The EU is fragmenting
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
A slew of papers and opinion pieces have been published recently analysing how Labour might get Britain back a bit closer to the EU. Improving relations with the EU seems to me to be the obvious direction in which British policy goes in the next few years, given how bruising Brexit was and how little public appetite there is for major deregulation or divergence on the rules governing the production of goods.
From 2025 the UK-EU agreement is up for review. Perhaps there is scope there for some improvement in the deal? No, forget it, say supporters of the EU. There will be no cherry picking by the naughty Brits. The mighty EU has a deal that suits it and even Labour being nicer to Brussels will not make any improvements possible.
And yet, the British debate looks increasingly out of date given what is happening on the continent.
A wise old Brussels hand told me this week that the point is being missed in London. What is preoccupying Brussels, he said, is fear of fragmentation.
This is not – not – a Brexiteer in search of vindication predicting that the EU is going to fall apart. Indeed, on the question of migration such a disintegration would be an absolute disaster. There is a need for more, not less, cooperation to control and slow the epic flow of economic migration into Europe.
Yet that is proving difficult, perhaps even impossible, to achieve. On the one hand, Italy (the frontline country) has had some success in persuading the EU to release funds to help stabilise North Africa, bailing out Tunisia for example, so it can be a reliable partner on combating the people smuggling gangs.
But the EU’s attempts to agree a deal on toughening up its own refugee rules led to an ill-tempered summit in Brussels last week. There is a fight between the Italian government and the German government with the Italians, rightly, furious that the German government is apparently funding charities towing boats from the middle of the Med to Italy.
This is fragmentation. On the two largest challenges facing all of Europe – migration and common defence against the autocracies – the EU is struggling for relevance. On defence, the EU is a major rule-maker on defence procurement but it is not a player on the nuts and bolts of deployment. That’s all about NATO, which rests (for now) on the US, and the UK and France.
The EU is also committed to further enlargement, bringing in states from the western Balkans. Ukraine is also being offered membership. Note that Poland, which has done more than any other country to help Ukraine, is now in open dispute with Kyiv over grain.
Says the old Brussels hand: “When the EU has to negotiate all this it will find itself offering concessions and compromises to those new countries that it was not prepared to offer the British, because that would have been cherry-picking.”
This will be awkward. The UK is a major European power on defence and security and it is logical for the EU to want better cooperation with Britain on these questions, given the scale of the shared challenges.
A well-worn rhetorical device and a necessary piece of hypocrisy in international diplomacy is the idea that defence and security must never be used in negotiations. That would be vulgar. Though of course, in practice, states have a long history of negotiating with security guarantees and cooperation in the mix.
Perhaps President Macron’s nascent European Political Community, of which the UK is a member, is the vehicle to deliver better cooperation across the board. Or NATO. Or is the EU going to offer a route after next year’s European elections if there is a shift rightwards on migration and some openness to compromise?
In this way, possibilities for a better deal between the EU and the UK may open up.
You cannot be serious
In October 1982 the Tories gathered in Brighton for their party conference. Britain had won the Falklands campaign that year and the slogan emblazoned in giant letters on the backdrop – The Resolute Approach – reflected the serious spirit of the times.
The year before at Wimbledon, John McEnroe had screamed at an umpire: “You cannot be serious!”
The umpire was serious, and Margaret Thatcher was serious too.
Her speech at Brighton in 1982 will be the inspiration for Rishi Sunak’s conference address in Manchester on Wednesday, it is reported.
The reports prompted me to go back and read the Thatcher speech. I suppose it is a standard feature of getting older that we yearn for the past and think leaders were better in our youth. In the early 1980s there were people lamenting that Thatcher was no Harold Macmillan and decrying the modern conference backdrops that looked like a sinister battleship.
Even accounting for this, the Thatcher 1982 speech is serious, almost shockingly so, in the level of its content. There are a few attempts at jokes along the way, but the main focus is on the communication of important ideas and making arguments to advance them.
At one point in the speech she quotes Edmund Burke on trickery and the French Revolution. Her analysis of the economy and foreign investment sparkled that day. Her explanation of the need to maintain the nuclear deterrent while the West looked for peace, and a chance to reduce nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry, was coherent and detailed.
Thatcher decried the illusion of easy and false promises: “The long term always starts today.”
Sunak is inspired by those passages on the long term, it is claimed. Like Thatcher, he’ll say he won’t avoid tough decisions that might be unpopular. Well, perhaps.
I hope this is more than just a convenient device to reconnect with parts of his party – invoking Thatcher to win a hearing again from the right – because a shift to more seriousness is exactly what is needed.
The signs are encouraging. On geopolitics, a subject in which Sunak had little interest before he became Prime Minister, he has been a very quick learner. On net zero, he has tilted national policy in the direction of reality.
What spoils it is the falling back on silly communications devices which contradict the seriousness. His recent switch on net zero, watering down commitments, was hitched on a pledge of honesty about how difficult it will be to get to cleaner energy. Quite right. So why in that announcement then include a list of policies he was stopping as PM, none of which had much basis in reality? The answer, I suspect, was to make a silly, day-glo graphic that could then be sent out by the Number 10 comms team for use on social media.
On Wednesday, he should strip all that out. Go as serious as possible. People might like it.
Must win by-election for Labour
We are standing on Rutherglen high street. It is autumn 1997 and a gaggle of Scottish hacks is waiting in the Glasgow drizzle for one of the architects of the New Labour revolution. The tall figure of Peter Mandelson comes into view and we in the media move towards him, looking for a quote or some incident to liven up a campaign that has turned into a victory march. Mandelson has come to Glasgow to campaign for a “yes” vote in the devolution referendum, which led to Scotland getting its own parliament.
That autumn a number of New Labour grandees visited. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott emerged from a taxi branded Yes-Yes and played a saxophone in front of bemused voters.
Those were very strange times. New Labour was in its pomp, with Tony Blair having won a majority of 179 in the May general election. The delivery of a devolved Scottish parliament and the creation of a Welsh Assembly was supposed to herald the birth of a New Britain.
Scottish Labour was simultaneously master of all it surveyed while being paranoid about offending the leadership in London. New Labour took message control extremely seriously. There was a brittle quality to the party’s wielding of power, as though the winners could not quite believe they had won.
Still, to us observers in Rutherglen in 1997 it would have been incomprehensible that only a few years later the SNP would all but wipe out Labour north of the border. Yet that is what happened.
Even those of us – me included – who were sceptical of devolution on the grounds it risked letting in the Scottish National Party, could not have foreseen how fast the situation would deteriorate. Not only did the SNP get into power in Edinburgh, its stewardship of education, health, public transport and the economy proved so lamentable that it is not an exaggeration to say Scotland has been wrecked by the Nats.
We are about to find out to what extent this matters to Scottish voters. The SNP focus on identity politics, rather than delivery of anything useful, remains popular with the party’s core supporters who place leaving the UK above all else. This is still the case even though the party’s former leader Nicola Sturgeon is in disgrace and had to resign as first minister. Sturgeon is waiting to find out whether or not she will be charged as a result of the ongoing police investigation into SNP finances.
The opinion polls suggest Scottish swing voters, those less ideologically committed to leaving the UK, are swinging back to Labour as a result of the mess the Nationalists are in, but to what extent we don’t yet know.
On Thursday, all this will be tested in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election.
For Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader, it is a must win. If the party triumphs on Thursday, it suggests he can win sufficient seats in Scotland to secure a majority at the next Westminster general election. Falling short would suggest not. For the SNP, defeat would constitute a humiliating confirmation of its slide.
A Labour win on Thursday will be an earthquake moment.
Changes at Reaction
My colleague Maggie Pagano has decided to step down as editor of Reaction. Luckily for us, she is staying on as a columnist and consultant editor. I’m back editing the site day to day.
Reaction has been running for more than seven years now. In that time a lot has changed in what they term “the media ecology” but the original reason for creating Reaction still stands. If anything, the blizzard of nonsense we’re trying to help our band of readers cut through has become more intense, as social media degenerates and mutates.
Now, the AI revolution is coming and it will automate a lot of news and information. Machine generated “content” will then be amplified by social media, which will also be powered increasingly by AI. Faster and faster, round and round it will go, with the politicians competing to feed the machine in order to get noticed and burnish their individual brand.
Personally, considering what’s coming, I’m for teams of actual human beings, working on news publications and magazines, trying to make sense of what is real.
There is another reason we started Reaction. The aim was to provide paid internships, training and mentoring for some of the next generation of journalists. Next month it’s our annual dinner for what has become the Young Journalists Programme, now in its seventh year.
The backbone of Reaction is our group of subscribers, though. We have a small dedicated editorial team on Reaction and what they do is only possible thanks to you. So, thank you for being a paying subscriber.
Reaction Podcast
On the latest episode of the Reaction podcast I talk to my friend George Trefgarne about HS2 and why the project went off the rails. George is a veteran journalist, now in business consultancy. He’s someone with a great eye for public policy and an unerring ability to explain calmly and clearly what is going on.
Also on the podcast is Max Mitchell, who joined our Young Journalism Programme recently. We discuss party conference season, generation rent and this week’s US Republican TV debates, which Max watched and analysed so you didn’t have to.
Rate us on Spotify and Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen. Please rate us only if you enjoy it, of course.
What I’m listening to
The new Rolling Stones single Sweet Sounds of Heaven, featuring Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder, is a cracker. It is from their forthcoming new album, which presumably will be their last, although when they released Steel Wheels in 1989 it seemed that might be the end. When they embarked on a world tour I was among those who bought tickets to several of the gigs in 1990 thinking this was probably the last chance to catch them before my hero Keith Richards (then aged 47) checked out and went to the great bar in the sky.
More than three decades later, Keith is still here, Sir Mick Jagger is 80 and the Stones are still rolling, albeit without drummer Charlie Watts. Last week Keith confirmed he is enjoying the novel experience of sobriety, having in the last decade given up cocaine, cigarettes and alcohol, although he very occasionally has a glass of something in his library.
On the latest new track they have produced something worthy of their masterwork 1972 album Exile on Main St. As an old friend, also there watching them at Wembley and then Hampden in 1990, put it: Sweet Sounds of Heaven is a song about ageing, mortality and the loss of Charlie Watts. It is rather moving.
What I’m watching
Still the rugby world cup, mainly.
Have a good weekend.
Iain Martin,
Publisher and CEO,
Reaction