Nasty and brutish? Surely they don't mean us?

I recently took part in a discussion at a European forum where I shared a platform with officials representing the UK and German governments on the topic of Brexit, and I have to say that I was more in tune with the German view of events than the British.

The UK government’s opening position is that Britain was always the bad boy in Brussels and that it never fitted into the EU in a constructive fashion, so that its departure should make life easier for everyone. That is an interesting sales pitch – and it is also largely not true. Whilst the British may have had a very different view of the EU and the direction in which it should head, compared to the French, that is less true of the Germans. Admittedly the UK and France have differed hugely on issues such as agriculture but the British influence has helped to reduce the amount the EU spends on agricultural subsidies from 73% of the budget in 1985 to 40% today, for which many EU members are thankful. Moreover, the UK and Germany have seen eye-to-eye on many issues and the UK played a very constructive role in making the EU a more business-friendly environment. Indeed it was a key player in helping to create the single market which the current UK government wants to leave.

The British government is also trying to sell the message to its European partners that the UK is the same country as it was before the referendum – nothing has changed and therefore it should be possible to conduct business as usual. I could not disagree more! The Brexit referendum has opened up numerous fissures in British society and in the conduct of its politics, such that this is very much a country ill at ease with itself. Leavers versus Remainers; young versus old; rich versus poor – and even the two main political parties struggle to find a common policy on Brexit. Indeed, I heard nothing to acknowledge the fact that almost half of those who voted in the Referendum wanted to remain.

Whilst the British government continues to adopt an “it-will-be-all-right -on-the-night” approach to issues such as the Irish border, the EU has adopted a rigorous legal approach which rightly points out that leaving the customs union is ultimately incompatible with maintaining an open border – a point which the German government representative reiterated. There is nothing new in any of this, of course, and I have been making many of these points for some time. But what concerns me is that the UK is holding to this fiction in the face of all the evidence. As one who does not work in the state sector I am not required to toe the government’s line, and I can afford to be free with my opinions. But it must be very difficult for those working on the inside who see the inherent contradictions in the government’s position but are not allowed to speak out.

Indeed, the disarray at the heart of government was manifest once again in the great WIndrush scandal. In short, immigrants from Commonwealth countries who began arriving in the UK in great numbers in the early 1950s are at risk of deportation if they never formalised their residency status and do not have the required documentation to prove it. This is a particular problem for those brought here as children, who have grown up in the UK and regard it as their home. Lest anyone forget, this is the result of a policy introduced by former Home Secretary Theresa May in 2013 (whatever happened to her?). Naturally, the policy is an embarrassment for the prime minister. But it goes way beyond that: It is indicative of a government which pays lip service to looking after the interests of its citizens but fails to do so and hides behind the letter of the law to justify its actions. And after having apparently agreed with the EU that it will guarantee the post-Brexit rights of EU citizens living in the UK, it once again calls into question the government’s competence to do so.

It was the philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote in his magnum opus, Leviathan, that life in the absence of a governmental-imposed social order would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Sometimes it feels as though the third and fourth words of his aphorism apply to life with a government too.