It is amazing how little the British people knew (or cared) about the EU, its rules and systems for the functioning of the single market and how little they have learned in the past five years. And I'm not just talking here about the average man in the street. It applies right up to the cabinet and the prime minister himself. This has become increasingly clear over the last six months and it came across with a much quoted piece in The Sunday Times last weekend.
Holidaymakers are beginning to return to Europe and the article is: Amber gamblers put No 10 in a spin as they jet off for sun and sangria. It's about covid but the opening paragraphs are these:
"As we trooped off our packed British Airways plane to Malaga, an officious border guard split up the flight for passport control: “Europeans” to the left, “British” to the right. A great solid mass of holiday-hungry Anglo-Saxons funnelled right.
“I love the way we’re not European any more just because we left their trade market,” complained an irate Liverpudlian called Tommy, waving his new blue passport defiantly. “Seems they changed the geography overnight, f***ing Nazis.”
I am sure this scene will be repeated for years until we rejoin the single market. The four freedoms included the right to the free movement of people, the right to regard the whole of the EU27 as your home country and to travel freely within it. The Liverpudlian, I assume, voted to leave and was probably warned this might be a consequence but thought it was scaremongering.
Britons are ambivalent about this particular freedom and thought it was OK for us but not for other Europeans, at least not the Europeans they thought were coming here to take our jobs or sponge off the welfare or health systems. There was no thought to the idea that we could also compete for jobs in Europe and use their welfare systems. I suspect many leave voters were not that worldly and thought a European beach was somewhere to go for two weeks every summer to get a tan during the day and blotto at night and that was it.
The scouser seemed to think the EU regard us as not being European any more and that the EU was about trade in goods only. Brexit was about getting us out from under European rules and the ECJ jurisdiction. Hence, the EU is no longer responsible for us and any limited rights we enjoy now are down to what Frost and Johnson have negotiated. It is not the EU's fault.
It does not help when we are detaining EU nationals who are trying to enter the UK for perfectly legitimate reasons and keeping then in holding cells as if they're criminals, as I covered the other day. This results in the kind of headline in European newspapers we can do without.:
This also brings me to Patel's attempt to replace the old system of repatriating illegal immigrants back to the EU country they came from. Having failed to reach agreement with Brussels she was relying on bilateral negotiations with individual member states (this is much more cumbersome and time consuming, another reason for being in the EU) to get something in place for her new immigration policy.
In this context, I noticed a post on Twitter by a German journalist, Stefanie Bolzen, the London correspondent of Welt.
‘This is only a British wish’: German & French gov confirm @welt there won’t be any bilateral negotiations with U.K. on readmission of asylum seekers from Britain. A cornerstone of Patel’s Sovereign Borders Bill, due in June, is gone 1/2 https://t.co/R89mzMK7Gr
— StefanieBolzen (@StefanieBolzen) May 30, 2021
France and Germany have now confirmed there will not be any bilateral talks. I don't know what Nigel Farage will make of it all. He has been cruising up and down the Channel doing King Canute impressions and being outraged at a few poor exploited wretches washing up on our shores.
I don't know how he will explain to the many leave voters who thought taking back control of our borders didn't also mean a reciprocal right for other countries to control theirs, which is what they are now doing. Borders have two sides - who knew?
Ms Bolzen also adds in the second post, that in the absence of bilateral talks, the UK can only go via Brussels. But an EU Commission spokesman confirms to Welt that "‘for the moment focus is on implementing TCA’ - which does ‘not include provisions on asylum and return’. EU is ‘not considering pursuing further negotiations to complement TCA at the EU level’."
The door is firmly shut and, as she says, a cornerstone of the government's immigration bill has now collapsed. Patel's freedom of (political) movement is now severely curtailed as well.
In a sane world, one might begin to have hope that these sort of events (as well as the NI protocol and the 'cats cradle of red tape' dragging our exporters down) might persuade people that Brexit is a thoroughly bad idea. But I wouldn't bank on that for some time yet.
The announcement that the government is to spend £200 million on a new Britannia shows just how little the government understands about trade. I used to work for a British company that thought customers should place an order if you bought them a good lunch. It didn't work then and it won't work now.
Customers don't place big contracts or sign trade deals on the strength of a swanky new yacht, You need world beating products and services and if you've got them why buy a yacht?
