You could be forgiven if you think it rather peculiar that the government is still clueless about what it wants Brexit to look like and that the Prime Minister feels it necessary to hold a special cabinet meeting to explore the options. The situation is not made easier by reports, far from reassuring, of quarreling among the Brexit trio supposedly in charge; Davis, Fox and Boris. Today this blog will hold back on commenting until some clarity emerges of at least the general direction of travel. Instead let us look at the opportunities this Brexit crisis may offer a flustered EU.
There are those who say that the EU is threatened by GB’s departure. They may be wrong. Britain has never really been part of the ‘family’. Always on the outside looking in and wanting opt outs and concessions and forever ranting against federalization. Something of a spoiler at the party. GB wants to be free of Europe, but it may very well be that Europe will prosper free of GB. The decision to create the Euro made federalization inevitable. As this blog is forever saying, you cannot have a currency without a government. That means not just a Central Bank, but a single finance ministry and economic policy, with a minister in charge.
That requires a pooling of sovereignty, some democratic components through which that can happen and an outcome which ensures that the economic policy treats the Eurozone as a unified whole in which opposing interests must be balanced, rather than allowing the strengths of the richer countries to be used to exploit and bully the poorer ones. Ideally this would include the EU Parliament becoming a Federal Parliament with some reduction in the numbers of councils of ministers and overlapping presidencies, none of which has a democratic origin.
Without GB in the Union it will be possible to put into effect the inevitable consequences of the decisions already taken towards the goal of ever closer union, of which the setting up of the euro is the most decisive. It might even go so far as to save the euro itself. There are some in the Remain camp, the majority of the British cabinet in fact, who hope that somehow the EU will loosen its structures to create a less formal arrangement of which we can remain a part. This is wishful thinking. That way the EU would unravel, euro and all. Germany knows that, so it will not happen.