May must put down her begging bowl and get tough with Brussels
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After her Pyrrhic victory in the Tory confidence vote, Theresa May has given herself no time to reflect on what it means or what to do next. She is in Europe today, but only in the role of supplicant. It is humiliating enough for Britain to be represented by a lame duck Prime Minister — the price her party demanded was her promise to go before the next election — but it is even worse that she seems to have no plan. Mrs May needs to turn the tables on Brussels. So here are some suggestions for getting tough with the EU.
First, we must restore better British relations with the Irish Republic and make it clear to the gentlemen in Brussels that their interference in what is essentially a bilateral border issue is unwelcome. Both the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and the Belfast Agreement of 1997 (often, but incorrectly, referred to as the “Good Friday Agreement”) were negotiated between Dublin and London, with some American help but minimal EU involvement. Those two agreements have been successful in bringing the Troubles to an end —so far.
This time round, the EU’s insistence on the backstop has vitiated negotiations over the border and even raised the spectre of a return to sectarian terrorism in the North. Mrs May needs to remind her EU counterparts that in such delicate talks, two is company but three is a crowd. Leo Varadkar would be much more amenable to reasonable customs arrangements that would avoid a hard border if he did not have the big battalions of Brussels urging intransigence on him at every stage. Once the UK has left, the border with the Republic will also be our land border with the EU. But that does not give Michel Barnier the right to usurp the rights of the Irish and the British to agree terms that suit their respective peoples.
Every time European powers have meddled in Anglo-Irish affairs — from Louis XIV to Kaiser Wilhelm II — they have done so for self-interested reasons and with disastrous results. Indeed, the French and Germans bear a heavy responsibility for the fact that during the Troubles, Loyalists and Republicans made constant reference to past events, such as the Battle of the Boyne or the Easter Uprising, which were provoked by Continental power politics.
Secondly, Mrs May should use the terror attack on Strasbourg to remind her counterparts that the UK remains an indispensable player in the security and defence of the European mainland. One of the least palatable aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement is that it ties the UK into EU plans to place these crucial areas under federal jurisdiction, including a European Army. That is not in the British national interest.
Last week, Sir Richard Dearlove and Major-General Julian Thompson —respectively a former head of MI6 and a former commander in the Falklands War — published a response to Downing Street’s rebuttal of their open letter, written with other eminent experts, criticising the Withdrawal Agreement’s security provisions. Dearlove and Thompson insist that the deal “surrenders British national security by subordinating British defence forces to EU military control”.
The deal, they say, would weaken Nato and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. France and Germany are part of the former but both Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have recently warned their EU partners against relying on the Atlantic alliance. They have never been deemed trustworthy enough by Washington to belong to the Five Eyes. Mrs May must not allow British defence to be subsumed into untested European structures, nor British intelligence to be downgraded by our allies in the Anglosphere.
These two areas — the Anglo-Irish relationship plus defence and security — are at the heart of the misgivings that many MPs have about the Prime Minister’s deal. If she could reassert British interests in her present and future encounters with the EU, she might go some way towards rebuilding trust in her leadership. Without such firmness, her tenure in office is still more than likely to be abruptly curtailed, one way or another.
