Why I shall always be a Remainer ... (30 December 2020)

That’s it. We’ve left the EU. We’ve swapped membership of a great international club for a sort of handwritten visitor’s-pass. We’ve done it to appease a motley and dubious crowd of braying nationalists. I don’t know, by the way, if this will make us richer, or if it will make us poorer. Neither do you. Neither does anyone. Both sides wheel-out their tame economic think-tanks to make contradictory forecasts. Yet even when Brexit has become old news, let’s say in ten years’ time, when all the dust has settled and economists have done their sums, do you know what? We still won’t know. We’ll still be arguing. Because who knows what the alternative future might have been? Remainers will say it would have been rosier. Leavers will say it would have been bleaker. Jacob Rees-Mogg will be telling us it will take fifty more years before we know. Well, good luck with that.

Here’s where I stand on the whole sorry argument. I’m a Remainer. I shall still be a Remainer even if Britain’s economy booms spectacularly after Brexit as Boris Johnson promises us it will, or equally, if it fails, as many economists and the Financial Times choose to believe. My argument, you see, has nothing to do with the economy, or trade deals, or customs unions, or tariffs. I’m not worried about the colour of our passports, or the plight of farmers in Northern Ireland, or lorries parking up on the M2 at Dover. Or fish. I am concerned however, about our belligerent desire to build barriers between peoples, as if somehow we are different, as if we breathe different air or have different numbers of legs. We are all related, the Brits, and the Belgians, and the Bulgars, and the Bolivians and every other label we can choose to hang around the necks of people, but we have lost sight of this. Let me demonstrate this. Consider your cousins. If your first cousin is someone who shares one (or usually two) of your grandparents, and your second cousin shares one of your great grandparents, it turns out that almost no one on the planet is more distant from you than a 27^th cousin. Most people are a whole lot closer. We are all related. We have been fooled by ephemeral things like skin colour or language to imagine that humans belong in races or nationalities, but genetically we’re all pretty much the same. There is more genetic difference between a chimpanzee in Senegal and another in Uganda than there is between an Inuit and a Maori, or a Yorkshireman and a Chinaman. It really doesn’t help us to define ourselves by the patch of land where we happen to have been born (or the island we happen to think of as home). We are one human family, and if the world belongs to anyone, it belongs to all of us equally. Understanding this, and treating the world as our common responsibility, is the best (and possibly only) hope for our species. We only have one planet. It is the cradle and home of our species. Whether you were born in Ruislip or Rio, whether you’re a Briton or a Breton, a Ghanian or a Guyanian, we all have a right to live and breathe the same air, to grow up, to raise families, and to pursue happiness or whatever it is we want to pursue (within reason of course). And it seems to me that the biggest barrier we have to this great ideal is our almost religious devotion to the idea of the nation state with its precious little borders and its pretentions of autonomy. I like to think that one day, probably long after you and I are dust, the squabble of little nations and fragile egos and tiny minded bigotries that infect our planet and keep us all at arm’s length will dissolve and we will come together as a people to manage, and curate this planet, and its tribes, and its wildlife, in a way we simply don’t do today. And in that regard I saw the European Union as one small, tentative, local, step in the right direction.

OK. So perhaps I’m a fantasist. But bear with me a little longer. The EU wasn’t (and isn’t) a perfect organisation. We agree on that. But it can (and does) legislate on environmental issues across a whole continent. That’s important. The EU has some of the world’s highest environmental standards, and laws passed in Brussels help protect natural habitats, keep air and water clean, ensure proper waste disposal, and help businesses move toward sustainable economies. Tin-pot nations that don’t belong to a global bloc like the EU don’t bother making these kinds of rules. Why should they? Only a big club like the EU can do this.

And the EU is growing. Or it was growing until Britain decided to take its ball away. It was nine countries. Now it’s 28. One day it might absorb countries in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and North Africa and who knows, it could, one day become a global union. I hope it does. I hope Brexit doesn’t put the brakes on this. And I hope, when it does finally reach a critical mass, it won’t be too late to save our planet from greedy, feuding, nation states.

Nation states are the problem. They’re not the solution. Not even Britain. Nation states like to think they can do whatever they want. They can make their own rules. And they do. But a world of competing nation states is a world that rapes the planet of its resources, that stifles the freedom of its people to travel, that overlooks famines and disasters in other countries. Nations go to war with other nations. Nations can’t manage the oceans. They can’t manage the climate. They can’t halt deforestation. They can’t stop mass extinctions. 

Yet the idea of the nation state is so deeply embedded in our collective view of the world that it is a difficult shibboleth to topple. All around the world children learn about the glorious histories of their own nations. Every other country is a potential enemy. That’s the lesson we all grow up believing. Brexit was driven by a whole basket of grievances, but more than this, it was driven by a nationalistic belief in British exceptionalism, the idea that we are somehow better than the Poles and Hungarians, that the sun that shines on Britain is our sun, that the fish in the sea are ours, that Queen still rules an empire, and the map is still pink. But none of this is true.

 The EU isn’t a global talking-shop like the UN. It’s a pragmatic single market with free trade and free movement and regulations and regulatory oversight and a court. It is an organisation that survives by respecting its members, celebrating their differences, and trying to find consensus. Imagine a world run like that. Is it such a bad idea? Really?

This is why I want to stay part of the club. I don’t expect Britain to rejoin for a generation at least – but I will support any campaign to rejoin. I’m a remainer. I will always be a remainer. And I’m proud of that.