Canis lupus labor

Several years before he entered Downing Street John Major once startled guests — perhaps the only time he made such an impression —with a prediction: “Europe is a wolf coming up the path to devour the Conservative Party.”

Now, it seems, the wolf is circling Labour.

The door to a Labour-led rejoin campaign was started just after the local election defeat, where some suggested “there is only one lever left to pull” to solve Britain’s — but primarily Labour’s — problems. Since, arguement to rejoin have been deployed in order to force Andy Burnham into a tight spot with the Makerfield electorate by leadership rival Wes Streeting.

In a recent article for Englesberg Ideas, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri lamented the death of British statecraft and the loss of the political personalities capable of operating with the longue durée in mind (his article on Alec Douglas-Home, perhaps the last figure in British politics with such a capacity, is the subject of an upcoming podcast).

That the argument to Rejoin has only been floated in response to Labour’s dreadful results at the local election — and is made in the express terms of keeping Labour, or one faction of it, in power — should tell you it owes more to the shortage of other suggestions the left has to put forward in order to fix the country’s problems than any strain of sound geostrategic or economic consideration of the national interest. It is an argument based entirely on a calculation around Labour’s electoral struggles, it thus argues only for us to join Europe, rather than shape it: as our editor said on our latest podcast, this is “the most visionless possible Europeanism”. Without that vision to reshape Europe, Labour is more vulnerable prey to the hungry lupine than the Conservatives are. 

There are fundamental flaws in the EU that make rejoining it deleterious to the British national interest. Immigration, of course, continues to be the totemic issue of British politics. As Robert Chalfont wrote recently, the EU has still to fix the fundamental flaw in the bloc: that “a borderless travel area cannot function sustainably when individual member states can unilaterally make large-scale admission decisions whose costs and consequences cross every internal border.” The Chişinău Declaration, as Adam Pollock has briefed, demonstrates how little actual movement the EU is prepared to make on immigration.

The central argument made by rejoiners is that the economic case for rejoining is now so compelling as to be undeniable, because the world Brexit was premised upon “no longer exists.”America, they argue, has become an erratic and unreliable ally, increasingly willing to coerce its partners; protectionism is spreading across the globe; any trade deal with Washington would come at Britain’s economic expense; and Labour, much like the Conservatives before it, remains trapped in the post-Brexit delusion that free trade agreements can deliver prosperity on their own.

Rather, however, it is the Europe Rejoiners fantasies that no longer exists. As David Marsh writes in Can Europe Survive?, the EU has been an excellent arrangement for the middle-income former Soviet bloc countries that joined two decades ago, but far less so for the wealthier existing members, whose relative prosperity has declined. There is now, however, “a sharp, synchronised slowdown in economic growth among the four principal nations of western Europe, accompanied by rising public debt”.

Research from the Prosperity Institute suggests that joining the Customs Union would reduce GDP by £40 billion in the first year, and more in the future as we are drawn into the EU’s uncompetitive regulatory framework. In our Eurocolumn today, Pieter Cleppe details how that that framework has become much more uncompetitive and burdensome under the leadership of Ursula von Der Leyen — who has also entrenched the EU’s migration problem, and it’s energy problem, as discussed below. This is not to mention the likely exorbitant cost of rejoining, and the fact Britain — as Brussels and any honest interlocutor has already made clear — will be made to join wholesale this time, with no opt-outs to any policy which might be obviously deleterious to the national interest.

It is true that America has become a less stable ally. China draws eyes east, not west, and America is  — not entirely unreasonably — asking incredibly wealthy allies to share a greater defence burden. Acclimatising to the idea that Europe has lost it’s agentic role in history is a painful process, which is made more difficult both by Trump’s delivery and personality, and the lack of statesmanship so ably exemplified by Labour. European nations no longer want to make the decisions incumbent upon great powers, and thus the EU continues to believe it can chart a path between the great power conflict with China and America. It cannot: there is a great technological bifurcation coming, and the American system will be the only one on which a free society can base itself. As Marsh warns, “accepting a sizable degree of American leadership may turn out to be the least unpalatable of the difficult decisions ahead.” 

Constant reactions to the latest statements of the Trump administration betray only how fundamentally weak Europe is, still unable to forge it’s own destiny without American steel. Many of the barriers to a great European restrengthening have or are being placed by the EU.

it’s regulatory environment drives out innovative businesses, which drives out capital, which further drives out innovative businesses, which creates a disastrous cycle for international competitiveness. We see this already in future-focussed industries like high-speed computing, artificial intelligence, materials science, where Europe lags behind both the US and Asia.

Likewise it’s energy policies have driven out carbon-intensive industries, most of which are critical to strategically important supply chains. EU companies face electricity prices two to three times higher than chose in the United States and in China. This is compounded by Europe’s openness to trade. As Mario Draghi pointed out when he presented his self-titled report:

We are the most open: our trade-to-GDP ratio exceeds 50 per cent, compared with 37 per cent in China and 27 per cent in the US. We are the most dependent: we rely on a handful of suppliers for critical raw materials and import over 80 per cent of our digital technology.

This makes Europe uniquely vulnerable to Chinese policies specifically aimed at deepening foreign dependence on their advanced manufacturing as a means of securing leverage. Commitment to the Paris Targets has led to a Dutch supreme court judgement that the Netherlands government is obliged to reduce emissions on the basis of human rights considerations. The prospect of “climate mitigation through climate litigation” opens the door to a cascade of lawsuits against states, companies, banks (including central banks), and financial regulators.

All of this, of course, combines to create a fearful economic picture in which EU economies are experiencing a slowdown in growth with a rise in debt. This is hardly the paradise painted by Rejoiners.

There is hope. For a start, of course, the Rejoin campaign would lose. The original Brexit vote is close enough in time that the campaign would appear as an attempt to overturn a democratic mandate by a Remain faction that never accepted the outcome in the first place. But it belies the fault at the heart of British politics: inside the EU or out into the world, this country “has acquired a lack of national purpose.” Where, one might ask, is Britain’s vision?