Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It was one of those news moments you always remember. Switching on the TV to see rolling coverage of Notre Dame ablaze. Notre Dame is France It is the nation wrought in stone and wood. It is the very soul of the French people. So, as their President said, France itself was on fire. In our country we have great iconic buildings as old and older than Notre Dame. They have great historical traditions and personify so much that is British. We love them as our own and feel that we share in a part of them. But none quite enjoys the mystical attachment to its people as Notre Dame does to the French.

It seems that heroic efforts by both the fire services and a salvagers that both the main structure and many, but not all, the treasures and relics have been saved. The world  looked on aghast as the flames tore through the roof and the spire but the fact that all was not destroyed is a shared deliverance. Already the plan to rebuild and restore is being prepared. It will be a project to engage not just the enormous artistic and construction skills of the French people, but of those everywhere who can offer their talent in such an historic and worthy project.

In the context of the original offer, yes it is. There may be some fudge type Brexit, or the whole thing may be abandoned. But the simple notion of a clean break, Global Britain, national independence and so on is just not possible. It was an ideal nurtured by mainly a fringe minority of English nationalists over decades , but given force by a toxic combination of austerity, free movement and the fact that for a considerable period each euro was worth less than each pound.

This all caused pressure on services in some deprived areas outside London, the undercutting of UK wages by migrant workers willing to work for less because less was more went sent to their home country and a general feeling that the establishment was getting richer while the people grew poorer. So, with a campaign that spoke to these discontents, but not always truthfully, the No side built a strident majority, based on  the nostalgia of the elderly for a faded past, given mass by the people who felt left behind, together orchestrated by right wing nationalists determined to pedal any fiction in order to win. And win they did. Just. But the big problem is delivery.

Forty five years of integration, not just of trade, industry, services, education and science, but of families, assets, social  cohesion and commercial and scientific structures, means that there is woven a web which makes GB an integral part of Europe and Europe an integral part of the UK. Whatever kind of Brexit occurs it will be little more than skin deep. The benefits will be near to zero, the inconvenience will be considerable and the worst impact will be upon those bludgeoned by austerity, who thought Brexit offered a way out. The politicians will get fed up with the experience of Global Britain left on the sidelines on nobody’s circulation list. When the prospect of Scotland and Norther Ireland dropping off the UK becomes real, people will have had enough. The door will still be open and we will go straight back in. The Brexit folly finally will be  over.