Plenty of nonsense has been talked about Brexit but Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has plumbed new depths of absurdity.
In a statement marking Remembrance Sunday, her department said it was seeking to ‘repair’ damage caused by Brexit to ‘the strong links with Europe that veterans’ service helped to secure and endure after the Second World War‘.
Ms Nandy is apparently suggesting that leaving the European Union was a betrayal of those who fought and died for this country. She believes we should honour their sacrifice by rejoining the Erasmus+ programme, the student mobility scheme that Britain left after Brexit.
Idiocy
Isn’t this utterly ridiculous? Veterans didn’t serve in order to promote Erasmus or any other EU programme. They were doing their duty for their country.
Moreover, Nato – not the EU – is the organisation responsible for the security of our continent for the past 77 years. If anything, the defence ties between its European members have strengthened in recent times, irrespective of Brexit.
So desperate is Ms Nandy (along with the rest of the Cabinet) to rejoin the EU that she will even try to hijack Remembrance Sunday to advance her cause. This tells us a great deal – and it should finally wake up somnolent Brexiteers.
Linda Nandy said her department was seeking to ‘repair’ damage caused by Brexit to ‘the strong links with Europe that veterans’ service helped to secure after the Second World War’
Andy Burnham may seem a lightweight sort of fellow, offering instant running commentaries on all manner of things (his most recent concerned rape trials).
But it would be a huge mistake to think that going cap in hand back to the EU is just another idea that has floated into his porous mind. He believes in it passionately. It’s probably his one core conviction.
Why this should be the case, in view of the economic difficulties of the EU’s leading countries and their drift to the hard-Right, isn’t clear. Andy made up his mind about Europe when he was a young MP and he isn’t going to change it now.
This explains why week by week we edge back towards the maw of Brussels. The PM claims food will be cheaper if we get closer to the bloc. Illegal immigration will be easier to control. The economy will be more buoyant.
Admittedly, Burnham concedes that complete reabsorption into the EU won’t be possible so long as the Labour Government remains bound by its 2024 manifesto promise to stay out, and not to join the Customs Union or Single Market.
Complete fulfilment won’t happen until after the election. Until then, Andy Burnham and the likes of Lisa Nandy are preparing the ground with extraordinary speed.
What astonishes me is the relative equanimity of many Brexiteers. They believe Labour will never pull it off. The EU will demand concessions that no British Government could ever accept.
Others say the issue of Brexit is so divisive that a sane prime minister wouldn’t dare reopen it. Maybe, but what about a prime minister who never actually says he has reopened it but moves forward in quick, short steps?
Are quiescent Brexiteers frightened of raising the subject with an exhausted electorate? Or do some of them believe in their hearts that the Rejoiners’ claims that Brexit has damaged the economy contain a grain of truth?
Whatever the explanation, there is a dangerous complacency. I realise Kemi Badenoch has criticised Burnham’s plans to finagle us back into the EU, while Nigel Farage believes they will give him the opportunity to revive the fortunes of Reform UK.
But so far battle hasn’t been engaged. Rejoiners are allowed to make unchallenged assertions. Take Labour MP Stella Creasy, Chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, who was again given the floor by the BBC last week.
She repeated her frequent claim that leaving the EU has cost the UK between 6 and 8 per cent of GDP per capita, an enormous amount. In an article in The Guardian last year she attributed this figure to ‘a major study’.
This was carried out by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a pan-European organisation based in Paris that describes itself as non-partisan. God forbid that I should suggest its findings might have been influenced in the tiniest degree by its own prejudices!
Estimating what Britain’s growth might have been if we’d stayed in the EU is a futile pastime. All we can say is that since the UK left in January 2020, its economy has expanded by roughly the same amount as France’s and significantly more than Germany’s.
The International Monetary Fund thinks Britain will grow at the same rate as Germany this year, and appreciably faster than France or Italy. Of course our performance is far from impressive, but it is still better than most.
Dodgy
The Stella Creasy of this world want us to believe that if Britain had remained in the EU its economy would have soared. And yet comparable countries such as France, Germany and Italy – which enjoy the supposed benefits of EU membership – have only bumped along.
Brexiteers should challenge such claims robustly. There will be more in the coming months. Treasury officials are reportedly going to set out the potential economic benefits of a range of options for Britain’s future relations with the EU.
Expect the obverse of ‘Project Fear’ during the 2016 referendum campaign. We were told then that leaving the EU would plunge the country into a deep recession, with house prices falling by up to 18 per cent and unemployment jumping by up to 820,000. None of this happened.
This time absurd claims will be made about the benefits of moving back into the orbit of Brussels. Brexit is being threatened by Andy Burnham and ministers, who will unleash a blizzard of dodgy statistics.
Absurd
Brexiteers should also expose the idiocy of supposing that we would be invited back into the EU on terms remotely comparable to those we enjoyed before. Here there is help on hand from EU insiders.
Former Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar predicted over the weekend that Britain wouldn’t get its £5billion annual rebate again if it rejoined the European Union. I am sure he’s right.
Meanwhile the EU’s former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier warns that Britain won’t be able to pick and choose which elements of the Single Market it wants. He says member states will insist on measures such as the free movement of people if the UK wants closer trade arrangements.
In other words, the EU will play hardball, as it always does. It is doing so in current negotiations over aligning food and veterinary standards, even though it exports more than three times as many products covered by these rules to the UK as we import from the EU.
Brussels has far more to gain from a new agreement, yet it plays a tough game in the knowledge that it’ll be able to extract concessions from a wide-eyed, eager Andy Burnham.
And that, of course, will be the pattern. So great is the Prime Minister’s desire to get closer to the EU that he’ll put up with any number of setbacks and humiliations, which he’ll represent as small, necessary compromises.
A huge battle is coming. This is a Government that shamelessly spins Remembrance Day to its own benefit. Many Brexiteers don’t realise that everything they fought for is in jeopardy.