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Simon Heffer ranting in the Telegraph.
Perhaps the most sparkling insight of Enver Hoxha, the late and unlamented dictator of plucky little Albania, came in the 1960s when, having made an alliance with Chairman Mao, he boasted of his nation’s international clout. “Remember,” Comrade Enver exhorted his fellow Albanians, “together with the Chinese we comprise a quarter of the world’s population.”
A similar delusion about their extraordinary power grips the increasingly rattled obsessives who run the European Union. It is a delusion that the British Cabinet, which is to meet next Friday at Chequers to decide the nature of Brexit and to agree a White Paper on it, should avoid. An impression lingers among many in our political class that the EU is a powerful, affluent and stable organisation. It maintains that if the United Kingdom is divorced entirely from it – what the 17.4 million who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum thought they were doing – then we shall be headed irrevocably for ruin and isolation.
In its Hoxha-esque grip on reality this conceit, which says we should appease and obey the European Union rather than determine to make our way in the world, should have no place in any rational political discourse. It is the fag-end of Project Fear, whose smoker strives for one last drag before finally having to rub it out with his foot.Mrs May has no need to appease the EU next Friday, and her cabinet should be intelligent enough, and observant enough of the principles of democracy, to see she does not. That the EU’s £80bn annual trade surplus with Britain will mean it suffers more than we do for any failure to do a deal has long been apparent. Likewise its need to punish us in order to encourage the others.
But it is also simply an institution so flawed and incapable that it is in no position to throw its weight around with us or with anyone else. It may have spent 10 hours last week fudging its policy on migration, to save Mrs Merkel’s skin; yet how long will the unrealistic arrangement to which it came hold? It is all very well advocating processing centres in Libya, but what will the Libyans think of that? And when the would-be migrants are “processed”, what happens to them? As with so many other EU ideals, this has already proved entirely unpractical; but like so many other EU ideals (take the one-size-fits-all single currency, for example), its flaws and failures cannot be admitted for fear of destabilising the entire project.
There are also rogue nations emerging in Europe who begin profoundly to question that project. The Italian government, which has upset the anti-democratic consensus on migration and has the power and mandate to do so on other even more significant questions such as the future of the eurozone, is the most obvious. But so too are Austria and Hungary; Greece remains unstable; Spain’s new, opportunist Leftist government expects a loosening of monetary policy to help with that country’s endemic unemployment problem, but it will not get it. The attempt by President Macron to find a route to ever-closer union is not only not supported my most of his fellow French, it is meat too strong even for Mrs Merkel. And she, after the migration furore, gives every impression of living on borrowed time.
Remembering the mandate the referendum gave to Mrs May – and it was unequivocal for a clean withdrawal from the EU – she should not even think of compromising. But, as in her approach to domestic politics, she must be aggressively more political. The body she is mandated to leave is weakened and getting weaker. There is no political sense in her caving in to their demands in the hope we might scoop up some crumbs from their increasingly frugal table. It is said she cannot avoid a compromise because she must manage her party and her cabinet. Anyone who goes to speak to a Conservative constituency dinner or meeting – and I do my share – knows that at the grass roots the party is massively behind fulfilling the people’s mandate. So is the vast majority of her MPs. Even some cabinet ministers who, for reasons of ambition (whatever they said at the time), backed Remain now see that Project Fear was absurd; and that the UK has nothing to fear from leaving the EU and trading more freely with the rest of the world.