It's not me, it's you - a letter to the Prime Minister

25th November 2018

To Prime Minister Theresa May,

I read your letter with interest but not, I must say, with any kind of joy or relief. Today you will be agreeing a deal that, far from being in our national interest, will severely limit our freedom and set us on a course for decline and marginalisation on the world stage.

You declare in your letter that we will no longer have freedom of movement. Yet in the past two years, you have never explained to me why I should rejoice at the idea of having less freedom. Even now, as your rush off eagerly to sign away the rights I have enjoyed all my life, you do not (and I suspect cannot) tell me why I should be happy that a significant part of my life, of my own self-autonomy, will be taken from me and handed over to state bureaucrats. The very prospect that I should require a visa to live in another part of Europe, in my own home, fills me with disgust. If the ‘prize’ I am expected to enjoy is a reduction in the number of fellow Europeans living here in the UK then I am afraid I shall have to disappoint you. Whether from France or Germany, Italy or Spain, Bulgaria or Poland, the Europeans I have known personally and that I see around me in my day-to-day life have all been additions to my wellbeing. To be divorced from that family can fill me only with sadness and anger.

I see also that you reiterate the decision to increase investment in the NHS. Yet I find the structure of your letter odd in this place. Just before this claim, you talk about ending our contributions to the EU budget (a fixation of some that I have never considered to be overly well-founded as all organisations must be funded and money, as I am sure you know, does not grow on trees). These contributions though have not ended and the government will be paying approximately £40bn to the EU as part of our exit. And yet the promise of more money for the NHS is there regardless. Moreover, the government’s own impact assessments, as well as those of many independent economists, conclude that Brexit will have a negative impact on the UK’s public finances. The promise of more money for the NHS therefore seems to be largely divorced from the practicality of ending our contributions and leaving the EU. A more cynical person than I would likely conclude that you were trying to trick people into believing that the “£350m for the NHS” promise from the referendum campaign was finally being delivered by putting these statements side by side. The fact that it was Conservative governments that led the ferocious cuts to NHS funding in the first place would then reinforce that perspective. I, however, merely observe an odd structure to your letter.

The next part of your correspondence deals with the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies. You declare with great enthusiasm that these have failed our industries. Nonetheless, I cannot help but remember that the government has repeatedly promised that farmers will receive the same level of subsidy as they did under the CAP. If the policy was such a failure for your farmers, why is the government so insistent on telling your farming communities that nothing will change? This must be a mistake and I hope that you will be able to correct this soon. In the realm of fisheries, I am also reminded that a great proportion of the fish we catch is exported in the Single Market. Could you clarify whether people will simply be expected to eat more salmon or will they pay more for their fish and chips? Certainly this jubilation over the end of the CFP seems surprising given that the Political Declaration indicates that future tariff-free access to the biggest market for UK fisherman will be reliant on a deal based on current quotas and access to fishing grounds. Perhaps the celebration is both misplaced and premature? Hoping to receive some clarification from you shortly.

The assurance that the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU is of course welcome. However, given the legacy of the hostile environment that you yourself helped construct at the Home Office and the difficulty this will no doubt cause for EU citizens, maybe more humility would be advised in this particular area. It is a reality that I should hope you are able to recognise that none of these people would be having such problems nor be forced to live with threats to their status if it were not for your own policies. The lingering possibility of being hounded by an uncaring and, often, unthinking bureaucracy designed to focus on exclusion above all else is a product of your political career and the removal of the guarantee that freedom of movement brought is your legacy.

If this previous section was misleading, the following part describing the continuing of free trade is something worse. As part of your exit agreement, no free trade deal has actually been negotiated and we must realise that, having escaped own cliff-edge, we may soon be faced with another when we reach the end of the transition period. Meanwhile, the belief that we can escape disruption to supply lines for key industries in this country when your avowed policy is to leave the Customs Union is simply false. Alternative arrangements may be found that help to minimise disruption but for the moment, the only real guarantee given to businesses is the transition period, a situation that will not last for very long.

We of course all hope that cooperation in defence and security will continue to the greatest possible extent but I cannot help but feel that you are omitting just how limited this will be compared to the agreements we have as part of the EU. Locked out of key databases, with no access to the European Arrest Warrant, our security forces will be left weaker and with fewer resources to fight crime. It is a continuing reality that no deal outside of the EU can deliver the benefits we have inside. Cooperation will continue, of that I have no doubt, but to the same level that we enjoy now? Certainly not.

It is reassuring that as Prime Minister you have committed to avoiding the return of a hard border in Ireland, particularly as I know that you are ordinarily quite fond of borders, as detailed earlier in your letter. It does seem odd, however, that we should go through all this trouble in exiting the European Union if the ultimate condition of keeping the border in Ireland open is to be aligned as closely as possible with the EU. Unless of course you were to decide that checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain were not such a great problem after all. Certainly it does not seem nearly as severe as risking a hard-won peace settlement in one of the most fraught and divided parts of the United Kingdom. Then again, I am aware that some of the allies you have had to bring on board in order press ahead with your Brexit project have somewhat different views on the matter.

In your letter you go on to list the new opportunities that the UK will gain once we have left the EU. Outside of trade deals, it is surprising to me just how many of these are in fact entirely domestic policies that would, in fact, be a total reversal of the previous positions of your own party. Even when one considers trade deals alone, I cannot see clearly from your correspondence in what regard being a country of 65 million citizens would give us greater power to negotiate favourable deals than as part of a union of 500 million citizens. Indeed, recent trade deals such as that between the EU and South Korea, have been exceptionally advantageous for us. The EU itself is one of the world leaders in pursuing free trade and have launched negotiations with a number of the countries that were supposed to be key targets for a post-Brexit UK, such as Australia and New Zealand. We are all of course supporting of the idea of ‘seizing opportunities’ but when the EU is seizing them too, it is less apparent to me why we need to do so separately? Hopefully you will be able to clarify this point also.

Finally, you exhort us to get behind the deal and to abandon the camps of ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ after the day of Brexit. Will I cease to be a ‘Remainer’ at the stroke of midnight? In some sense, yes. To the extent that ‘Remainer’ was never my own word but rather a label applied to me by the political and media class, a label that I had little choice but to adopt in the context of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, I suppose I won’t have much difficulty abandoning it. If, however, you expect something rather more, if you are anticipating that I will abandon my beliefs then on that point I must disappoint you. Whether I am to be labelled a ‘Remainer’ is a question for the tabloids, what I know is that I will always be pro-European.

As a child of Europe, born to a citizenship that you are angrily determined to strip from me, I will always fight for the place of the UK and for the future of Europe, whole and free.

Yours sincerely,

Pascal