Promise unfulfilled

It was a highly European day for us, Danielle and me, five days ago today, on 23 June 2016.

We’d spent the night before in our house in Luton, in South East England, and stayed just long enough in the morning for me to cast my vote in the EU referendum. It may not surprise anyone familiar with this blog that I voted to remain a member. Danielle didn’t vote, as a Frenchwoman with only limited rights to vote in Britain.

As soon as I’d cast that vote, we headed for continental Europe ourselves. We were travelling to Kehl in southwest Germany, where we’d previously lived, just across the Rhine from the city of Strasbourg in France (and sometimes Germany, in the past: putting an end to those Franco-German conflicts was a major motivation for building the EU in the first place). 

It was a tough campaign
Though, as to who runs the country, it feels like the same people

The campaigning I’d done around Luton for the Remain cause had left me feeling pessimistic about the result. Still, I slept reasonably well during the night of 23 to 24 June. Danielle, on the other hand, kept waking up and couldn’t resist the temptation to check her phone for news from the BBC. So by the time I woke up, she was even more depressed from reading the results than I had been from my unsuccessful canvassing (Luton voted to leave the EU by a large margin). 

That morning we had to travel into Strasbourg, which meant crossing the French border. The crossing had been open for most of the time we were living in the area, with at most the occasional spot check. Terrorist attacks in France had put paid to that. By 2016, there were French police guarding the bridge across the Rhine most of the time.

We stopped with the rest of the queue of cars. Policemen were walking up the line checking vehicles and travellers. One, a slightly older man than most of the others, approached us looking displeased. Almost menacing. Imperiously, he waved us over into the lane where cars were being stopped to allow closer questioning of people attempting to breach the defences of France.

Remember that we were driving a car with British plates.

He walked over to us and I wound down the window. I wasn’t driving – Danielle’s a far better driver, and I’m a far better passenger (I feel far less inclination to step fiercely onto an imaginary brake pedal) – but, of course, British cars have the wheel on the right side, the wrong side from a French policeman’s point of view.

He approached my window, still looking grim. 

“Brexit ou pas Brexit?” he demanded to know. Brexit or not Brexit.

“Oh, entièrement pas Brexit,” I assured him.

The grimness vanished. A huge smile replaced it. It was amazing how he suddenly looked properly human.

“Allez, passez,” he told us, waving us through.

It’s been five years since that date with destiny. A recent Ipsos Mori poll, that 58% of Brits think that Brexit has changed nothing whatever in their lives. Only 39% thought it had made any impact at all. Out of that group, 28% (rather over two-thirds of those who reckoned they’d seen any change at all) thought the effect had been negative, while just 11% thought it had been positive.

Curious, isn’t it? I suppose it wouldn’t have made much of a slogan on the Brexit side. “Vote leave! It may not make much difference, but things shouldn’t be too much worse. At least at first.” It’s not quite as snappy as “Take back control” or “Get Brexit done”, is it?

In any case, it’s early days. It’ll be interesting to see how views change as the effects start to accumulate. After all, big economic phenomena don’t happen fast. Or, more accurately, they build up slowly until they happen fast. The 2008 crash burst on us after a quarter century of unregulated bankers behaving like unruly teenagers.

What about the EU itself? 

Losing a major economy, financial centre and even, among non-superpower nations, significant military force is a blow to the EU. Britain was also a valuable counterweight to the Berlin-Paris axis that tends to dominate the Union. For countries like the Netherlands, that provided precious support. That’s all gone now and the EU is weaker for having lost it.

On the other hand, Britain was always an awkward member. It was always demanding special treatment, rebates on contributions, exemption from certain measures. It also developed a nasty habit of blocking important initiatives.

For instance, we now live in Spain (yep, our Europeanism runs deep) and this country is about to benefit to a startling level from EU financial assistance, running to a likely total of well over 200 billion euros. To finance such support, the EU nations had to agree to take on debt together. Shared debt? As Jennifer Rankin points out in the Guardian, EU leaders are far from convinced that it could ever have happened had Britain still been around to veto it.

Rankin quotes Georg Riekeles, of the European Policy Centre think tank:

“There are different states of sorrow,” he told her. “We miss the British, but probably less than we thought.”

Time will tell how things work out. But my view is that, if the EU is missing Britain less than expected, Britain may end up missing the EU far more than Leavers liked to claim.

It’ll be interesting to see how things stand on the tenth anniversary of that gloomy 23rd of June.