One cannot help feeling a touch nostalgic about some of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s prescriptions for the next EU agenda (“We must strengthen European sovereignty”, Opinion, May 28).
Their article suggests that “the EU needs more innovation, more single market, more investment, more level playing field and less bureaucracy”, precisely the type of agenda that Margaret Thatcher, lodestar of British Conservatism, advocated 40 years ago in the debate about completing a European single market by 1992.
In practical terms, the French and German leaders argue for reaping the full benefits of a modernised EU single market, reducing fragmentation and barriers, fostering connectivity, enhancing skills, promoting mobility and convergence, and cutting bureaucratic burdens on business. Contrast these sensible objectives, resuscitated from decades ago, with the performance and outcomes of post Brexit Britain: on all these issues Britain has gone significantly backwards, much to the detriment of the country as a whole.
Unlike their British counterparts, one should be grateful that European leaders have an institutional memory.
Richard Wright
London NW8, UK