Europe: the next election’s Great Unmentionable

The party conference season is fully under way. But the Great Unmentionable is Europe. All three party leaders are stressing that there is no question of rejoining the EU.

The LibDems, as ever, want to walk both sides of the street with their deputy leader, Layla Moran, talking about rejoining the Single Market while her boss, Sir Ed Davey, says “no-one is talking about Europe on the doorstep”.

Ms Moran was slapped down by Sir Ed yesterday, speaking on the Sunday BBC1 political show. Victoria Derbyshire relentlessly pressed with endless Jeremy Paxman-type questions, trying to get the hapless LibDem leader to say anything about rejoining even the Single Market.

He refused, waving away any rapprochement with Europe to some far-off time. A desirable target, but not for tomorrow or next year or for the foreseeable future.

Rishi Sunak is a devout Brexiteer and was selected in his safe seat of Richmond by promising the Daily Telegraph- and Spectator-reading Tory activists of North Yorkshire that he wanted nothing to do with Europe.

Sir Keir Starmer is rather like Thomas Cromwell: a devoted Papist under Cardinal Wolsey and then anti-Rome under Henry VIII.

One cannot blame the three party leaders. They are told by focus groups that if they want to bring red wall voters back to Labour, or persuade West Country or mid-Bedfordshire Tory voters (who are mainly anti-European) to vote Lib-Dem, then they must not allow any hint of softening on the mantra of the triple lock of No to the Single Market, No to the Customs Union and No to allowing Brits to travel freely in Europe. The latter also makes it hard to work there as professionals, live there without coming home every 90 days, or even enjoy bumming around, doing bits and pieces of work in ski resorts or teaching after graduation.

There is chatter about using the clause in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), which is the treaty negotiated by Boris Johnson and David Frost. The TCA went way beyond the  Brexit demands of 2016 and has made life much, much harder for businesses and individuals to have even routine exchanges with the Continent.

The review clause is just that. A look at how the TCA is working. Any changes to the Treaty would require agreement by 27 sovereign national governments. They are more than cheesed off by decades of being mocked and sneered at by Brexiteer ideologues in the UK government and the offshore-owned British press.

Labour has said it may be possible to get a bit closer without compromising the Triple No lock. Labour called for a return to Horizon. Sunak agrees. Labour called in the Commons to stop those parts of the “Brexit Freedoms Bill” proposing that every single EU law, many proposed by Prime Ministers Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron, should be repealed or be replaced by a new made-in-Whitehall regulation or law. Sunak agreed to that, too.

The UK chemical industry was forking out millions to replace the common European Reach legislation on standards for chemical production. Now Sunak has sensibly stopped all this and the CE kitemark and other common pan-European rules to help commerce will be maintained — just as Labour’s Starmer has proposed.

Sunak has also agreed to accept the Brussels interpretation of trade between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland, grandly called the Windsor Framework.

He will host the second meeting of Emmanuel Macron’s European Political Community. This gathering allows EU leaders to sit down with all those heads of government who would like to join the EU from small nations like Kosovo, North Macedonia and Armenia, as well as big ones like Ukraine and Turkey. It also includes countries such as Norway and, of course, the UK that do not currently wish to join the EU.

Such gestures are welcome but don’t go far enough. Britain may start paying into and benefiting from Horizon, but as things stand no scientist from Germany or Poland, say, can come and work at a British university without excessive cost to both the host university and the scientist.

A hundred craft beer and ale makers have shut down because they cannot get key ingredients from Europe. Anyone who tries to get a book sent from a European capital now faces the hassle of customs declarations and duty or exorbitant postage payments. French, German or Spanish newspapers have disappeared from London newsstands, as Brexit rules make it too difficult or pricey to import them.

The UK’s global standing has fallen on account of Brexit isolation. All this is commonplace but won’t be discussed at the election, as the omertá of the three main parties blocks any  resolution to the continuing crisis of Brexit.

This seems odd. Polls show a growing majority saying Brexit was a mistake and more than 50 per cent saying they would vote to return to Europe.

These can be taken with the usual caveats. On Saturday there was a march to Parliament Square and a rally for Rejoin. It had far fewer participants than previous Rejoin demos. The speakers were all stars of 2016-17 – Gina Miller, Steve Bray, AC Grayling and Guy Verhofstadt. There were very few young people.

So Sir Ed Davey may be right that the nation is not bursting apart over Brexit. Yet every day there is a column or news story about Brexit in the press. Books on Brexit continue to be published. On a London bus at the weekend a woman spotting my pro-EU badge spontaneously told me she regretted voting Leave in 2016.

All the main issues remain unresolved. How voters react to political parties (other than the SNP or Greens) who say “Nothing To See Here, Please Move Along” remains to be seen. British democracy has usually been unafraid to discuss big issues that affect the nation.

But now silence on Brexit is the order of the day. At some stage there will have to be a grown-up debate. But almost certainly not this side of the election. And probably not until the current generation of political leaders are replaced over time with a political class not made fearful and frozen by the 2016 plebiscite.

Denis MacShane is a former Labour Minister of Europe under Tony Blair.#

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