How suddenly the EU dropped off our radar. We were members for half a century. Forty-eight per cent of us wanted to stay in the wretched thing. Yet you need to scour the inside pages of most newspapers for mention of this week’s European elections.
More than 370million people are entitled to vote between June 6 and 9, an electorate second in size only to India’s. As the EU has continued to centralise power, the European Parliament has become less like an international assembly and more like the legislature of a superstate.
That superstate is taking shape right next door to us and, although we are each other’s largest trading partners, our relations have often been marred since Brexit by the tendency in Brussels to see us as a rebel province.
In short, you might think we would be interested. So why so little coverage?
Is it that we have become more insular as a result of Brexit? Au contraire, as we old Brussels hands say.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of National Rally, France’s former National Front, has been gaining major ground in recent years
The ANC’s slide in South Africa has been decently chewed over by our commentators. So has Narendra Modi’s pitch for a third term in India. And Donald Trump’s legal battles are front-page news, despite the imminence of our own election.
No, what we are seeing is a reminder that this country was never especially community-minded in its outlook. In 1950, as Labour’s then foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, put it: ‘Britain is not “part of Europe”, she is simply not a Luxembourg.’
As long as we were members, we did our best to pay attention. Turnout at our European elections may have been in the low thirties, but at least we had a vague idea of who Jacques Delors and Jean-Claude Juncker were.
The moment we left, though, our gaze snapped back to the Commonwealth and the other English-speaking democracies – places which, for many of us, are not just familiar, but familial, in the sense that we have relatives there.
The weird thing is how little interest the irreconcilable euro-zealots now show in what is happening across the Channel. If only they stopped yelling about British fascism for a moment, they might notice something striking – the EU is about to swing further to the Right, including the authoritarian Right, than ever.
Opinion polls suggest that the various Right-wing groupings in Strasbourg – Christian democrats, conservatives and hard-Right populists – will get more than half as many seats again as the combined socialists, greens and communists. In Britain, by contrast, cumulative support for the parties of the Left is higher than for those of the Right (Tories plus Reform) in 573 out of 650 constituencies.
This striking divergence has not made the slightest dent in the consciousness of those who proclaim that Europe is an important part of their identities.
Once again, we see that Europhilia in Britain has become a lost cause to which people cling because of how they like to think of themselves rather than because they expect to effect any political change.
Being a Remainer doesn’t mean that you have a clear plan to rejoin, or even that you especially want to. It means, rather, that you have an image of yourself as broad-minded, anti-racist and entitled look down on Eurosceptic thickoes.
As the EU has continued to centralise power, the European Parliament has become less like an international assembly and more like the legislature of a superstate
‘Hard-core Remainers are going to be very peeved about what is actually happening in their beautiful Europe,’ says Yanis Varoufakis, the Leftist Greek politician.
No they won’t. They will simply fail to notice it.
Even as Marine Le Pen – now the leader of National Rally, France’s former National Front – struts her stuff in Brussels, they will carry on telling one another what a small-minded and xenophobic place Britain has become since Brexit.
The difference between Britain and the Continent is most pronounced when we look at the attitudes of young voters.
Here it is pretty much taken for granted that people under 30 will be on the Left – not least by the Tories themselves, whose election campaign is disproportionately aimed at pensioners. But all over Western Europe, younger voters are switching to anti-immigration parties.
If you run the same test again – cumulative support for the parties on the Left versus those on the Right – you see that young people overwhelmingly lean Right, including in Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Belgium and Finland. In most of these countries, the populist Right party is ahead of its traditional conservative rival.
Why is this happening on the Continent? And why isn’t it happening in Britain?
Both answers are obvious.
First, there is war in Ukraine, which tends to push voters Right. Then there is massive illegal immigration – at higher levels in most EU states than in Britain, though you wouldn’t think it from our headlines. Concerns over energy security and price rises are also helpful to Right-wingers.
All these things have accelerated the long-term decline of parties of the traditional Left, whose ties to industrialised labour and trade unions already made them look anachronistic in a gig economy.
So why isn’t it happening here?
The short answer is that, as in 1997, the Tories are now so disliked that their association with an otherwise popular policy is enough to turn people against it.
For me, the most shocking poll since the campaign began is a YouGov survey which asks people: ‘From everything you have heard about Conservative plans to help pensioners, do you think they go too far, not far enough, or they are about right?’
Now bear in mind that the Tories have geared almost their entire campaign at pensioners. Not content with locking down young people during the pandemic in 2020, nor with preserving the ‘triple lock’ despite the artificial bounce-back of wages in 2021, they plan to introduce a tax-free allowance for pensioners while forcing young people into national service.
So how does all this go down with the target market? Four per cent of over-65s think Tory proposals go too far, and 54 per cent that they don’t go far enough. For the electorate as a whole, those figures are 12 and 36 per cent.
How did the Conservatives get to the point where whatever they say seems to irritate people?
Again, the answer is obvious enough. After 14 years, voters have all manner of accumulated grudges, some more justified than others.
Most of their grievances have to do with the effects of a lockdown which Labour (and, indeed, the electorate as a whole) wanted to be even longer and harsher than it was.
There is a reason that no PM since the Duke of Wellington in 1830 has taken his party to a fifth consecutive election victory. But the sad truth is that, with the temporary exception of immigration, which is likely to drop next year regardless of who wins because of changes that have already passed through Parliament, almost nothing will improve.
The Government will still spend vastly more than the country can afford. The NHS will continue to gobble up more cash for fewer consultations and medical procedures. Government departments will remain more interested in diversity and equality than in doing their notional jobs.
The factors that are driving the EU Rightwards – price rises, excessive eco-regulation, problems with assimilation, the threat of Russia – will still apply here. And we will realise that Labour, unlike the current Government, is not even theoretically interested in taking on the woke establishment.
Indeed, it is very likely that Starmer will scrap the Rwanda scheme just as numerous EU states adopt versions of it.
In other words, Britain will swing Left just as the EU adopts many of the policies that Brexit was expected to deliver.
Funny old world.