Comment

The EU is treating Britain like North Korea. It's time we prepared to walk away

Theresa May speaking
The EU would have reacted negatively, whatever Theresa May said on Friday Credit: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Eurocrats behave like pre-programmed Twitterbots when it comes to Brexit. Anything said by a British politician is dismissed as a wishful fantasy. The UK wants the closest relationship with the EU? “Stop cherry-picking!” It will continue to support its allies in security and intelligence sharing? “Get your head out of the sand!” It promises not to erect a physical border in Ireland? “Having your cake and eating it, eh?”

Whatever Theresa May had said on Friday, the reaction in Brussels was going to be the same. Sure enough, it came almost before she had sat down.

Here, for example, is the leader of the biggest group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber: “After what I have heard today, I am even more concerned. I don’t see how we could reach an agreement on Brexit if the UK Government continues to bury its head in the sand like this.”

There speaks the authentic voice of those who want a surrender, not a deal.

The pattern was set early on. A year ago, when an account of Mrs May’s dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker in Downing Street was leaked by his side to the German press, it was already clear that she was the one pressing for cordial relations, while he insisted that Britain must suffer.

There is something almost hilariously misplaced about the Labour/SNP/Lib Dem claim that the Government is set on “an ideological hard Brexit”. Although it hasn’t suited Mrs May to correct her opponents in public, the fact is that she, three quarters of her Cabinet and two thirds of her MPs campaigned to stay in the European Union. In every public utterance, she has emphasised that she sees Britain as the EU’s “best friend and closest ally”. The people insisting on a more distant deal are the Brussels functionaries who cheered when Donald Tusk declared that the choice was between hard Brexit and no Brexit.

Aye, there’s the rub. Many Eurocrats aim to make Brexit difficult and disagreeable in the hope that Mrs May will somehow drop the whole idea.

If you’re reading this column in Britain, that may strike you as preposterous, but think of it from an EU perspective. Brussels rarely lets referendums stand in the way of deeper integration. In Denmark and in Ireland (twice), people were forced to vote again. In France and the Netherlands, they were simply ignored.

British Remainers continue to shuttle over to Brussels to discuss ways of sidestepping the result. I bumped into Nick Clegg in a corridor last month.

“Hello, Cleggie, what brings you back here?”

“Sabotage!”

“Right, yes, ha ha.”

“No, I mean it. We’re going to stop this thing, you just watch”.

Nick Clegg
Nick Clegg hardly hides his ambition to stop Brexit: he wrote a book on it Credit: Justin Tallis/AFP

In fairness, the former Lib Dem leader is hardly hiding his motives. He has written a book called How to Stop Brexit.

Labour displays no such candour, but the only way to make sense of its policies – staying in the customs union would be the worst of all possible worlds – is as an attempt to frustrate the whole business.

I had assumed that, by now, the two sides would be thrashing out a deal based on their respective self-interests. We are forever being told that the EU is our biggest market, but the reverse is also true. Neither side should want to impoverish, let alone interdict, its chief customers.

The outlines of a mutually advantageous outcome were clear from the outset, and were repeated by the Prime Minister this week: Britain wants to be as close to the EU as a fully sovereign country can be; to remain as a non-voting member in some common initiatives, paying its share of the costs; and to secure the deepest trade deal in history, based on the unique fact that the two parties begin with regulatory equivalence.

So far, these things are not happening. The EU’s draft withdrawal treaty was calculatedly bellicose. Although coverage has focused on the outrageous proposal that Brussels assume regulatory control of Northern Ireland, the same aggressive tone runs through every article, from the instruction that Britain must not discuss trade with anyone else, to the revived “punishment clause”.

Michel Barnier occasionally talks of Britain having a simple third-country arrangement with the EU, like South Korea. But we are being treated here like North Korea – that is, as a likely enemy.

Although most of the EU’s member states want a good deal, they are not drafting the documents. As so often happens, Brussels officials have exploited advantages of time and place to seize control of the process.

The 27 governments may yet assert themselves, but Britain should not rely on it. The time has come for us to prepare for a skeleton deal, covering only the most basic accords that the EU has with all third countries, on aviation, extradition, exchange of information and the like. In the meantime, we should be streamlining our tax and welfare systems, raising productivity and looking to build on our country’s extraordinary record of attracting inward investment.

As long as Brussels, encouraged by British Europhiles, believes that Brexit can be reversed, it won’t talk terms. Both Yanis Varoufakis and David Cameron found out what happens when you negotiate with partners who believe you won’t walk away. For Heaven’s sake, let’s not repeat their mistake.

Fears about overpopulation have not kept up with the facts

A pregnant woman
There have been calls for children to be taught about conception at school Credit: Katie Collins/PA

What is the purpose of sex education in schools? It tends to focus on contraception, but doctors are starting to suggest that that approach is 180 degrees wrong. Instead of teaching young people how to avoid babies, says the Fertility Education Initiative, we should teach them how to make babies.

This might seem a countercyclical message. Don’t we have a problem with under age pregnancies – to say nothing of global overpopulation? Actually, no. As so often, our fears have not kept up with the facts.

Teenage pregnancies were common in the late 20th century, but their rate has halved since the Nineties, and now stands at a record low. As the average age of motherhood rises (at 30, it has never been higher) a more serious problem is that increasing numbers of women are struggling to conceive.

A similar perception-lag governs our ideas about overpopulation. We blame it for crowded roads, GP waiting lists, pressures on the green belt. We fret that there were a billion human beings in 1800, two billion in 1930, three billion in 1960, six billion in 2000. How much longer before the whole planet starts to resemble Oxford Street in the sales?

In fact, birth rates are dropping on every continent. The rate of reproduction in Kenya has fallen over the past 50 years from eight live births per woman to 4.5. In Brazil, the decline is from 5.7 to 1.8, in Iran 6.8 to 1.9.

It’s always the same pattern: as prosperity rises, fecundity falls. The increase in female education correlates closely to the reduction in fertility rates. So, indeed, does the spread of television – possibly because it gives couples a different way to occupy their evenings.

Most of all, though, birth rates fall in tandem with infant mortality. When not every child is likely to reach adulthood, people want lots of children. After the arrival of modern medicine, there is often a population explosion, because the first generation retains the cultural habit of large families.

But, in the next generation, numbers stabilise. Europe went through its bulge in the early 20th century. Latin America in the late 20th century. Africa is doing so now.

According to a major study by Deutsche Bank, the world population, currently 7.4 billion, will peak at 8.7 billion in 2055, before dropping back to 8 billion by the end of the century. Even if those dates turn out to be too early, few demographers doubt that a peak is coming.

Depopulation will bring a different set of challenges: decaying towns, unaffordable pensions and the like. But, just like the challenges of rising numbers, they will be overcome. And, when they are, people will look back in wonder at a generation which, Hamlet-like, recoiled at the notion of procreation.

Every tradition, every instinct and, for what it is worth, every major religion, rejoices in children. How odd that we should need to take that message into the classroom.

Milking anti-US sentiment

The i newspaper wins this week’s award for the most asinine front page: “Britain may be forced to take inferior US milk”. The story was based on a claim by Greenpeace that American milk, which apparently has a shorter shelf-life than ours, might be included in a future UK-US trade deal.

The headline was wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where criticism should begin. Britain is a net exporter of milk and, even if it wasn’t, it would hardly source its imports from across the Atlantic. The preposterous word “forced” implies that government inspectors will somehow make us buy things against our will. Silliest of all, though, is the idea that America’s ultra-fastidious regulators would allow the sale of toxic milk. Have i journalists ever been to the US? Did they drink any milk while they were there? Did they feel OK afterwards?

These stories have less to do with health than with dislike of America, dislike of industrialised farming, dislike of trade and, in the last analysis, dislike of the idea that Britain might prosper after leaving the EU. What an unedifying blend of motives.

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