There is a taster on the BBC website HERE.
Elsewhere, if the definition of madness is to keep repeating the same thing hoping for a different outcome I am afraid Kier Starmer needs to seek help. The Labour leader is in Montreal talking to other centre-left leaders but spoke to the FT where he pledged to "seek a major rewrite of Britain’s Brexit deal in 2025 if the Labour party wins the next general election, saying he owes it to his children to rebuild relations with the EU." He also explicitly ruled out rejoining the single-market or the customs union.
The FT talks of Labour striking a veterinary agreement, closer ties in areas such as security, innovation and research, improvements to youth mobility and more cooperation in energy.
I don't say these things are impossible but I am sceptical that Brussels will be happy to keep fiddling with the TCA, making constant adjustments to suit every future change of UK government - as if it's an extension of Whitehall, like a vernier gauge to be 'tweaked' backwards and forwards by Britain's political class for political or economic gain during the run-up to a general election.
I'm really not convinced it's in the EU's interests.
Starmer is revisiting 2017 and starting out with the same intention as Theresa May, leaving the bloc completely while keeping all the advantages.
Next, I think you'll like an article (Britain’s dawning self-awareness, also in The FT) by one of their journalists, Simon Kuper. He has contributed quite a bit to the Brexit debate over the last few years. His previous articles for the FT are always insightful and perceptive, as they ought to be. Kuper understands the Brexiteer's mindset because he went to the same university (Oxford) at the same time as Hannan and Rees Mogg and narrowly missed being a contemporary of Johnson and Gove.
Unlike the Brexit types, he is realistic enough to accept that Britain is not a global power any more and never will be again. The last seven years he argues have been therapy of a kind with a majority of the public now believing Brexit was a mistake and that we are really just a small country that “needs immigrants, high taxes and European allies.”
Kuper says:
“The UK entered therapy afflicted by delusions. A paper by Louise Isham, an Oxford psychology professor, and others defines these as “unfounded beliefs that one has special powers, wealth, mission, or identity”. These “delusions of exceptionality” are “arguably the most neglected psychotic experience in research,” they write. Examples of delusions are “believing one is invincible and stepping into traffic, or believing one is Jesus and will therefore be crucified”. The Brexiter version was believing that one is a global power that should “go it alone”.
This is unique British exceptionalism, isn't it?
He suggests "most Britons" have ditched grandiosity because "going around the world shouting 'Do you know who I was?' hasn’t worked." I am not sure it's quite a majority just yet, but we're certainly on the way.
As my generation fades away, I think the pace will accelerate. We went to schools that had walls plastered with maps of the world printed in the 1950s or before, showing huge swathes of the globe in pink representing Britain's empire, overseas territories and dominion and we were taught by men and women born before the First World War who genuinely believed we were born to rule. I was born when we still ruled India!
Now Britain's past is being forgotten and rightly so.
I started to lose my delusions in the seventies when it was clear we were not the great economic and manufacturing power that we once were. I met lots of people who were suspicious of anything German and thought made in Japan was code for cheap and tacky. They laughed at Italians and joked that France would be OK if it wasn’t for the French.
But gradually they all overtook us in GPD per capita, as Poland will shortly and Slovenia already has.
Brexit has been a bit of electro-convulsive therapy to Britain's view of itself and even Starmer won't be immune to it
Finally, there is a piece in The Financial Review by their Europe correspondent, Hans Van Leeuwen, which is in a similar vein and ends like this:
"The aftershocks of Britain’s big Brexit rupture, magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, are only just beginning to settle. Some commentators hope that this will restore Britain’s lost sense of proportion and pragmatism. Let’s hope so because the alternative is a potential descent into pessimism and paralysis."
I think that's right. We need to grasp reality and just knuckle down, as Germany and Italy did, to work with other small countries to improve global security and the material well-being of people in this country. The quicker we abandon dreams of world leadership the better.
