One day in January 1985 I was staying in my usual Paris hotel, writing an article about the French economy and due to interview the finance minister that morning. He stood me up, but with good reason. The telephone rang and his assistant said Monsieur Delors had just resigned from the treasury and was off to Brussels to become president of the European Commission.
I hesitate to use a dreadful cliche, but I shall: the rest is history. Delors formed an alliance with Margaret Thatcher which led to the creation of the single market, with Thatcher’s nominee Arthur (later Lord) Cockfield playing a leading role in its formation.
Thatcher and Delors later fell out over the latter’s plans for closer political ties, European monetary union and the single currency; but no less a former colleague than Kenneth Clarke regarded Thatcher’s role in the formation of the single market as her finest achievement.
At the time, the Labour party was predominantly Eurosceptical. But Delors played a crucial role in winning it around with a truly historic speech to the TUC annual conference in 1988, not least with his assurance that there would be a “social dimension” to the single market. It was not, as the lunatic fringe of the left imagined, some “capitalist plot”, but an engine of economic growth and closer political and social cooperation.
So it proved to be – so much so that Keir Starmer, not widely seen as a man of passion, was the embodiment of passion in arguing after that dreadful referendum of 2016 that there should be a second one, in the hope that the decision to leave the EU could be reversed.
It never happened – or, I should rather say, it has not happened yet. Instead, it was Starmer’s position on rejoining the EU that was reversed. Indeed, I have lost count of the number of occasions on which the leader of the opposition and his shadow chancellor have ruled out rejoining the single market if – or when – they are elected.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Labour is frightened of offending those erstwhile Labour voters who, often misled by the Leave campaign’s shamelessly mendacious propaganda, became part of the group known as the “red wall”.
The received view among the Labour hierarchy is that it would be too risky to fight an election promising to rejoin the EU. Instead, we get a lot of well-intentioned guff about closer cooperation. This is in spite of the way the country at large has woken up to how it was swindled by Brexit and sees the consequent damage on many fronts. As my colleague Toby Helm reported last week, a poll suggests the British public “now regards Brexit as a failure … just 22% of voters think it has been good for the UK in general”.
That two of the main players in Brexit – David Cameron and Boris Johnson – went to Eton has given rise to savage criticism about the damage wreaked by “elites”. In his memoir Among Others, the author and playwright Michael Frayn recalls some of the great products of that school and laments “how many of the Old Etonians who are nowadays prominent in political and business life seem to be charlatans, thieves and liars”, unlike predecessors who were “all, genuinely, deeply good people”.
Frayn is a great satirist, as is Tom Stoppard. But I doubt whether either of them could have thought up the line recently coined by a Brexiter minister, one Kevin Hollinrake, when referring to the putative appearance of the pint-sized wine bottle: “Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this.” The benefits of Brexit! Pint-sized, and probably not needed anyway.
So there you are, dear reader. What Nigel Farage – with his all too successful campaign to blackmail Cameron into calling a referendum – and Johnson and Co have brought us is a pint-sized Brexit wreaking huge damage to our export trade and budgetary position, which latter will severely inhibit a Labour government’s freedom of manoeuvre to spend the money the party pretends it does not want to spend.
We now have the Tories promising tax cuts when the prospects for public services are dire. Do they ever listen to that voice of sanity Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies? After a decade of austerity, the IFS foresees more, and argues that the last thing the economy needs is a preference for tax cuts as opposed to much-needed increases in spending.
It is absolutely vital that this country should own up to its historic error over Brexit. Why, even the ostensibly Eurosceptical Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, knows which side his bread is buttered. Whatever else he is up to, he does not wish to follow the UK’s self-harming example of leaving that great institution, the single market – brainchild of Delors and, er, Thatcher.
