Review: Unfinished Business: Journal of an Embattled European

Geraint Talfan Davies thinks he has the acerbic wit and impregnable style of a Gore Vidal or a Christopher Hitchens. His latest book – Unfinished Business, a collection of essays on the virtue of the EU – is full of ‘literary’ put-downs which are intended to be withering: Boris Johnson is a ‘Bullingdon bugle’, David Davis is a ‘cheeky chappy’, Nigel Farage is a ‘saloon bar Saladin’, and Brexit is ‘fate’s multi-headed conspiracy’. At first, this faltering humour and overblown alliteration is endearing. You want to give the author an A for effort. But as Davies’ slim volume drags on, its prose becomes less readable. His impassioned defence of Europeanism is undercut by a litany of mixed metaphors, non-sequiturs, factual inaccuracies, garbled sentences and careless misspellings. To give just two examples, Davies spends many pages inveighing against ‘John Macdonnell’ (whom he presumably believes to be the Labour Shadow Chancellor) and writes cryptically of a second referendum: ‘This elephant in [sic] not yet in the room, but it is loitering on the garden path’.

The lack of consideration which afflicts Davies’ writing points to a wider problem with his thought. It is clear from the synopsised autobiography in chapter one that his attachment to EU membership (which he falsely and persistently conflates with ‘European identity’) is steeped in bourgeois privilege. When he was a teenager, Davies had an extensive education in foreign languages and swanned off to Rome for the Olympics. At Oxford he ‘heard Edward Heath lecture persuasively on Europe’ and went on a whirlwind road trip to Greece. During his journalistic career he reported from several European countries and hob-knobbed with figures from German and Czechoslovakian high society. As chair of the Welsh National Opera he developed an endless appetite for Italian music, and he now takes frequent holidays to his favourite European hot spots. These facts are recounted with a tone of misty-eyed nostalgia verging on aggressive self-pity. How, Davies asks us, could anyone want to restrict his access to these sunny climes and enchanting arias? While the author’s self-description as ‘an embattled European’ might strike some readers as excessive, it is impossible to deny his deep sorrow at exiting what he calls (in a revealing chapter title) ‘the single market of the mind’ – that transnational fraternity of pseudointellectuals for whom a vaguely delineated and class-specific ideal of ‘European civilisation’ is an insatiable fetish.

The writer’s comfortable status does not, however, prevent him from adopting an oddly frugal position on the pitfalls of Brexit. Of all the issues which get a hearing in Davies’ diatribe, the one to which he returns most frequently and ardently is low-cost airfares: ‘[T]he EU Open Skies policy … allowed the emergence of budget airlines’; Britons ‘have become the most travelled generations in history’ because of ‘cheap air travel’; ‘in the age of cheap air travel … no country is an island’; EU citizens enjoy ‘the ease and cheapness of air travel’; Europe brought ‘profound changes in the ease and cost of transport and travel’; while the price of Brexit is ‘indelibly imprinted on the credit card bills of every British holidaymaker in Europe’. Davies also makes the case – not once but twice in Unfinished Business – that EU membership is essential because it boosts the popularity of subtitled cinema amongst the otherwise uncultivated British masses. Are these, we must ask, the priorities of a journalist who is deeply connected to the spirit of the age?

The rest of Davies’ book is peppered with under-researched descriptions of EU policy and political predictions which have been invalidated since they were written. His praise for the ‘European social model’ takes no notice of the fact that the EU has systematically eroded welfare systems and pushed ruinous privatisation in its member states. His contention that the EU’s internal market is ‘fair and helpful’ neglects the massive inequalities between European countries that are entrenched by the eurozone. And his claim that Europe ‘extended democracy to millions’ through its partnership with NATO does not stop to consider, say, the tens of thousands of Afghani civilians who have been killed by this noble project. No one doubts that Davies enjoys sipping espresso and listening to Verdi on his weekend trips to the continent; and it would of course be a terrible shame were the current negotiating deadlock to disrupt these luxuries. But that does not give Davies a free pass to moralise about Leave voters (whom he depicts as either stupid, credulous or nasty), nor license to inflict his troubled predictions about airfare on the innocent reading public.