Eu

Now that Britain has left the EU, we are no longer bound by the European Court of Justice. Some may view that as something to celebrate. Yet there may also be downsides. The ECJ is the final court of the EU. It hears lots of cases about EU member states who break EU law. It then reaches conclusions which form case law. All 27 members of the EU are bound by this, but Britain, outside the EU, is not. But here’s the catch: some of those decisions might actually be good ones. The solution is that we should borrow these good ones for ourselves. English law is a magpie. We pick up shiny bits of ‘good law’ that other places have and we make them ours. It is what lots of sensible sovereign states do, and there is nothing wrong with this. There is no copyright in law.

Rewind a few months, and it was all meant to be very different. With Covid-19 rampant across the world, the European Union would take charge of sourcing vaccines from the major drugs companies. Its massive buying and regulatory power, coupled with its finely-tuned administrative machine, would make sure its 440 million people were protected from the virus before anyone else. It would be a magnificent demonstration of the whole point of the organisation. The trouble is, not only has the project already started to come off the rails, it is getting worse with every day that passes. Europe’s vaccine alliance is crumbling with potentially far-reaching consequences. Europe’s vaccine alliance is crumbling with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Every party keeps on file a list of rash things politicians in other parties have said that can be used against them at a later date. Way back when I was directing Ukip’s 2014 European parliamentary campaign, I built up a ‘helpful contributions’ folder containing print-outs of gaffes and embarrassing admissions made by pro-EU MPs and MEPs. Conservative Campaign Headquarters probably has at its disposal a far more sophisticated and comprehensive digital system for logging the own-goals of its adversaries. But one thing is certain, someone will imminently be inputting an entry marked something like ‘Duffield, R. – Labour’s plan to re-join the EU’.

The banks would all flee. International investors would take fright. And the pound would turn into the Great British peso. We heard a lot over the last four years about how leaving the European Union would be catastrophic for the UK economy. But here is something odd. With the transitional arrangement coming to an end with the close of the old year, and with the UK now out of the Single Market and the Customs Union, and with just a loose trade arrangement with the rest of the continent that doesn’t even cover financial services, so far the FTSE is loving Brexit. True, it is only the first week of trading, and even that is not over yet, but so far the benchmark FTSE-100 index has risen from 6,500 on Monday to 6,850 on Thursday.

It was a ‘rush of blood to the head’. Its central bank would prove to be hopelessly ineffective. And cultural differences would remain too deeply ingrained for an internal market to ever work as it should. We learned this week from papers released in Dublin that Mrs Thatcher was completely damning about the idea of a single currency for the European Union. Looked at with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, however, it is clear that the most remarkable point about her views is not just how intransigent she was but that she was completely right. The Euro has been a comprehensive failure, just as she said it would be. Rewind three decades to the fading months of the Thatcher premiership and she was facing what turned out to be terminal trouble over her views on Europe.

What does 2021 hold for the European Union? At the end of 2020 Brussels has gone out of its way to engage in unity-signalling, announcing that all 27 members will begin vaccination on the same day and feigning a united front in the face of the UK’s new strain of coronavirus. But in truth its 27 member states are confronted by serious structural divisions in three fundamental areas: economics, culture, defence. Deep economic divisions surfaced in the EU after the 2008 financial crash along a north-south axis. The split between the richer ‘frugal’ northern economies and the ‘profligate’ southerners was starkest in 2012-13 over Brussels’ treatment of Greece.

Should we be worried that the UK didn’t get all that it wanted for financial services in the UK-EU Trade deal, as the PM mentioned to the Sunday Telegraph? Financial services are our biggest export industry by some margin, including to the EU, as well as (arguably) our biggest taxpayer, so anything that hampers it could have serious economic repercussions. The EU for its part has said that it will consider in its own time if it will grant ‘equivalence’ to UK financial services, making it easier for UK based institutions to serve customers in the EU, and will only do so if it is in the EU’s interest. The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has already unilaterally granted EU equivalence status, providing continuity for EU financial services companies operating here.

Ursula von der Leyen quoted TS Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ in her press conference today: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end, is to make a beginning.’ The free trade deal between the UK and the EU marks beginnings (new arrangements on commerce, fishing and security cooperation) and ends (the single market, free movement, Erasmus), but what we can’t yet be sure of is which category Scottish independence falls into. We might glean the answer from the 2,000-page agreement when the text is published but it is more likely that the question will remain open for some time.