EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will forgive me for not speculating about what this measure will bring forth: it is too long and the time too short. Instead, I will use my meagre ration of minutes to advance two historical reflections. The first concerns the law of unintended consequences. David Cameron’s clever tactic was to promise a referendum in 2015 to dish Mr Farage and to keep Britain in the EU; the unintended outcome was Brexit. The moral of this is pretty obvious: do not sacrifice your long-term strategic goal to short-term practices.

The second, deeper reflection concerns the “cunning of reason”. When Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, he meant that the direction of history is evident only after the event. In retrospect, one can see a kind of inevitability about Britain’s separation, not from Europe—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson—but from a particular institutional expression of Europe: the European Union. As such, the question is not just about Britain’s future relationship with the EU, the subject of this debate, but the future of the EU itself.

A few years ago, Wolfgang Schäuble, then German Finance Minister, talked about “variable geometry” and a “multi-speed” Europe—but it may be more accurate to think of the EU going in different directions rather than in the same direction at different speeds. A core of Germanic countries will push for full integration or federalism, and a Mediterranean group will choose more flexible arrangements to preserve crucial areas of national autonomy, such as control over their own currency. I think this is the direction Europe will go, and, if that is so, historians may well see Britain’s leaving not as a breach of a solid structure but as an episode in the reshaping of Europe. The leavers instinctively sensed the flight of the owl; the remainers did not.