Saturday 12 December 2020

Schooling a Brexiteer

One of the reasons we are in such a terrible mess (and be in no doubt we are) is the decision taken back at the end of 2016 by Theresa May and her advisers that Britain should leave the single market and the customs union. The cabinet wasn't involved and there was, as far as I know, no national debate about what Brexit meant. Vote Leave hadn't been clear and offered only a few slogans. Nobody did any serious thinking about it beyond the political. One of the two advisers who convinced Mrs May to adopt the plan she did, was Nick Timothy, writer of the 2017 manifesto (for which he was sacked) and learner of nothing. A few days ago he sarcastically Tweeted:

Timothy was born in 1980 and has no idea what it was like in 1973.  I assume he was responding to someone trying to explain that things were not quite what Brexiteers like him think they were all those years ago.

Now the author of "Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum & Seventies Britain" Robert Saunders has delivered a stunning riposte which I reproduce below. It is an incredible demolition, not only of Timothy's tweet, but of the lack of rational thinking behind it. Here is Mr Saunders Twitter thread:


To save you the trouble I copy it out in full below. It's a salutary lesson about a world we have forgotten ever existed:

The UK has not been able to feed itself since the early C19th. Even for an industrial economy, it is unusually dependent on imported food. And by the 1970s, a mixture of bad harvests, population growth, inflation & the collapse of Commonwealth agreements was starting to bite.

In 1974, for example, Caribbean sugar imports dropped by a third, as producers abandoned Commonwealth trade agreements and sold to more lucrative markets elsewhere. Supermarkets introduced informal rationing, and consumer organisations urged the public to stop buying sugar.

Later that year, the Ministry of Agriculture warned that Canada might suspend grain exports if the currency continued to decline. In November, Margaret Thatcher had to open her cupboards to journalists to prove that she wasn't hoarding food.


1974 also saw a bakers' strike, in response to rising costs and falling real wages. Some suppliers restricted shoppers to a single loaf each, prompting queues outside bakeries at dawn. Conservative MPs again raised the prospect of rationing. 


The UK had joined the EEC in 1973, but was still operating under transitional arrangements on food and farming. So the 1975 EEC referendum saw a serious debate, of the kind we don't seem to be capable of anymore, about what leaving might mean for the supply and price of food.

Leave campaigners argued that prices would be higher in Europe, because production costs were greater and the Common Agricultural Policy was designed to ensure farmers a decent wage. Barbara Castle compared shopping bags in London and Brussels, as a warning against EEC prices.


Pro-Europeans responded by pointing to rising prices across the world. The days of cheap food from compliant colonial markets, they warned, were over. European prices might, in some years, be higher, but Britain would at least have a guaranteed source of supply.


As Margaret Thatcher warned: "In Britain we have to import every second meal. Sometimes we shall pay less in the Community, & sometimes we shall pay more. But we shall have a stable source of supply, & most housewives would rather pay a little more than risk a bare cupboard".


The leader of the National Farmers' Union warned of "a clear threat to continued regular food supplies if Britain left the Market". Voters were urged to think of the EEC as "the Common Super-Market. Well-stocked shelves; plenty of choice and just around the corner".


The food economy has changed radically since the 1970s. Production has boomed, transportation has improved & prices have fallen. At the same time, Britons have become less suspicious of "Continental" food, & used to abundant supplies reliant on "just-in-time" delivery chains.

Yet food poverty remains a desperate social problem. In the year *before* the pandemic, foodbanks gave out 1.9 million food parcels. The poorest 10% of households spend more than double the share of income on food of the richest. If prices rise, we know who will suffer most.

47 years after joining the EEC, it's legitimate to ask whether the old arguments for membership still hold. What's less forgivable is the stunning incuriosity of those tasked with delivering Brexit about why Britain joined, what changed with membership, & what's now at stake.

Perhaps Brexiters can find better solutions to the challenges that drove the UK to join. But pretending those challenges did not exist - as if Conservatives like Thatcher, Heath & Macmillan embraced membership in some bizarre spasm of irrationality - is a recipe for disaster.

Brexit requires us to rethink nearly every major policy choice since 1973. If we don't understand why those choices were made, we won't be ready for the decisions that lie ahead. If tweeting for lolz is the best we can do, the joke will deservedly be on us in 2021. 

I think it's a great piece and explains a lot about Brexiteers who think the world we live in is wholly a natural thing. We take loaded supermarket shelves, groaning under the weight of every kind of food imaginable, as something God given.  The CAP may not be perfect but it has provided the continent with near self sufficiency in food while Britain imports about half of what we consume. 

Brexiteers suggest we grow more of our own food but as someone else pointed our in the last week or so (not Mr Saunders) we couldn't feed ourselves during two world wars so the chances of doing it now are pretty slim.

Where Mr Saunders is bang on the money is that Brexit requires the rethinking of nearly every policy choice since 1973. When that happens - as it will have to sooner or later - other men and women (not Johnson or Gove, they are too blinded by Brexit) will come to the same conclusion as MacMillan, Heath, Wilson and most sensible people in 1973, that membership of the EU is the ONLY rational solution.

The EU is not perfect, or anywhere near it. It is as Churchill said about democracy, just better than any of the alternatives.
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