The EU, Brexit and sovereignty
There's an interesting article by Ferdinand Mount (a Tory of the old, respectable kind) in the London Review of Books about the nature of the EU and the issue of sovereignty (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n11/ferdinand-mount/why-we-go-to-war — but you have to be a subscriber to access it)). In it, he includes a quote from a piece in the Spectator in 1990 by Enoch Powell:
"If a distinction is now to be drawn, as a matter of settled policy, between on the one hand the surrender of political independence – by way of monetary union by Britain to Europe, and on the other hand the continuation and extension of freedom of trade with that continent – in the breaking down of tariff barriers by 1992 – then a great deal of tough intellectual work lies ahead. This work has been neglected during almost twenty years when freedom of trade and political imperialism were allowed and encouraged to be mistaken for one another. The work will involve a closer understanding and definition of freedom of trade than has previously been called for during perhaps the whole of the present century."
Mount discusses this as follows:
"Or to put it more bluntly, how the hell do we keep trade flowing freely across Europe without some sort of supranational arrangements to police it? I cannot say that, in the thirty years since Powell in old age made this oblique admission, any of the Brexotic think tanks, let alone the ludicrously misnamed European Research Group, have stirred themselves to carry out this ‘tough intellectual work’. By de-linking the business of settling economic quarrels peacefully from the political structures of the EU, the Brexotics have sought to bring off a further rhetorical trick: it has been a recurring theme of theirs that the EEC/EU can take no credit for keeping the peace in Europe for seventy years; that credit properly belongs to Nato. It is collective security, not political institution-building, which deters wars from breaking out. Brexotics simply refuse to engage with Monnet’s core argument that European political structures would evolve to keep economic quarrels from reaching a flashpoint at which Nato might need to become involved. Any major disagreement – over tariffs, industrial protection, pipelines, mineral rights, water management, intellectual property, dumping and a dozen other things – is far better settled within the EU and its attendant institutions. It is these unlovely compromises that keep us ‘secure’ in a far fuller sense than the purely military. One thing that the past three otherwise fruitless years have taught us is the intense complexity of social and economic relations between the UK and the rest of the EU. ‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ And no island is an island either."
This argument, that the issue of trade is totally different from that of political sovereignty and that the Brexiteers are sacrificing the former for a false view of the latter, is something that the Brexiteers haven't even begun to appreciate and Remainers haven't made the most of.
Oh, and someone might have to explain the island comment to Dominic Raab.
Richard Carter ● 2709d13 Comments