First Confession

by Chris Patten

  Begin there, with the most potent of the English nationalist Brexiteer slogans that ‘we must take back control’ of our government, our lives and (the clinching argument) our borders. What control did we lack? It is true that in return for access to the single market, we allowed Europeans to come to Britain to live and work. (We should not forget that we are talking solely about EU migrants, not those – the majority – from the Commonwealth and elsewhere). We did not apparently want to control the number from the EU who came to do skilled jobs, who more or less keep our health service running, for example. It was those who came to do unskilled jobs who worried us. We had not controlled their number because our economy had been growing and we did not want to do the jobs that they were prepared to do at the levels of remuneration which they accepted. So we needed to take control of those Romanians and others, and find someone else to stack supermarket shelves and pick peas in Lincolnshire or strawberries in Kent. Economists suggested that the resulting increases in remuneration for British-born pea pickers would be extremely modest – in the low pence – even if we could find people who would do the work. ‘Why not recruit British old-age pensioners to pick potatoes?’ suggested one numbskull Brexiteer. Now there’s an election winner! So it was true that we could ‘take control’ of a fraction of our immigration numbers at a small cost in inflation (better pay for shelf-stacking) and some cost to economic growth. What will actually ‘take control’ of immigration figures is simple economics. Less growth will equal lower immigration, and the government will not have to lift a finger.

  That tells us something about control. How much control do governments have at the best of times? I remember one weekend when I was Governor of Hong Kong and the hedge-funds launched a combined assault on the link between the Hong Kong and US dollars. Fortunately we had huge reserves and were able to see off the clever young speculators sitting in front of their screens all around the world, often manoeuvring and manipulating money that did not really exist to attack funds that did. But for forty-eight hours I did not feel very confident that I was ‘in control’. I have some sympathy for the observation of James Carville, a strategist for President Bill Clinton, known as the ‘Ragin’ Cajun’, who was purportedly stunned in the early days of the Clinton administration at the power of the bond market over the government. ‘I used to think if there was reincarnation,’ he said, ‘I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.’ ‘Take back control’ and nationalize the banks (again), the railways, the steel industry, the ownership of land. ‘Take back control’ and watch your economy sink as inflation starts up again, the markets mark your currency down and investors move their money elsewhere. There’s control for you.

  It is not only markets which have huge power and need to be managed with great care, a reason why ‘blazers’ presumably vote most of the time for a party committed to cut excessive deficits. We are subject to other forces which give some definition to what sovereignty actually means today, less than it did for Lord Palmerston, that is for sure. What sovereignty means in practice is the power and authority you have in relation to events at any given moment. Sovereignty is not a once-and-for-all commodity, or an incredible shrinking asset. It is not, on the one hand, like virginity, as Geoffrey Howe used to note – there one moment, gone the next. Nor is it like a great monument, probably built by some past national hero at the end of Whitehall, from which nefarious foreigners pinch precious corbels and cantilevers under cover of darkness. Sovereignty is the management of a community’s affairs as the sovereign chooses and wishes. Our own sovereignty has been exercised through Parliament during the years we have been members of the EU, though this is regularly denied. ‘Bring back Westminster control,’ the Brexiteers demanded. Then, when their plan was published for EU exit – a government White Paper – they had to admit that Parliament had actually been sovereign all along. One of the choices it had made using its sovereign power was to be a member of the EU. Parliament has regularly made these sorts of choice which often require partnership and negotiation with others. The choices are not boundless. That is simply a consequence of living in the modern world.

  Take a choice most English nationalists, especially Conservatives, regard as fundamental, our ability to defend ourselves from threat as the financial resources available to do that dwindle. Our membership of NATO was from the outset as deliberate a pooling of our sovereignty as any other treaty that underpins international co-operation. It has at its heart a commitment to collective defence. Article 5 of the NATO treaty, to which we signed up in 1949, means that if Russia, for example, invades Latvia or Lithuania, we are obliged to go to the aid of those small Baltic states. Go further and consider our ultimate defence, the deterrent capability represented by the Trident fleet, the submarines and their nuclear ballistic missiles. It is probably true that a British Prime Minister does not have to get permission from Washington to fire a missile, nor are we dependent on US codes or satellites. But the degree of technical dependence on the US certainly raises questions about the nature of our independent control of these awesome weapons. Our missiles have to be serviced in the US and some of the components of the warheads are made there. I have always, on balance, supported our nuclear deterrent; getting rid of it has always seemed to me a risky leap in the dark. But I have never believed or argued that it is wholly independent. So while a Life Guard, breast plate, black stallion and all, may be a symbol of our nationhood, I do not believe that the defence forces of which he is a member are manifestations of our ability to make wholly sovereign decisions about our security. This is a fundamental point about sovereignty. In what sense are we sovereign, knowing as we do that we cannot defend ourselves adequately on our own? We have to some extent to depend on others. Our sovereignty is everywhere compromised. It is not an absolute.

  What makes ‘taking control’ an even more absurd aspect of English populist nationalism is the way in which our borders have been increasingly challenged and even laid flat. I have already noted how much this is true in finance. In economics more broadly too: outside the EU our Parliament will still be bound by the nature of the negotiated agreements (almost certainly inferior to present arrangements) that regulate and augment our trade with the world in the future. A member of the WTO, for example, is bound by independent quasi-judicial arbitration. More important still, the recent problems of our steel industry – exposed to competition from huge surpluses at knock-down prices from China – showed the economic limitations of national powers. That is true unless you opt for a degree of international protectionism that would impoverish us and other countries while it lasted, and break down inevitably as technology and greater mobility punched holes in it.

  Overall, globalization produces threats and opportunities which individual countries (even the biggest), and therefore their governments and parliaments, cannot tackle on their own. This is the real world, from the environment and climate change to global health, from crime to the illegal arms trade, from sharing water resources to fighting terrorists. Individual governments cannot ‘control’ these issues themselves. They have to co-operate with others, sharing decision making, recognizing that sovereignty is not some pure, Platonic notion in order to overcome problems which they cannot solve on their own. Think again further, for example, about immigration, the most potent issue in the nationalist Brexit campaign – so potent that it left behind a nasty tinge of racism and a spike in hate crimes. This is not just a short-term issue for Britain and Europe, driven principally by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria, whose refugees, it was suggested, were about to land in their thousands on Britain’s shores alongside millions of Turks. The real challenge posed by immigration is far bigger; it will affect the whole of Europe. England will not be saved by its Channel, which we must hope does not turn into a watery graveyard like the eastern and southern Mediterranean sea today. What does help us is the European mainland, which lies between
us and the source of the problem.

  During the nineteenth century as Europe’s population grew from one fifth to one quarter of the world’s total population, millions left their native countries for other continents. Between 1815 and the 1930s, about 60 million Europeans emigrated. Almost two out of every five people worldwide had European ancestry at the beginning of the First World War. Today, the balance has been completely reversed. Europe’s population has fallen steeply to well below one tenth of the global total. As populations elsewhere sky-rocket, this fraction will fall much further. Moreover, the number of the economically active will decline in many countries, with older populations needing outsiders to do more of the hard work in their economies.

  Over the last four decades, Egypt’s population has increased from 39 million to over 90 million. During a comparable period, the population of Ethiopia more than tripled to 101 million. Nigeria, now home to more than 180 million people, has followed a similar trajectory. Its population is predicted to rise to a half-billion by 2050. During the first half of the twenty-first century, the population of Africa as a whole is expected to grow from just over one billion to 2.5 billion. The world’s poorest countries, many but not all of them in Africa, are experiencing the fastest population growth. They have the youngest populations, and all too often are among the most likely to see a breakdown in governance. Failing states, as we have learned, export their problems and their populations.

  The resulting flows of people will put developed countries under extreme pressure – nowhere more so than in Europe. Erecting more razor-wire fences will not come close to being an adequate response. The seas around our shores are cemeteries for some but barriers for only a few. Britain will not be able, island though it is, to meet the migration challenge on its own. There will have to be a long-term programme agreed across Europe (and with the United States if possible) which co-ordinates foreign, security and development policies in order to prevent uncontrollable, unmanageable migration – a phenomenon that will lead to many migrant deaths, will stoke xenophobia and will enable politicians on the far right like Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage to flourish. We will need to agree on how to deal with failed states and help to put them back on their feet. We will have to use our development assistance strategically to help poorer nations to grow and provide their citizens with a reason for staying at home. We also need more aggressive policies to help tackle people-smuggling, supported where necessary by UN Security Council resolutions. We also need to deploy more naval resources in the Mediterranean (and, in time, in the English Channel) and spend more on border security. This is what ‘taking control’ should look like in a sensible country: ‘taking control’ by working effectively with others.

  English nationalists have concluded that the institution in which they have hitherto worked most closely with others infringes their liberties and places unnecessary burdens on their shoulders. The gains of EU membership, both those more and less easy to calculate, do not apparently overcome these negatives. There are some elements to this mood which match a rising spirit elsewhere. Most nation states find it easier and more comfortable to identify with and feel loyalty towards their national institutions than with and to those created specifically to manage shared sovereignty and to make the decisions taken in its name more accountable. The ‘demos’, the popular will in European countries, is based on the nation state; it does not run across borders from Finland to Spain, Poland to Ireland. So nationalists may feel more comfortable with the Brexit vote behind us. It would be easier to be sure about this if we knew what Brexit actually meant. For some time we had to make do with the proposition that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, which was sufficiently tautological to repel comprehension at every point. ‘Breakfast means breakfast’ – café crème and croissants, or the full English fry-up with a mug of builder’s tea? Even now we will not know what will satisfy nationalists until we have negotiated something whose only known characteristic is that it should not be membership of the EU.

  Those who think that parliamentary sovereignty, traduced and undermined by Brussels, can only be restored by leaving the EU will harbour anxieties during the Brexit negotiations about anything that involves compromise. Hardliners in the Conservative Party will not be satisfied by much less than full rupture of our EU relationships. Compromise is not an option. There will be more McCarthyite hunts for public servants who want a deal that meets the national interest rather than right-wing fictions about the way the world works. Whatever the outcome, our Parliament, in which trust has plummeted in the recent past, will be tied up for years dealing with the legislative consequences of departure. I wonder whether our tabloid press will encourage us to look the other way when we discover how little we can actually do on our own.

  The government that has to decide what sort of breakfast we want to eat, what sort of Brexit should determine our future, is led today by a Prime Minister who has placed the most enthusiastically dogmatic Brexiteers in the key positions to negotiate our European departure. They will doubtless enjoy their own discoveries of reality. Their work will be no short-term fix, but instead will go on and on, with half a dozen interlocking sets of negotiations. We will first have to negotiate our divorce, and after that the economic ties – presumably some sort of Free Trade Area (FTA) – that we would like to have with the huge European market. Then we will have to work out with the EU the interim arrangements before that FTA comes into force. After that we will need to negotiate national membership of the World Trade Organisation; let us hope that Russia or some other country does not hold up this process. The deal to cut after this will be with the fifty-three countries that currently have FTAs with the EU. Finally, we shall need to work out our ties with the EU on co-operation in areas like policing, aid and foreign policy. EU negotiations are going to be a growth industry in Britain; I hope it will not be the only one.

  To guide us through all the complexity and waffle surrounding the years of talks that lie ahead, we should be clear that Theresa May concluded that what the British public had voted for in June 2016 was control over EU immigration and release from any jurisdiction by the European court. There are consequences: not punishment by its remaining members for leaving the EU but a future trading relationship with our biggest market which is bound to be on worse terms than at present. That much at least is clear. We cannot possibly enjoy in future outside the EU a trading relationship as good as, or almost as good as, the one we enjoyed when we were members. The real cost we will pay for leaving the EU is as yet unknown but that it will have to be met is undeniable.

  While we attempt to secure the best possible terms for the UK with our biggest market, we will find ourselves arguing a very different unionist case to discourage a Scottish vote for independence in a referendum north of the border. In Scotland, English unionists will be arguing that the country cannot exclude itself from its biggest market and the rule-setting that goes with it. Meantime, the same unionists will be saying that Britain can escape its own biggest market without damage. It does not take great perspicacity to see the contradiction here.

  Will the outcome of negotiations close the British divide? What deals will be required to get the trade terms we need that will work? Will the EU give us whatever we ask for – all British take and no give? I doubt whether at the end of the process the blazers will feel that they have got their sepia-tinted country back, whatever that means and whatever that country was. There will be no emergency lever to pull, stopping the world so that the English can get off. There will be no sudden conversion of their children’s generation, with its greater enthusiasm for Europe and the wider world, to their own older, grumpier, doleful view of foreigners, or abroad, or of the future.

  What of the alienated workers? Will foreigners still be taking the jobs that natives are disinclined to do in England? Will low-productivity, low-paid jobs have been transformed? Will public services be delivering what the blue collars want? Will a probably less prosperous Britain be just what they required? Will nat
ional prosperity, national hope, national pizzazz, have been redistributed from London and England’s biggest cities to older industrial England? And if not, what next? What sort of populist politics will slouch out of the shadows? What sort of national identity will that represent?

  This is a subject which I approach with some foreboding. Look again at the crucial relationship between nationalism and immigration – and, by extension, race and community relations. Two speeches illustrate my argument. The first was Enoch Powell’s to the City of London branch of the Royal Society of St George in 1961. He argued that, within Britain, England and the English were the principal focus. Praising English values and history, he set out with a romantic and very literary flourish the case for English nationalism, with its ‘roots’ in English earth, the earth of England’s history. We should seek from our ancestors memorialized in brass and stone ‘in many a village church … some answer from their inscrutable silence’. He went on, ‘Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years, whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.’ He noted that Herodotus reported the surprise of the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burned by the Persians, finding one sacred olive tree flourishing among the ruins. Perhaps amidst ‘the fragments of demolished glory’ the English would find ‘one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring. England herself.’ It was a remarkable speech – grand, romantic with patriotic sentiments from the sublime to the ridiculous, but did not set the blood of taxi drivers or West Midlands car workers racing. As a call to a sense of nationalist identity, it was pretty harmless.