Chequers is dead: long live an alternative Europe

Prime Minister May was a remainer, and has remained a remainer. She has ensured that Whitehall leads the negotiation with Brussels. Since Whitehall is part of the Brussels establishment, it is the establishment negotiating with itself about how best to dilute or even negate the referendum result of June 23, 2016.

The same people who negotiated between the time of Prime Minister Cameron’s Bloomberg speech in January 2013 and Cameron’s announcement of his proposed deal with the EU in February 2016 have also negotiated the Chequers deal. Cameron’s February 2016 speech was greeted by a Sun headline: “Who do EU think you are kidding?”. The response to Chequers is similar.

Britain could have stayed in the EU prior to June 23, had Cameron revoked the Heath definition of the EU as a supranational institution, to which the UK is subordinate. Neither France, nor Germany, nor Italy recognize such a definition.

Remainers do not want to follow the Germans and have a more national definition of the EU. They are campaigning to keep the UK in an EU where the UK remains supranationalist No Uno. Trouble is: it doesn’t sing at home.

Nor does it sing in Germany or France. The Constitutional Court of Germany refers to the EU as no more than an alliance of sovereign states, and contests the ECJ’s claim for supremacy-so ardently championed by UK supranationalists. In August, President Macron has proposed a Europe of concentric circles-quite a different perspective.

Its for the British government to decide whether they should vote again in a second referendum. Since polls are now completely politicized, it would be unwise of either side to think they would win. In the 1960s, 13 percent of voters were floaters; by the early 2000s, it was 40 percent. It is probably rather higher now.

Labour has veered sharply left and is defining itself by identity politics and anti-Semitism-ie racialism. It is being led by a man who thinks that all the sins of the world are caused by Israel and the West. He has just recently made this clear by in effect suggesting that the UK  back Hamas’ call for the liquidation of Israel.

If May had her way on Chequers, the UK will be a vassal state; the pretence would be that the UK is independent. But  the aim of Whitehall-Brussels-10 Downing Street is to either keep the UK semi-attached or back in. If back in it will pay its full dues, and have to join the Euro.

It can’t be semi-attached à la Chequers. The formula doesn’t sing at home, and M. Barnier has said Non, it’s not legal.

Nor, by the way, is the EU. Trying to smuggle supranationalism in through the backdoor, as Lord Kerr did as former President Giscard d’Estaing’s factotum during the EU Constitutional Convention of 2002-2004, is not clever. The French, Dutch and Irish voted no.

The EU supranationalists took a pause, then introduced the Lisbon Treaty, which rejigged the failed Constitution. As Giscard d’Estaing told the European Parliament, in every essential, it’s the same thing.

Jean-Claude Juncker was more to the point: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie”. Prime Minister May, arguably the most foolish PM ever, acts as if she agrees.

The crisis over Brexit is a European crisis. Germany, as I have written on this blog, can only accept the EU on its terms. France wants Germany and the Netherlands to fund a Finance Ministry and make the EU the centre of a massive north-south redistribution. The member states from central-eastern Europe disagree.

Scandinavia and Finland are turning against open borders. The countries of central-eastern Europe, crushed by dictatorships for most of their post-1918 existence, are in no mind to yield to the commissars in Brussels.

I propose that the UK’s official supranationalism, which gives it allies in Brussels, is a failure. It was bound to be a failure. Merging a mosaic of states and peoples, with different languages, legal traditions, histories, tax systems and economic structures—not to speak of cultures—into a United States of Europe (USE) was, is and will remain a dream.

The trouble with utopias is that they fast become dystopias.The EU is presently a dystopia. A truly European response would be to create a European alliance of democratic constitutional states, with Brussels cut down to size, its pretensions scaled back. If that could be achieved, Europe could come into its own. It is already the wealthiest region of the world. Less integrated, it would be more united.

Now that really would change the way the world works.