Bad fog over the Channel

The financial crisis has exposed the weaknesses of all the larger European countries. As we might have feared, this shocking revelation has dealt a serious blow to our beloved France, which has been very slow to undertake the necessary reforms and is still addicted to public spending. However, the biggest shock has come from the United Kingdom: in just a few months, the country’s ‘Cool Britannia’ image promoted by Tony Blair has fallen victim to the dreaded curse of the Picture of Dorian Gray.

The UK is all at sea. Its flagship, the prestigious City of London, suddenly appears to be steered by the blind. The glorious pound sterling has been reduced to an insular currency. The local press has turned its guns on Westminster, the mother of all parliaments, where many of the expenses claims submitted by MPs and Ministers have been exposed as fraudulent. Despite the injection of additional funds over the past few years, the health, education and transport services are still some way adrift of the Scandinavian model.

It gets worse, however: the UK does not know where it is heading. Should the economy be rebuilt by reviving high-tech industry and advanced technologies, or by confirming financial services as the top priority? Should these financial services be governed by a new legislative framework, or would it be better to restore trust in their creative abilities? In the long term, is the complete freedom to determine the salaries of the financial whiz kids who make – and sometimes break – London’s fortune compatible with the principles of social justice put forward by a left-wing government? Is it possible for the UK to advocate opening up to the outside world in all areas whilst gradually closing itself off from Europe? Aside from the very orthodox litany of the environmentalist creed, now shared by all political parties in the western world, the Conservative Party and its youthful leader, David Cameron, do not give the impression of currently being in a position to provide more specific answers to the major problems facing the country.

The results of the European elections and their aftermath even reveal a worrying picture of a UK tempted to retreat into isolationism behind its maritime mists. More than half of the British MEPs have chosen to sit in three different fringe political groups, each trying to outdo the other in their euroscepticism: the Conservatives have left Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy’s European People’s Party, deemed to be too ‘European’, in order to join forces with Poles from the Kaczyński Brothers’ party and Czech supporters of Václav Klaus; founded five years ago, the UK Independence Party secured 13 seats on a platform whose sole aim is UK withdrawal from the European Union; since 7 June, however, it has been overtaken on its right by a newcomer, the British National Party, whose leader has publicly proposed to stop immigration by sinking the boats of illegal migrants in the Mediterranean. The British, now totally absent from the EPP, the largest group in the European Parliament, fewer in number than the Germans, French, Italians and Spanish in the Socialist Group and down to just two Green MEPs, give the impression of intentionally relegating themselves to the sidelines – ‘UK sleepwalks to fringes of Europe’, wrote an FT correspondent on 10 July.

Thanks to the strength of the UK’s institutions and the tremendous ability of our British friends to deal with the most formidable challenges, we remain confident for the future. However, their current weaknesses, and the anti-European sentiment that they reflect, are very bad news for Europe as a whole. What we need is a 21st-century Winston Churchill.

Alain Lamassoure, 15 July 2009