Others perhaps took it out of context, reading into his words that Europe needed us to lead it in some much broader way, as if the EU had been left drifting rudderless for the last ten years without the UK.
Either way, it shows even the LibDems aren’t immune to wishful thinking on the EU front.
I saw one comment in response that the EU is a ‘collaborative’ project after great powers like France, Germany and Britain spent centuries trying to dominate and control other smaller nations on the continent. The implication being that no one country 'leads' all the others. I agree with that view. It is perhaps a fundamental point about Europe that seems to have escaped Britain's political class.
Which brings me to one of the difficulties in negotiating with the EU. David Davis and Digby Jones thought that Britain could get a favourable trade deal by immediately opening talks with German car makers after the 2016 referendum. It was one of the many illusions that were shattered over the next four years, but UK politicians still don’t get it, as Mr MacCleary’s comments show.
In sales of capital goods, you are usually speaking with what we used to call Mr MAN. He was the person with the Money, Authority and Need. It was usually relatively easy to find out where you were in the race by speaking to Mr Man. Much more difficult was when the end user employed a main contractor. In those cases, it is virtually impossible to know who was actually making major decisions, which were often made collectively in meetings with perhaps a dozen people, or even on what basis equipment was to be chosen.
So, it’s not hard for me to see what sort of problems our negotiators have in understanding EU positions. Germany might think one thing while France thinks another. The overall stance of the EU is quite fluid right to the end because there are always trade-offs, which is how it should be when you are working collaboratively. But, and this is the key point, an outsider can never fully understand how any particular decision was made, or know in advance what it will be.
Getting one or two countries on your side, even powerful ones, isn’t enough and certainly, as far as the EU is concerned, things will always return to first principles when Brussels officials get involved, to remind member states what they all signed up to.
All this manoeuvring to gain a special advantage is bound to fail. Which brings me nicely to the next point.
Another single market
It seems the Labour government has tried to persuade the EU that what is being described as “a single market for goods trade” is a potentially workable solution as part of the next phase in the so-called ‘reset’. Note this is not THE single market, but another ‘single market’ involving trade between the UK and the EU.
This was first reported by The Guardian. Apparently, during recent visits to Brussels, the Cabinet Office’s top official on EU relations, Michael Ellam, presented the idea to deepen the UK’s economic relationship with the bloc.
Ellam was a career civil servant at The Treasury, a former chair of the EU Financial Services Committee. He left to join HSBC in 2013 and became head of Public Sector Banking in the Global Banking and Markets Division. Starmer recruited him last year as Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office, EU and International Economic Affairs, tasked with leading a "reset" of UK-EU relations.
He wasn’t part of the civil service in 2017-20 but you would have thought he might have read the newspapers at the time or at the very least had a chat with some of our Brexit negotiators from those days. Had he done so, he would have known before opening his mouth that the EU would reject it out of hand. It was reported that EU diplomats, in response, suggested a "customs union or economic alignment through the European Economic Area."
In short, use one of the standard options they have always made clear are readily available to the UK.
The problem of course, is in accepting the freedom of movement of labour and being seen to unquestioningly adopt EU laws. We are back to 2017, not knowing exactly what we want, only that what's on offer in Brussels isn't it.
Ellam should have realised that this nebulous single-market proposal is nothing other than a rehashing of Theresa May's “common rulebook” for goods idea, without free movement of people, proposed during the Brexit negotiations in 2018. The cabinet agreed on that plan in early July, but David Davis and Boris Johnson immediately resigned, triggering May's downfall.
Then, the idea wasn't acceptable to either side. Now it's just the EU who reject it.
EU officials are said to want to avoid a complicated relationship with the UK that could prove an attractive model to anti-EU populists in the 27 member states and embolden a Eurosceptic candidate in France’s 2027 presidential elections to argue that Paris should pay less attention to single market rules. Other countries, it is suggested, might question their contributions to the EU budget if the UK is deemed to be getting special treatment.
One EU diplomat said the EU’s approach was based on its interests: “If you start going back on those principles – leading to a non-member being treated better than an actual member – you certainly would trigger an internal debate on the fundamentals of [EU] cooperation.”
Then, as now, it isn’t spelt out whose rules and regulations this new single market should adopt, but I’m pretty sure the UK side would argue for the EU, in some circumstances, adopting British regulations otherwise, we would simply be joining the EU single market for goods but without freedom of movement.
Just raising the issue reveals to the EU that fundamentally we haven't grasped the nettle even now. We can only guess what the reaction was behind closed doors in Brussels. Britain is clearly still not in the right frame of mind to negotiate a 'reset' let alone membership.
This is after eight years, eight long years, and still we are banging our heads against a brick wall trying to negotiate a deal better than the existing members have got. When will we ever learn?
We are either IN or OUT, hanging around outside wailing and hand-wringing is starting to look not just pathetic, but stupid. More so when you hear MPs in the Commons talk about Britain leading in Europe.
