EU’s vaccine disaster demonstrates the point of nimble Britain leaving
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.
Vaccinated European citizens are sharing videos of jubilant pro-EU flag-waving in anticipation of imminent liberation. In Madrid and Amsterdam police have had to intervene to shut down early celebrations.
Never one to miss a chance to crow, Euro-federalist Guy Verhofstadt MEP (for it is he) this week made a triumphant speech in which he compared the EU’s vaccine lead and Britain’s historic degradation to the combined collapse of the British Empire, the break up of the Beatles and the Queen abdicating. He said: “It is very sad to see poor Britain coming to understand what it is to be alone, to be on the fringes. It is very sad to see Britain discover the true cost of not being in the EU. But it turned out after all that Brexit really does mean Brexit.”
Ed Davey MP, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, has been quick to praise the Verhofstadt speech. Britain’s vaccines failure is proof definitive that being outside the EU is impossible, he says. We must as soon as possible resume close cooperation with the EU by begging them to let the UK back in, according to a petition signed by 1.5m people, even if it means joining the Euro this time.
This has been followed by nine members of Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet signing up to the newly-established organisation REJOIN NOW! (slogan – Save us, Brussels) established by Europhile luminaries including Alastair Campbell, Gina Miller, Lord Mandelson, Europhile PR man Roland Rudd and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
In a joint open letter to the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former PMs Tony Blair and Sir John Major have offered to broker an airlift of emergency vaccine supplies purchased direct from the EU if the UK government will agree to pay Brussels for 30 years – in instalments of £350m per week. The European Commission is thinking about it.
In the light of the vaccine failure compounding Britain’s disastrous record in the first phase of the pandemic, there are calls daily for a battered Boris Johnson to resign. With total lockdown in perpetuity and vaccines not arriving in the UK, Number 10 says Johnson has no intention of being forced out. The executive of the backbench 1922 Committee and scores of Tory MPs say that they will be the judge of that, thank you very much.
It is suggested that next week Nicola Sturgeon will fly to Brussels engaged in a peace mission, offering to arrange a deal on vaccines with a triumphant Ursula von Der Leyen – if in return the UK government will allow a referendum on Scottish independence later this year. Boris Johnson should have taken SNP advice and joined the EU vaccine procurement programme in mid-2020, says Sturgeon, shaking her head sadly, in that way she does. Support for Scottish independence has hit 78% in opinion polls,
Yet none of this has transpired. It did not happen. Instead, it is the EU that screwed up its procurement and Britain that, so far, has done better on vaccines.
The British government vaccine task-force run by Kate Bingham has been a shining success. We stayed out of the EU programme, thank goodness, and we are now vaccinating our population at greater speed, alongside Israel and the US.
It is not hard to imagine how that script of doom I’ve just mapped out or something like it would have played out if the EU had eclipsed the UK effort, though. Imagine the clamour, from noon to night, and through the wee small hours, on every TV station and news programme. Imagine the castigating of broken Britain and its doomed Union as a failed state, an embarrassing sad case stuck outside the EU.
This is not a competition, we like to say politely, but of course that is nonsense. Geopolitics is a competitive as well as collaborative endeavour. Britain in choosing to leave the EU took a position, a calculated gamble on a transgressive worldview, that it would have greater freedom to be nimble and creative in the interests of the nation rather than being part of a giant bureaucracy and supranational legal system. That was the Boris Johnson and Michael Gove case for Brexit.
In contrast, the entirely valid case for the EU beyond romantic idealism was largely practical, resting on Europe’s supposed strength and sophistication. The community was supposed to be – and sometimes is – a regulatory, trade and geopolitical superpower that can get the best deal and turn scale into clout and meaningful improvement.
Yet in a properly consequential crisis, a once in a half century calamity, the EU fluffed it by turning scale into a disadvantage. It is for EU members to decide what to do about that. But what is the point of a governing organisation and system of institutions that fails on something as fundamental as locating vaccines in a pandemic?
I’m not sure we’ve fully grasped what competition for vaccines and the race against mutations mean. These first Covid vaccines are good news but they also constitute a seismic political development. They herald the closure or restriction of borders for years to come, to all but the wealthiest, as governments eye each other suspiciously. Easy globalisation is over. These are the conditions for state to state and bloc to state conflict, as we have already seen from the bizarre behaviour this weekend of a desperate EU that was slow and incompetent on vaccines and now has to catch up.
This is not to excuse British failure. In the first phase of the crisis, the UK did badly. Even if the grisly death tolls of major European nations evens out because of variants, new waves and the delays to vaccines in certain countries, the UK under pressure bungled it last February and March.
The vaccine phase has been a different story, however. British skill in bio-tech, combined with City expertise, a willingness in government to allow innovation, a national health service with purchasing power, and a diffuse local delivery system in the form of the GP network, produced a formidable effort.
If we had stayed in the EU Britain could we have opted out of the European scheme? Yes, in theory, but would we have? None of the others did. Better not to take the risk, would have been the cry in the media. Imagine the fuss and the elite optics, with the attendant pressure from officialdom and academia to join in with the 27 last summer. With the European Medicines Agency based in London (as it was until Brexit) would we inside the EU really have chosen our own route? I doubt it.
The EU will, hopefully, catch up and this process will regularise as more vaccines and supplies come on stream later this year. We should hope that happens not just because we want our friends and neighbours to get through this with us. There is an urgent economic imperative too. Major economies not being vaccinated for months longer than necessary means a slower return to economic growth in key countries such as France and Germany. The risk in the EU must be the potential for a banking crisis, because if an economy cannot recover speedily thanks to the population getting jabbed then its banks will be exposed for longer to the effect of bombed out businesses and bad loans, with the risk of systemic damage. The Eurozone with all its imbalances is not secure.
Even with an early vaccine boost and a mini domestic boom this summer, when Brits at home spend the equivalent of the £43bn they spent abroad on holiday in 2019, the situation will be tough.
At least we have had a glimpse thanks to Kate Bingham and the scientists of what is possible outside the EU. Brexit represents at its worst a narrowly nationalistic or jingoistic impulse. At its best it is a patriotic endeavour, quite a different thing from nationalism, rooted in the principles of self-government and a determination to solve problems by being nimble as a nation state. Next, we need to apply that way of thinking beyond Covid, to what comes next – in boosting the economy, renewing our institutions, strengthening our defences, reviving our education system and salvaging social mobility to help the young and poorest hammered by lockdown and Covid.