Michael Heseltine, who writes for The Independent with all the authority of his 93 years and with all the conviction of his steadfast support for European unity, makes the unanswerable point that the promoters of Brexit have gone quiet on the subject.
“Where are the paeans of praise to Brexit from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and their accomplices for the land of milk and honey they told us it would deliver?”
Lord Heseltine writes: “They don’t normally hold back from giving their opinions. The reason is obvious, I would suggest: their scandalously false prospectus has turned to dust and ashes. They are the guilty men and should hang their heads in shame.”
As the 10th anniversary of the referendum vote to leave the European Union approaches, the best that the advocates of withdrawal can muster are some hypothetical claims about a slightly faster deployment of vaccines during the pandemic, some wafer-thin trade deals and the consolation that any mistakes made by the government since 2021 have been 100 per cent sovereign British mistakes.
Chief among these, of course, was the failure of Boris Johnson’s government to reduce immigration, which made a mockery of the Leave slogan, “Take Back Control”. This failure was so incompetent, however, that it allowed Nigel Farage back into mainstream politics, because he was able to argue that Brexit had been mismanaged and betrayed by the Conservative politicians who took charge of it.
This claim is a little like that of idealistic communists that “real communism has never been tried”, but it has worked for Mr Farage as long as the traditional parties seem unable to meet the challenges of the times.
Lord Heseltine’s energy and intellectual confidence ought to summon those who share The Independent’s view on Europe to raise their sights and to see the issue in the broader sweep of history. That is why we have launched our Europe: The Way Back campaign – not to seek to reverse Brexit and return to an EU that existed in the past, but to chart a way forward to a new relationship with a new EU, which is likely to gain new members in the Balkans and new arrangements with Ukraine and Moldova in the next few years.
As Ben Judah, an adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, writes in our pages, Britain needs “more Europe – and the sooner the better”. Mr Judah writes that he initially thought that Sir Keir Starmer’s “reset” was enough. This was, in effect, to try to negotiate something as close to Theresa May’s soft Brexit as possible. That would still be better than Mr Johnson’s hard Brexit, but Mr Judah rightly argues that it would not be enough.
He points out that in a world dominated by America and China, in which Russia is militarily punching above its economic weight, there is a low limit to what Britain can achieve alone. His is not an argument simply to rejoin the EU, but to forge a new European defence and security pact.
In all of this, British public opinion is moving away from Mr Farage – despite his temporary position as the leader of the most popular party in a five- or six-party system – and towards “more Europe”.
A new survey by Ipsos, King’s College London and UK in a Changing Europe finds that nearly half of the British public want another EU referendum, including a fifth of Mr Farage’s supporters, and that 61 per cent would vote to rejoin if a vote were held. Just as significantly, 60 per cent want more cooperation on defence.
Lord Heseltine is right. “We should reclaim our traditional role as a major European nation. We should do so in the interests of growing generations of our young people. We should do it in our interests as a nation state with limited resources.”
As he says, in partnership with the rest of Europe, we can compete with the world’s largest economies. But also, in partnership with the rest of Europe, we can defend ourselves and our continent in an uncertain world.
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Brexit has been a disaster – it’s time the guilty men felt some shame
