In November 2012 David Davis, now Brexit secretary, made a speech about our relationship with the EU. You can see it HERE on his website. This is rather a long post but it is helpful, I think, to see with hindsight what he said just over four years ago. He began the speech by looking back to when we joined in 1973 saying the then PM, Edward Heath told us Britain would become “more efficient and more competitive in gaining more markets not only in Europe but in the rest of the world.”
I think the evidence is that this is exactly what did happen, spectacularly so with the car industry, but he seems blind to it saying Britain’s future in Europe has never been so uncertain. I think this is more down to the right wing press, Boris Johnson and UKIP rather than the EU.
He reluctantly admits the EU single market and enlargement that brought “countries with troubled histories into the modern, democratic world” is a success but seems to dismiss how much this means for a Europe ravaged by two massively destructive world wars in the last century. And the demand for a referendum on the future of the country was “constant” so he claimed but in the previous election of 2010, UKIP received just 919,546 votes or 3.1% of the total. Hardly a huge endorsement for leaving the EU. Had the government put a strong, positive case to counter The Daily Mail and Nigel Farage I do not believe they would have got even that.
UKIP did better in 2015 with 12.6% of the vote but retained just one MP. By then of course the whole idea of an in/out EU referendum had been firmly planted by David Cameron as a way of outflanking Farage and this encouraged people to focus on the EU.
He thinks we were scared into voting remain in 1975 and blames the government, the Commission, the CBI and the TUC for using “every scare tactic in the book” to secure a Yes vote and said those who “cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. If you look at the pamphlet (HERE) sent to every home it was fair and balanced (in my opinion that is) and he completely overlooks the position of Fleet Street where every national newspaper in the 70s was in favour of joining the EEC. It gives a glimpse into the mindset of a Brexiteer – any rational argument against leaving is always a “scare tactic”.
Brexiteers were able to use the “scaremongering” claim to great effect in 2016. They did learn the lessons of history. But next time, it will be they who are defending the status quo and they will find it much more difficult after the populace have had a dose of what life may be like out of the EU.
His position in 2012 on a future referendum was odd – he said if “voters were scared into voting “In”, that would be the worst case scenario for Britain”. He thought it “would render future British governments utterly impotent in European negotiations, undermining their ability to block EU initiatives, which threaten British interests.” Three points occur to me. Firstly, he seems to see negotiating with the EU as a sort of battle rather than a joint venture to improve the lives of European citizens. It is the view of those with a very small nationalistic turn of mind.
And listen to this: “Even amongst those who want to take powers back from the EU, there is a fear that other Member States would not play nice and that the negotiation would fail. I don’t believe this either. But we will have to show more imagination, courage and tenacity than has been shown by British negotiators for some time". This is Davis the bare-knuckle fighter, the bruiser, throwing his weight about and shouting to try and get what he wants.
Secondly, although worried about possible scaremongering, he seemed sanguine about leavers promising the earth during the referendum in 2016 only to roll back on virtually everything within days of the vote. It was OK to behave like a huckster to get a leave vote but wrong to “scare” people into a remain vote. Thirdly, it almost appears that he saw a leave vote as handing the government a power to threaten the EU, which would immediately capitulate and offer us everything we wanted. If this was his calculation it may turn out badly wrong.
He claimed in October 2016 that Brexit has no downsides and “only considerable upsides”. In his own mind this is how he saw things. I wonder if that is still his position after his period as Brexit Secretary?
He talks of the EU as being like the “third rail”, politically charged and too controversial to touch. It was so, he suggested, because of the fear of splitting the Tory party. But that risk had dissipated he said because the party was now 90% Eurosceptic. This was an amazing claim since we know that probably two thirds of Conservative MPs voted to remain in 2016.
Warnings about trade are dismissed by a graph showing exports to the rest of the world rising while exports to the EU were falling. He makes no effort to interpret the data or to ask himself why this should be beyond saying the EU was not growing very quickly. He doesn’t ask himself why this means we must leave the EU or why Germany, France, Italy, Holland and even tiny Belgium all export more to the rest of the world from inside the EU than we do. This apparently doesn’t trouble him at all. He sees it as a binary choice, to raise exports to the rest of the world we must apparently leave the market that takes 44% of our trade.
Brexiteers have never faced up to this issue. What is it about our exports that the EU does not like or want? Is it the price? Is it quality, reliability or availability? It can’t be standards because they’re the same throughout the EU. However, he does not ask himself the question and so it is never answered.
He says the world is growing quicker than the EU – which was probably true in 2012 but not so much now. If in 2025, the EU is growing more quickly than the rest of the world, as is entirely possible, presumably he would argue to rejoin. One can see this is not a reasonable way to deal with friends and neighbours over the long term who may be disinclined to allow us back in if we want to leave every time the going gets hard or economic growth slows.
He is highly critical of the Euro zone and debt levels. EU countries must kick their spending addiction he warned after pointing out the debt to GDP in the Euro zone was at 90% and will reach 95% next year (2013) he claimed. In fact the Euro zone debt never exceeded 92% and is actually falling. At the time our own debt is forecast to hit 90% in 2018 according to the OBR and will be higher than the Eurozone!!
Of course, now he is a member of a government still borrowing £50 billion a year or more I note the debt to GDP in the Euro zone does not feature in any of his current arguments. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
In 2012, it was the lack of growth in the EU that he was also critical of. But the Euro zone is now picking up speed and is growing at least as quickly as we are. In 2017 it is expected to grow by 1.6% and 1.8% in 2018, the same as the UK. We are slowing down as they speed up and the graph lines probably crossed at the end of last year. This may take some explaining in the next two or three years as the “sluggish” and “sclerotic” EU overtakes us!
He also took a pot at EU employment levels, which were all very high but are now falling rapidly. Portugal for example, he said had 1 in 6 unemployed, now it’s 1 in 10. Total Euro zone unemployment was 18 million, now down to 15,439,000 as of February 2017 and falling by 140,000 a month. So, all the numbers are encouraging for Europe (see HERE)
Mr Davis said, “Even the eternally optimistic European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi, recently ridiculed for claiming the Eurozone is “poised for recovery”, believes any recovery would “probably be slow. Without drastic action, Europe risks becoming “the 1% Continent” with low growth in perpetuity”. But now the positions are reversed and in future, it looks like the EU may overtake us and we will look once again like the sick man of Europe.
He forecast disaster for the Euro and Euro zone countries, which does not, unfortunately for him, look remotely like coming true.
He is paranoid about what he calls the Franco-German domination of Europe and their calls for further integration that he thinks Britain has been on the receiving end of. But the only example he cites is the Working Time Directive. He says the UK was against it but as far as I know there is no great pressure to repeal a part of employment law that benefits workers. Anyone in this country can opt out of it if they wish and anyway, who wants to be looked at by a doctor who has worked a 100-hour week?
A body like the UN would presumably be more to Mr Davis’ liking. That is a talking shop without any real powers to change anything and with five major countries on the Security Council having a right of veto over everything. He sees nothing odd about the UK along with four other nations “dominating” proceedings in the UN. That is because the rules favour us.
He seeks repatriation of powers from Brussels and says, “If we achieve this we would return Britain to a relationship with Europe similar to that which the British people thought they voted for in 1975 – a Common Market to deliver economic benefits for the whole Continent without impinging on the democracies of the nations within it”.
This is patent nonsense. We knew what we were voting for in 1975, far more than we do now, as can be seen by the pamphlet that was sent to every household. This is just a repetition of the claim that anti-EU campaigners have made for years and which has penetrated deep into the British psyche - but it’s still wrong.
The powers he wants returned include justice and home affairs powers, immigration, social and employment legislation, giving government the final say on health and safety legislation as well as “protecting” Britain from financial regulation designed to “punish the UK’s success”. It is the old EU bogeyman again. And like all Brexiteers he does not say what he would do differently to what the EU does. He just wants to get his hands on the steering wheel. The problem for Mr Davis is what the EU will demand in the negotiations. They are reluctant to see the kind of low regulatory country on their border and may want us to sign up to minimum standards before a trade deal can be negotiated.
Note also that this is the sole mention of immigration in the entire speech and he doesn't say what he would do if control of immigration came back to the UK anyway.
He claims the acquis communautaire is a “doctrine which states that the powers the EU has acquired belong to the EU forever”. I think this is plain wrong, the acquis is not a doctrine at all. It is simply the accumulated law of the EU, something that every accession country has to agree to as we will when we rejoin. But again it is the usual EU as malign and power hungry. It is true that once the EU assume competence for something it overrides national law, but this is separate to the acquis.
Getting in to his stride, he says “The EU is run by the Commission, a group of people who are all unelected and are mostly unheard of. It is they who propose new laws, control the budget, implement decisions and manage its day-to-day running”.
The Commission is a bit like our civil service (see HERE) about whom you could say the same thing. They propose laws but the Council of Ministers and the EU parliament must approve them. This is fundamentally at least as democratic as our system. Our civil service controls the budget and as well as implementing decisions and managing the day-to-day running of the country. So, once again it looks as if he is frightened of his own shadow.
His brand of Conservatism is, so he says, “one that believes the nation state is a moral concept. By that I mean that, with its common laws, its common tradition, its common conventions, its common beliefs, and its common understandings, the nation state is actually the highest manifestation of democracy”. He does not say how this sits with the UK, an amalgamation of three nation states and Northern Ireland. This is surely no different to the EU, except he wants to keep the Kingdom United but break away from the EU. It is not logical but xenophobic.
We should be able, according to Mr Davis, to have a universal opt-out that allows us to “escape the damaging effects of costly and unnecessary EU laws. If we do not like a new law, Parliament should be able to reject it”. But as usual he doesn’t say what laws he does not like – I assume it’s just the Working Time Directive?
He suggested a double referendum strategy for renegotiating our relationship with the EU, something I posted a piece about a few days ago (HERE). He wanted the people to have the final say on whatever deal was negotiated - now he's against it.
He thought the mandate from a referendum would “both stiffen the spines of our negotiators, and undermine the legitimacy of the European resistance to change. It would communicate as clearly as possible the dissatisfaction of the British people with the current status”. Once again, the old bruiser's sentiments are clear. Get what you want by force of a referendum. In the event it was only 51.8% to 48.2% so hardly stiffening the spine of anyone and as time goes by there is growing polling evidence that people are regretting the decision as well.
The purpose of this strategy was to maximise both the democratic legitimacy and the “negotiating leverage” to achieve our policy aims. The EU would be “forced to negotiate seriously”, he said, as if they were not doing it before. Translated he means we didn't get our own way. It will remain to be seen how much worse off we are in the future than now.
In the negotiation, he thought we would have options like joining the EEA or EFTA or even a series of bilateral agreements like Switzerland. All have now been discounted. He wanted us to stay in the customs union to avoid “complex and punitive “rules of origin” tariffs if parts of their products were made in, say, China”. That option is also off the table apparently.
The customs union “would allow true free trade in both directions across the Channel, so Continental manufacturers would benefit and therefore prefer it. In the event that we arrive at this position, the pressure on European governments from their own manufacturing industries for this deal would be quite strong”. It does not seem the pressure is quite as strong as he thought and the need to keep the EU together may be much stronger. We shall see.
But if we could not remain in the customs union, the “Swiss free trade area approach would allow us to negotiate advantageous trade deals with non-EU countries. It would allow us to maximise our trading advantages, and in conjunction with a strong low tax and deregulatory strategy at home, would liberate our nation’s ingenuity and skills to create jobs, wealth and growth in a way that is currently beyond our grasp”.
He does not say why he thinks we can maximise our trading advantages with non-EU countries when we can’t seem to do it inside the EU as Germany, Holland, Belgium and Italy can. Or why any of it is out of our grasp now. And once again, we are back to the low tax, low regulatory regime that the Conservatives are always keen on.
He finishes with this:
“Paradoxically, the fact that the radical, out-of-Europe options are growing more attractive as the years pass, means that the deal that we can strike with Europe is likely to be much stronger”
He believes the EU will recognise that we are sailing off to a bright future and will give us all we ask for. This looks like hubris on a grand scale to me. Europe, in the main, think we are all going to be much worse off. The float on the left here shows Europe's attitude towards us far more realistically the David Davis' rather optimistic thinking.
