolation in this cool wet archipelago. Well, freedom of movement works both ways. By ending it we remove the right of British people to live, study, work and retire across the entire continent. Of course ways can be found for some people to do some of these things but we are talking about negotiation of special arrangements to do things that are now available as rights. The end of freedom for our European neighbours to come to work in the UK poses enormous challenges to the NHS, the care system and agriculture, none of which can currently function in the absence of a substantial non-UK work force. However I look at it, the end of freedom of movement is a disaster for all concerned. Even the xenophobes who just don’t like foreigners will eventually catch on to the hard facts of life but how much damage will have been done by then?

Even the manner of the UK’s departure from the European Parliament filled me with gloom. The boorish, screeching, hateful display from Farrage and Widdecombe on their last day in an institution they had done their very best to sabotage truly made me ashamed of the country that had elected them. In contrast the behaviour of the other MEPs in the chamber as they sang Auld Lang Syne gave me a glimmer of hope, as did the gestures of lighting the Grand Place in red, white and blue and dressing the Mannekin Pis in John Bull style yesterday evening. I spent a lot of time in Brussels in the 1980s and saw the little guy in various forms of fancy dress but I never expected to see this particular one.

This morning the BBC is covering the last day of our EU membership in its usual way. In search of balance it is interviewing politicians who still think that Brexit is a good idea. One in particular caught my attention although sadly not to the extent that I remember his name. His thesis was that in the months to come the EU would have to wake up to the fact that there was now a British government with a large majority and so it would have to accede to British demands in the trade negotiations. This too deepened my gloom. What possible difference does the size of Boris Johnson’s majority make to the fundamental facts of the situation? The EU and AEA together remain a market of almost half a billion people while the UK has 65 million. If the UK wants access to that market it will have to accept most of its rules. If it wants to diverge from those rules there will be costs. None of this is altered in the slightest by the fact that the Conservatives have a majority of 80 in the House of Commons. The speaker went on to describe the forthcoming negotiations in confrontational terms. Part of me was waiting for him to suggest that if those nasty Frogs, Krauts and Dagoes didn’t yield to our righteous demands there would be gunboats sailing up the Rhine forthwith.

How the hell does someone this stupid manage to dress himself in the morning?

Then on the lunch time news I heard Anne Widdecombe again. Leading a march away from the European Parliament behind a lone piper. Usually if you hear a lone piper, he or she is likely to be playing a lament and I can’t think of a day in recent history that more merited a lament.

While I’m on Anne Widdecombe and I’m venting, just a footnote about her brand of nasty Catholicism. I was brought up in the Catholic Church and went to Catholic primary school where ten lessons a week were dedicated to religious instruction. As an impressionable child I was much taken with New Testament teaching. You know, the bits about turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour as yourself. By the time I was a teenager I had noticed that many of the people professing these principles were actually amongst the nastiest and most bigoted people around. Love your neighbour [unless your neighbour is a single parent, gay, protestant, Jewish, a sex worker – or just generally different]. This is why Anne Widdecombe is a Catholic nowadays and I’m not.

But I digress.

As I write this in eight hours’ time the UK will have left the European Union. In practical terms not much will change tonight because we have a transition period until the end of the year. That time is supposed to be used to negotiate comprehensive trade agreements not just with the EU but with our other major trading partners throughout the world. I have yet to hear any expert with knowledge of trade negotiations say that this is in even remotely feasible. As things stand the true cliff edge will come on New Year’s Day 2021 and the prospect is hideous. The lunatic currently in charge of the Downing Street asylum, one Dominic Cummings, has been scheming towards this end for years. It’s hard to understand his motivation. Presumably it is a mixture of being very well paid and a manic desire to be disruptive. Whatever it is, he will be pushing the Prime Minister towards the hardest of scorched earth Brexits and it’s difficult to see any way to stop him.

One voice of hope this dismal morning is David Allen Green, a legal commentator whose blog has been a voice of reason over the last three and a half years and who I met in a pub once. Green is not a “Remainer”. In fact he is on record as saying that after the Maastricht Treaty he would have preferred to leave the EU but judged it to be too much trouble. He has been extremely critical, not of the decision to leave in principle, but of the absolutely shambolic way in which three successive Tory governments have attempted to carry it out. Green, along with other legal commentators, has noted that Michel Barnier has proposed an Article 217 (of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU)) Association Agreement as the basis for the future relationship between the UK and the EU. This provides a vehicle for mitigating some of the damage that leaving the EU will do to the UK. The EU already has more than 20 such agreements in place with neighbouring countries and the legal framework is well understood. It would be a political hot potato and some of the backwoodsmen of the ERG (the European Research Group, or as I usually think of it, the Provisional Brexit Party) would no doubt oppose it with their customary venom. However, this may be where the Tory majority of 80 plus could come in handy. If Johnson were to wake up to the enormity of what he has done he might see an Article 217 Agreement as a way to avoid the worst stains on his record. With a crushing majority in the Commons and likely support from at least some of the opposition parties he could probably push it through.

Today is not the day for detailed examination of such an option but that day will come soon. Is it likely that someone with Boris Johnson’s history will take a pragmatic course to restrict the damage? In all honesty no. It’s not likely but neither is it impossible. And on this dismal day that tiny ray of hope is the only thing I am clinging on to.