Britain should have stayed in the EU and led it to reform

Ever since the referendum, hardline Leavers have tried to convince their followers, and anyone else who will listen, that the European Union is on its last legs – a doomed enterprise destined to collapse under the weight of its contradictions.

The single currency cannot last more than another couple of years, they say. The next recession will see it off. But that will be the least of it. The rise of populism, with its emphasis on the sovereignty of the nation state, will end in an institutional armageddon fought out between the forces of white, Christian Europe and the migrant hordes seeking to overthrow its two-thousand-year-old civilisation.

Britain, we are told, will be well out of it. Behind our Channel moat, we alone will save our souls.

Remainers have retorted by stressing the dangerous and untrodden path down which Britain is heading by deciding to strike out on its own. Yes, we can survive No Deal, the message goes. We are not bound to descend into the pit of Hell. But the UK that finally emerges from the self-inflicted agony of Brexit will be a shrivelled husk of what once it was, stranded on the western edge of Europe, its globalist narrative more like the hollow boast of a general who knows he is beaten but would rather die than admit that his strategy has failed.

The fact is that neither of these two versions of what lies ahead of us is likely to prove accurate. Even in the event of a hard Brexit, Britain, in my view, will not sink back into the primordial swamp, and Europe, for its part, will somehow hang together rather than hanging separately.

But the risks to both are real and imminent.

The tragedy is that Britain is walking away from a fight that it need never have provoked. It should have stayed and offered hope to a Continent that, having seriously overreached itself, was fresh out of ideas and, in ideological terms, ripe for a takeover. David Cameron (and he was not alone in this) made a fatal mistake by never once offering leadership to the 27. Instead, his premiership was one long diminuendo. Europe, he insisted, had to give Britain a de facto version of Brexit, by which, in addition to its existing opt-outs from the euro and open borders, and its determination to frustrate the creation of a European Army, it could, uniquely, disavow the free movement of labour – one of the pillars of the Single Market.

Consider for a moment what would have happened if Cameron had launched his 2010 premiership, in which he enjoyed the support of 59 Liberal Democrat MPs, by making it clear that the millions of East Europeans then pouring into the UK would only be accepted beyond a given date in return for the completion of the single Market by the addition of banking and financial services.

His demand would have faced strenuous opposition from Day One. There would have been objections from countries jealous of the City of London and from others in Brussels, Paris and Berlin who considered that such an advance could only take place once the euro was adopted across the EU, most notably by the UK.

It would have been the fight of Cameron’s life, and one for which his political skills would have suited him. If he had won, he would not only have secured an important victory for the City – by far his country’s biggest export earner – he would also have established himself a a leader to be reckoned with, loathed, feared and admired in equal measure. But he didn’t have it in him. He preferred to dither. Instead of going for the jugular, he decided to snap at the EU’s ankles.

If you are going to lose, at least lose well. We could have gone out with dignity and our principles intact instead of in tatters. What actually happened is the sorry history of the referendum and everything that has happened since.

By not fighting for the vision of Europe that he said he believed in, Cameron handed Britain’s future in Europe over to those who believed, as an article of faith, that Britain had no future in Europe. Worse, he exchanged a manifesto that could have proved transformational for “project Fear” – the idea that unless we toed the line and accepted out fate, we would end up as outcasts, living from hand to mouth, pitied by our friends, despised by our enemies. He had to go and he left at the earliest opportunity.

Theresa May was left to pick up the detritus left behind by her predecessor’s failure, only to add to it by, first by embarking on Project Impossible – a smooth Brexit agreed by both sides in Britain as well as by the Powers that Be in Europe – and, second, by then opening herself and her fragmented and diminishing Cabinet to the pitiless scrutiny of the European Research group, the human hand grenade that is Boris Johnson and the naked opportunism of Jeremy Corbyn.

And so we are where we are. Does anybody – up to and including Jacob Rees Mogg, Iain Duncan Smith or Nigel Farage – honestly believe that a No Deal Brexit is going to end well? Does anyone genuinely think that James Dyson’s calculation that a global company cannot be run from Britain is other than a kick in the teeth for the No-Deal option?   Conversely, does anyone truly think that the European Union is destined for the knacker’s yard? Isn’t it, rather, the case that Britain will stagger on and Europe, though hobbled by populism, will somehow survive to fight another day?

What is sad is that it didn’t have to be this way. A Europe that is starting to devour itself is precisely the Europe that Britain could have led out of darkness and into light. There were allies there for the taking. There were many, in Berlin if not in Paris, who would have looked to Britain to come up with pragmatic solutions to the chaos of mass-immigration and the onset of economic stagnation. But we blew it, and we blew hard. And now we move, jointly, if not together, into an era of reduced expectations that will hold us back, on both sides of the Channel, for a generation.

“If Only” could be the motto of both Britain and Europe. At least it would be something we might all agree on.