![]() ![]() The most ardent pro-Europeans accept one core part of that view: it won’t be economics that wins it for rejoin. As for the generation that would have voted to stay in 2016 but never got the chance, they’ll soon move on: other issues will assume greater priority, starting with the climate crisis. What’s more, any British attempt to rejoin the club would not be on the bespoke terms we used to enjoy: if we want to come back, we’ll have to do so without the once-cherished, Thatcher-negotiated cash rebate and by agreeing to join the euro, a bridge too far even for some committed remainers. He suspects that the probable consequences of Brexit make a return less likely: with those pesky Brits out of the way, the EU27 can get on with ever closer integration, thereby making the European Union of 2040 an even less enticing prospect to federalism-wary Britons than it was in 2016. Little wonder that when asked this week by a Spanish newspaper whether a Bre-entry might occur in his lifetime, Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent, said no – pointedly adding that he’s 40 years old. As Gordon Brown’s former strategist, Stewart Wood, puts it, “You don’t feel a counterfactual.” The UK economy will grow, but more slowly than if we’d never left. Instead, the coming failure will be of the slow puncture variety, the air seeping out of the economic tyres steadily and over time. It’s also that the agony won’t be sudden: thanks to the deal, we did not cycle off a cliff at 11pm on New Year’s Eve. What of the 6.4% shrinkage in GDP per person that is coming our way over the next 10 years, thanks to Brexit? It won’t cut through, and not only because any immediate economic pain in 2021 can be conveniently blamed on the pandemic of 2020. They just wanted the whole saga over with, yearning for an end to an argument that had split the country and consumed four and a half years of our energies. People are thoroughly fed up with the issue: note this week’s polling, which showed Britons simultaneously urging MPs to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal even as a hefty majority of those same Britons couldn’t say whether the deal was good or bad. Could the trick be repeated by those who lament it most? Could Britain’s pro-Europeans do to the 2016 vote what the anti-Europeans eventually did to the 1975 one and reverse it? Is it conceivable that Britain might one day rejoin the European bloc it has now left? ![]() For pro-Europeans, that movement ensured the start of this new year is tinged with regret, even longing, for what’s been lost.Īll of which prompts a question. What was once the quixotic cause of anoraks and obsessives – to overturn a settled decision on Britain’s relationship with Europe – has proved to be among the most effective political movements in the country’s history. Against all odds, he got his way: the new year begins with Britain having completed its exit from the European Union. Yet today that man is celebrating a victory, one that, at the turn of this century, would have seemed like the stuff of laughably improbable fantasy. Nobody wanted to be the man in the egg-stained tie. ![]() His obsession was Europe and the supposed tyranny of Brussels. You’d see him at most political events he was often in the Question Time audience. A forlorn figure – mocked even by his fellow Conservatives – he stood at the back of fringe meetings, armed with a plastic bag full of leaflets, leaping to his feet to offer “more of a comment than a question”, uniting the room in a collective groan. ![]() Have I mentioned the man in the egg-stained tie? I first spotted him at Tory party conferences two decades ago. ![]()
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