‘Sometimes you get the impression that the British are talking to themselves,” said the outgoing French ambassador, Sylvie Bermann, on the Today programme last week.
There have been suggestions that the French are rubbing their hands and doing their best to lure as much business as they can from the City of London to Paris.
My own impression, however, is that the French, and most other of our fellow Europeans, are saddened and not a little mystified by the sight of a nation whose leaders give every impression of rushing headlong to the cliff edge.
Of course they want to take advantage of this weird situation. But it is a natural consequence of self-harming decisions made in this country, not in continental Europe.
There was a similar air of puzzlement at the annual meeting of the Ambrosetti Forum which I attended last weekend in the beautiful surroundings of the Villa d’Este on Lake Como. The Ambrosetti Forum has been described as the Italian version of the World Economic Forum in Davos, but it is a more civilised and less pretentious event.
Nor was it just about Brexit – although it was a distorted version of what the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said at the forum that captured the headlines in the Britain that talks to itself.
I can tell you, I was there when Michel Barnier was speaking. He did not, as widely reported, say in belligerent tones that the British needed to be taught a lesson. His general tone was one of regret, but not hostility. The future of the EU itself was far more important than Brexit, but Brexit had “extremely serious and important consequences, which should not be underestimated”. Not unreasonably, he said that “these have not been explained properly to the British people”.
As for the endless “debate” about the exit bill, he pointed out that there wasn’t one. The UK had undertaken in 2014 to pay its 14% share of “all our [EU] expenses” for the next seven years. As the Financial Times pointed out last Tuesday: “The EU commission … is clearly right that the UK should pay its share of budget commitments that have already been signed off, and agree in principle to cover pension liabilities.”
Barnier emphasised: there was no exit bill, no punishment. It wasn’t blackmail. It’s fact.
A few days later, in response to some distorted reporting on the BBC, Barnier tweeted that Brexit was an “occasion to explain single market benefits to all countries including my own”.
That was earlier in the week. Some of my anti-Brexit friends are worried that, while definitely winning in exchanges with our benighted government, Barnier must not make the mistake of overplaying his hand. The fear is that there could be a reaction in this country.
While on Lake Como I met a Dutch couple who told me that when, the day after the referendum, they went to a Coldplay concert in Amsterdam, proceedings began with lead singer Chris Martin apologising to the audience for the referendum result! The result was bad enough, but the way our so-called leaders accepted “the will of the people” amazes me.
Yet, on returning to London last week I wondered whether there were not just a glimmer of hope, amid the outcry caused by the leak of the government’s immigration proposals, and the chaos around the so-called repeal bill, that more of our parliamentarians are waking up to the damaging absurdity of Brexit.
They made a mockery of their own sovereignty when, ignoring the wisdom of Edmund Burke, they acted as delegates after the referendum vote, not representatives with their own minds and judgment, and voted to trigger article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, thereby setting out on the road to ruin.
As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, stated in June, in spite of everything, the door to continued EU membership remains open.
The ridiculous thing is that there are enough problems in the British economy and British society without the added self-inflicted damage from Brexit – a first taste, of course, being the collapse of the pound, which has hit British holidaymakers forcibly this summer.
On the economy in general, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in a report coordinated by the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank, is surely right to claim that Britain’s economic model is “broken” and requires “fundamental reform”.
But he and his colleagues also go on to say that reform is required on the scale of the 1940s and 1980s. I concur about the 1940s but I should like to remind the archbishop that much of the economic injustice that he so rightly laments dates from the more rampant elements of Thatcherism in the 1980s.
Finally, all praise to John Le Carré for reminding us that his famous fictional character George Smiley dreamed of a united Europe, and not the Brexit that le Carré and so many of us detest.
