It’s party conference time, so everyone’s pushing their ideas into the public domain, hoping they will get picked up by the faithful (and the media) just at the point that policy might get changed.
The IPPR have a useful report on the costs of not having mutual recognition of conformity assessment with the EU, highlighting how this might generate much more economic impact than any of the reset dossiers. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to engage with why the EU has steadfastly refused to even discuss such an agreement for the past several years (spoiler: there’s no good reason for them to do it).
But the eye has been caught much more by the latest report from the Tony Blair Institute, with a foreword from the man himself. This prompted some initial thoughts from me.
At one level, there’s quite a lot to be positive about from the work. It rightly argues (as I’ve been trying to since, well, ages) that the UK needs to develop a more positive vision of what its relationship with the EU should be, grounded in an understanding of how that fits into the country’s development and position in the world, rather than being driven by unhappiness with How Things Are.
It also is correct to note that the UK can’t avoid this, given its exposure to the EU (economically and geopolitically). If Britain gets a cough when Europe sneezes, then being involved in helping Europe not get poorly makes sense.
But these good points are lost in what follows, which reads much like Tony’s Special Wishlist of All The Things.
By becoming a progressive and dynamic place and setting a goal of rejoining within the next decade, the UK can more effectively press for new deals with the EU that serve the former’s advantage (calculated by a “Power Maximising Test” that will tell us all what the right level of cooperation is for any given area).
That in turn will also allow the UK to stop the EU doing bad things that hurt it and the UK, because everyone will see that’s the right thing.
Oh, and the EU itself will be simultaneously a much more powerful and effective global actor, speaking with one voice on all manner of things, while also being a “Europe of nation states”, i.e. one that lets each country do what it wants when it needs to.
There is minimal sense that the EU understands itself to have the dominant position in the relationship, as the larger and the less-needy party, nor of how it will see being told how to sort itself out by politicians from a country that – not that long ago – decided it wanted out of the organisation altogether.
There’s also no recognition that the EU has never, ever let itself be changed by non-members’ preferences or needs, and has repeatedly used the accession process to require massive adjustments on the part of the acceding state.
To take one obvious example, the then EEC developed its Common Fisheries Policy in the early 1970s precisely because several new states with large fishing waters wanted to join and the existing members wanted to embed their preferences about access and management before the new lot got a say. Just like the new EU made choices about institutional arrangements and funding for agriculture and regional development before admitting Central and East European states in the 2000s: if only I could remember the name of the guy in charge in the UK back then.
I find it very hard not to lay this at the feet of Blair himself, given how closely this all reads to his previously stated views on the matter. The helpful sections on specific domains of cooperation get lost in the over-extrapolation the report authors are asked to make, for example.
Given that the initial response to the report has been generally as bad as might be expected, it’s tempting just to write this off as Late Stage Blairism and move on.
But again, the diagnosis of the failings of the current (and historic) British approach to European policy still stands up, as does the need to start building an alternative grounded in a positive mission and set of objectives that tie into the country’s wider development.
I don’t think bathwater can be either stupid or ridiculous, but there is still a baby to be saved in all this, and whether that’s done will be a much better marker of whether the UK has got beyond Brexit than anything else in all this.