Sunday Scribblings

Revisiting Brexit

I don’t much bother with Brexit these days. What is done is done and will not be undone anytime soon. The UK is outside the European Union and will stay outside, probably until the end of time.

The UK never wanted the EU to exist in the first place, and never wanted to become a member when it did come into being.

The British political elite has never gotten over the loss of empire, never gotten over the days when Britannia ruled from one end of the world to the other. That goes for Labour as much as right-of-centre parties. Back in the day, Attlee and Bevin were as imperialist as Churchill. A commitment to the “white lands” of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the lands of “kith and kin”, was buried deep in British hearts. I suspect it still is. A lingering mythology of what these countries once were, not what they are today. A mythology held dear by people who have never visited any of these countries.

I know that there is now a very strong pro-EU movement in the UK, a movement that never existed before. I get emails from it all the time. They are good people, very much my sort of people. People who once more want the UK to be part of Europe, for UK citizens to be able to work, live and travel freely in their European homeland. At its simplest, who wants to be in that long, non-EU airport queue, waiting to have their passport stamped? Or to be restricted to 90 days in 180 days for a stay in Schengen countries? It is the “Brexit of small things” that hurts the most.

Not to mention the economic damage of barriers to trade that being a “third country” brings.

No wonder so many British people have discovered their Irish heritage and applied for an Irish passport.

If I am not much bothered about Brexit anymore, why am I writing about it this week? For two reasons. First, I am reading Tom McTague’s book, Between the Waves”, a very lucid account of the UK’s tortured relationship with Europe in the post WWII years, as Europe went a way the UK did not want it to go. I will write again about this book when I am finished reading it. At 470 pages, there is a lot of reading.

But even at this point, I am left with the impression that fundamental to the thinking of Brexiters, those who wanted the UK to leave the EU, never to return, is “whiteness”, a longing for the UK, and especially England, to be again the land of “white people” they imagine it once was. Is that not what all the current anti-immigration protests, the flag-waving, Farageism, is really about? “We want our country back”. Back from whom and to whom? Who gets to define who is British? Or any nationality, come to that. Are there purity tests related to blood and soil and the colour of your skin?

The second reason I am coming back to Brexit is the announcement by the leader of the Conservative Party, the leader for now that is, Kemi Badenoch, that she will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights and, therefore, out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights if she wins the next election. She would have the UK sit there with Russia and Belarus as the three European countries outside the Convention. By the company you keep, and all that.

Why do the Conservatives, like Farage’s Reform, want to do this? Because they think it will help them to cut down on immigration, to stop people coming to the UK, especially those who come across the UK Channel on small boats, at considerable personal risk, as the number of weekly deaths attests.

I live on the north coast of France, though the launching point for the boats is a little further down the coast from where I live. But I see migrants every day of the week if I am out and about. Their presence is just part of the fabric of life here, as they leave poverty, oppression, tyranny, and death behind them in whatever country they are fleeing. Is this not what we Irish did to escape British oppression when we moved in our millions to the US? Sadly, for me, it seems that too many of Irish descent in the US have now become oppressors, bought into the agenda of hate and fear that runs from the White House.

Will the UK's leaving the Convention stop the small boats from crossing the Channel? Probably not, unless the UK authorities think that being outside the Convention will allow them to sink the boats with any means available, with the loss of life that will involve. What other conclusion can you come to? It is the inherent logic of the position of Badenoch and Farage, even if they will never admit to it or say it out loud. Sink the boats is their unstated message.

But the decision on the part of Badenoch to pull the UK out of the European Convention worries me for another reason. This reason is because I am Irish.

The European Convention on Human Rights is baked into the Good Friday Agreement/Belfast Agreement, underwriting human rights in Northern Ireland. The Convention is an integral part of the agreement. That agreement is the foundation of the peace that now exists in Northern Ireland, uneasy as it may be, a peace that put an end to over thirty years of murder and bloodshed.

What responsible politician would want to go back to those days by undermining the Good Friday Agreement? But then, Badenoch and Farage are not responsible politicians. Farage is what he is, a populist demagogue with no answers to anything. Has anyone ever heard him say one intelligent thing about how to reboot economic growth in the UK? Didn’t think so.

As for Badenoch, she is just a politician who is utterly self-confident in her own profound ignorance. In a recent interview, she asserted that Northern Ireland had voted to leave the EU when it voted 56% to 44% to stay. Speaking to BBC News NI, she said: “The last time I checked, Northern Ireland did vote to leave.” She must not have checked very hard. But then, it seems, she is not much given to checking anything before she has something to say. She speaks out of the depths of prejudice, rarely informed by facts.

Crashing the Good Friday Agreement and putting peace in Northern Ireland at risk would not bother Farage or Badenoch. They care nothing for the place, even if it is one of the last bits of the British Empire, along with some rocks in the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic.

I said at the top of this piece that I did not see the UK ever rejoining the EU. Reform is opposed, the Conservatives are opposed, and Labour is opposed. Labour has rediscovered its inner Attlee and Bevin, and has returned to the days when Europe was not for it, when Labour hated Europe, unless it was going to be just a free trade Europe led by the UK. That ship has long sailed.

One last thing. If by some miracle, which is not going to happen, there was a complete change in the UK and a political consensus formed that it again wanted into the EU, I doubt very much that the EU would want to take the UK back.

The trouble the UK would inevitably cause would simply not be worth it. It would hardly be in the door before it was demanding opt-outs and special deals.

The UK is caught in the position that it can’t live with the EU, but neither can it live without it. Like Sisyphus, the UK is condemned to forever roll the European rock up the hill, never to reach the top, only for the rock to roll again to the bottom, and for the UK to have to start the push all over again. Call it the “Myth of British Aloneism”.