This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter for Reaction subscribers.
Picture the scene. It is late January 2021, right now, but in another branch of history, and Britain’s decision not to join the EU vaccine procurement programme has backfired spectacularly.
What a disaster. It turns out to be true what the EU’s advocates said all along. Shamefaced Brexiteers admit that the supranational bloc’s size and scale afforded it superior commercial and negotiating clout. Deluded little Britain is lost, left scrambling around for any leftover vaccines it can find. How embarrassing to have it confirmed that the UK is – in the infamous phrase of the anti-Brexit actress Emma Thompson – little more than a silly joke. We are, she said in 2016 when advising a vote to stay in the EU: “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island.”
The outcome of Britain trying to pursue a national procurement policy for vaccines has been utter humiliation, the biotech equivalent of the Suez imbroglio. In France, some ten million citizens have been vaccinated thanks to the EU. In Germany, they are even further ahead with almost 12 million jabs. In the UK we might get to a pathetic million next month, if the vaccines can get through the Channel Tunnel blockaded by anti-Vax demonstrators driven totally round the twist when the UK government admitted that lockdown will last in Britain until 2023.
