In June 2018, at a Foreign Office reception, Boris Johnson was asked what he made of business leaders’ fears about Brexit. His answer was “fuck business.” It was delivered to Belgium’s ambassador and around the world within days. While tempting at the time to file it under the usual Boris bluster, as Prime Minister he went on to deliver that promise. The deal we ended up with under Boris tied up British traders in new border checks, customs declarations, rules-of-origin paperwork, VAT bills and health certificates. The Party that once called itself the natural home of the entrepreneur chose, deliberately, to make trade harder.
Now, the case for EU membership is the most Conservative case going. If you believe in Britain as a destination for investment, in a country that trades its way to prosperity, creates jobs and rewards enterprise, you cannot also believe in cutting ourselves off from our largest, nearest and most trustworthy market.
Frontier Economics has modelled the growth on offer from the various options for a UK-EU relationship. Their conservative estimate is that full membership would raise GDP by 2.5 to 3.6 per cent in the long run, worth between £66 and £92 billion a year. That recovers roughly 90% of the hit the OBR attributes to Brexit. It is worth at least six times the combined value of every trade deal Britain has struck since leaving, and around twenty-four times the gains from the much-trumpeted agreement with India. And for those who liked another of Boris’ sayings, Frontier’s work shows that it’s the West Midlands, Yorkshire, the East Midlands and the North East, that gain most.
Nor is this a trade-off worth paying for the sake of sovereignty: the Brexit deal has left us in a rule-taker max position, with exporters effectively still bound by regulations written in Brussels but with no vote on them. Full membership is the only option that hands us decision-making rights, a seat at the table and judges on the European Court of Justice.
In the run up to the 2016 referendum and beyond, the promise we were sold was that leaving the EU would free Britain to make its fortune elsewhere, above all with America. But the USA is no longer a dependable trading ally, and under Donald Trump’s second presidency is more likely to mete out punishment beatings than open its markets. It now reaches for tariffs as a first instrument rather than a last resort. Frontier modelled that too, and found that deeper integration with Europe is exactly what shields British firms from the worst economic effects of American protectionism.
Brexit also had us lose control of our borders. While we were EU members, the Dublin arrangements let us return asylum seekers to the first safe European country they reached. We now have no automatic legal route to send anyone back, and no seat at the table where EU member-states coordinate their own returns. Similarly on defence, where Britain has found itself on the outside of the EU’s SAFE defence procurement fund at the very moment the continent is rearming and Moscow is threatening to attack British bases supporting the Ukraine effort.
The most traditionally Conservative instincts we have on border control, economy, security and defence are inextricably linked to EU integration whether we like it or not.
Despite this, Brexiteers only want to go further, and leave the ECHR. This would do more to strain the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom than any nationalist campaign has ever managed. The Good Friday Agreement is built on the ECHR being written into Northern Ireland’s law. Severing that link hands the EU grounds to suspend the security and cooperation provisions of the Brexit deal and cast doubt over the very Windsor Framework negotiated by a Conservative and Unionist Government to keep both the peace and the trade moving across the Irish Sea.
The Union has also suffered in Scotland, which voted to remain by 62 per cent to 38. Being hauled out against its will gifted the SNP its biggest boon since the 2014 referendum.
Besides, if further integration with Europe proved impossible, two in five Conservative voters would back closer relations with the EU up to and including membership, as our polling finds. Across the country 53% would support re-joining.
None of this is alien to the Conservatives. The single market, that engine of tariff-free trade across half a billion consumers, was Margaret Thatcher’s project, driven through by her own commissioner and sold as a British achievement. “Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community,” she told her audience at Bruges, in the very speech Eurosceptics most love to misremember. Reach back further and you find Winston Churchill in Zurich in 1946 urging Europeans to “build a kind of United States of Europe.”
Somewhere along the way that inheritance was reduced to crass slogans. It doesn’t have to stay that way. Conservatives can and should make a strong argument for Britain to be an open, enterprising, trading nation once more, and there are plenty of people within the party’s ranks who can do so seriously and persuasively. The Tory manifesto should be unashamedly pro-business, pro-internationalist and pro-European.
Original photo by Rocco Dipoppa.