What is driving this chaos? I’ll tell you. The EU is determined to punish us.
You want a one-sentence explanation for the chaos in our politics, the breakdown of our party system, the shenanigans at Westminster? OK, here it is. It’s important, so I’ll put it in the original French first.
“J’aurais réussi ma mission si, à la fin, le deal est tellement dur pour les Britanniques qu’ils préféront rester dans l’Union.”
In English: “I’ll have done my job if, in the end, the deal is so tough on the British that they’d prefer to stay in the EU”.
The speaker, as you have probably guessed, is Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator. He is reported in the French current affairs weekly Le Point as having spoken those words to EU leaders in 2016. The article adds that most of the leaders shared his view, as well as that of Jean-Claude Juncker, who said that Brexit must be a form of “punishment” for deserters.
There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the quotation. It accords with everything the EU has said and done since the referendum result was announced. Brussels negotiators have dragged their feet over the smallest things, while all the time publicly telling us that “the clock is ticking”. They have made a series of demands that they know to be outrageous, and that they would never dream of making of any other country, including a period of non-voting membership, the regulatory annexation of Northern Ireland and EU control of our trade policy after we leave. As Donald Tusk put it, quite overtly, in the aftermath of Parliament’s rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement last week, “If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” Got that? The British people may have voted to leave, but we have made all the alternatives so unappealing that they’ll simply have to back down.
The normal British reaction to such blackmail would be to bridle at the threat and dig in in defence of democracy. In a healthy polity, even those who had voted Remain would be appalled by the bullying tone, and would rally around a policy that honoured the referendum result.
But our polity is far from healthy at present. In the debilitating culture war that followed the referendum, plenty of British politicians and commentators were determined to side with Brussels, however unreasonable its demands. Although many Remainers accepted the referendum result in good faith, some Europhile peers, MPs and businessmen were determined to overturn it. They therefore lined up behind even the most preposterous EU positions, because they shared the goal of making Brexit so painful that Britain would drop the whole idea.
