ANDREW NEIL: My conflict on Question Time with a Lib Dem MP, and why the Left is so blind to the explanation why we should NOT rejoin the EU

The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats see themselves as the forward-looking, progressive voices of British politics.

The latest opinion polls suggest that, after a general election, they might even cobble together some sort of governing liberal-Left alliance between them, since nobody looks like getting an overall majority.

Which is a worry – because when it comes to the European Union, which they’d both like to rejoin (even if they can’t quite bring themselves to say so) they are backward-looking, myopic, stuck in a time warp.

Neither has grasped that the Europe of today is nothing like the Europe the country voted to leave in 2016. That in the past decade it has moved in directions which should disturb any proper progressive – with worse to come.

Labour and Lib Dem politicians constantly peddle the myth that if only we could somehow rejoin the EU single market and customs union, as a prelude to returning to full membership, our growth prospects would be magically transformed.

They don’t seem to have clocked that the EU’s three biggest economies (Germany, France, Italy) – all fully ensconced in the single market and the customs union – are stagnant. That the economic success story so many of my generation was keen for an ailing Britain to join in 1973 (when it was the European Economic Community) has long been consigned to history.

The British Left is now so myopic that you wonder if they ever read the foreign pages of our own newspapers, never mind the foreign Press.

Back in 2016, Francois Hollande, a centre-Left socialist, was President of France. Angela Merkel, the epitome of European centrism, was Chancellor of Germany. Matteo Renzi, a dashing young liberal technocrat, was Prime Minister of Italy. All progressive folk Labour and the Lib Dems could do business with.

Now look at the state of European politics. In the three biggest economies, the mainstream parties are in disarray and decline, the populist-Right is on the march. It already runs Italy, whose Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the sort of Reform-style politician Labour and the Lib Dems affect to abhor. She’s likely to be re-elected in next year’s general election.

In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a centre-Right moderate, is the most unpopular leader since the German federal republic was created in 1949. The populist insurgents well to the Right of him, the Alliance for Germany (AfD), have this month won two state elections in eastern Germany. It also has a comfortable lead in the national polls.

Indeed, if a general election was held now, the AfD wouldn’t just be the largest party in the German parliament – it would have almost as many seats as Merz’s Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats combined.

The CDU and the SPD have been the country’s governing parties for almost 80 years. If that’s not a sea change in German politics, I don’t know what is.

True, it’s still hard to see the AfD forming a national government (the other parties won’t deal with it and Germany is run by coalitions). But it is clearly going to wield enormous influence – and not in a good way. A disturbing development to which our own know-nothing Europhile politicians are oblivious.

Things are about to turn even nastier for progressive minds in France, whose lame-duck President, Emmanuel Macron, is seeing out his time until he steps down in seven months. Here’s the rub: in every opinion poll, no matter her opponent, Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist-Right National Rally, becomes France’s next President in May.

So there you have it. Politics in Europe’s most important countries are changing in radical ways that should be causing shivers down progressive spines. Over the next 12 months Netherlands, Romania and even Spain could all move Right too. Yet Labour and the Lib Dems still blithely dream of rejoining their favourite ‘civilised’ club, as if nothing has changed since 2016.

They’re in for a shock. The populist-Right insurgency is bound to change the outlook and operations of the EU. Already, almost half the European Parliament is made up of shades of Right. Only four of the EU’s 27 commissioners could be said to be on the Left. Soon the EU’s all-powerful judges, as new ones are appointed, will start to reflect the populist-Right (just as the US Supreme Court has under Donald Trump).

Yet still Andy Burnham and Ed Davey long for the warm embrace of the EU, as if it was still a congenial place for their sort of politics. They are being egged on, inevitably, by Tony Blair. Though it pays to look closely at his words. ‘The UK shouldn’t rejoin the EU as it is,’ he said this week. You might want to bookmark that quote. We should rejoin ‘only if the EU changes significantly’. So we’re back to the old Blairite dream of a reformed EU. But who, exactly, does he think will spearhead the ‘radical reform’ he urges?

Hardly Macron, Merz or Meloni. The first two can’t even reform their own countries, much less reform the EU, and Meloni has her hands full keeping debt-laden Italy afloat. In truth, there is zero chance of Blairite reform of the EU and much more likely it will be dragged in a populist-Right direction – not something Blair, Burnham or Davey would relish.

If Blair’s words can be taken at face value they can mean only one thing: we won’t be rejoining any time soon. Yet still Labour and Lib Dem politicians talk up the case. I heard it again when I appeared on BBC1’s Question Time on Thursday night. A Lib Dem MP on the panel claimed the UK economy had been ‘flatlining’ since Brexit but that robust growth would be ours again if only we joined the EU single market and customs union.

This is now the received wisdom of Britain’s Europhile liberal-Left. It is also arrant nonsense. For a start, the British economy has not been flatlining; and staying in the single market and customs union has hardly pepped up the EU’s biggest economies.

In every year bar one since the end of the pandemic, the UK has outperformed Germany, France and Italy, in some years growing two or three times faster. So much for flatlining. So much for EU membership being the magic elixir to stimulate growth.

Yet such claims are stated ad nauseam by Rejoiners and rarely, if ever, challenged. When I confronted the Lib Dem MP on TV, his only response was to wang on about Donald Trump (I didn’t have time to point out that we’ve even been growing faster than the US economy for the past three quarters). It’s not that the UK performance is anything to write home about. It’s just that in a low-growth world for advanced economies, we’ve done as well as almost any other (bar America) and better than most. That’s the case no matter what reference point you choose.

Since the Brexit referendum the EU-27 and the UK have grown on average by about 1.5 per cent a year. Since Covid we’ve not only grown faster than the EU’s Big Three, we’ve outperformed the EU-27 as a whole.

There were many good economic arguments for voting to remain in 2016. It’s a pity we didn’t hear them from a Remainer campaign which was as negative as it was complacent. But there are no good arguments for rejoining.

The annual membership fee would be massive, with no chance of resurrecting the rebate. We’d be under pressure to join the euro and the Schengen free travel area. We’d have to give up all our new free trade deals. The dead hand of Brussels would soon snuff out our high-tech industries, currently the biggest and best in Europe. And it would quickly become apparent that rejoining is no panacea for more growth.

Indeed, it’s always been one of the more ludicrous claims of the age that growth could be rekindled by throwing our lot in with the slowest-growing group of economies on the planet.

It doesn’t pass logic, much less economics. Yet that is what now passes for political insight on the British Left today.

Time to strip it bare.