Europhiles have finally had their eyes opened to the hideous reality of the EU

 In a display worthy of 1960s Nasserite dictators, over the last 72 hours Eurocrats have broken every norm of civilised behaviour.

Source _ Daily Telegraph 30/01/21

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Remainers were right. Brexit has indeed led to an outbreak of populism, protectionism and chauvinism. But not on the side of the Channel they expected. 

The EU’s behaviour over the past 72 hours has been so demented, so self-wounding, that it is hard to know where criticism should begin. 

Let’s start with the bare facts. Brussels is in dispute with AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company, over the late delivery of some Covid vaccines. For what it’s worth, the EU seems to have a staggeringly weak case. It published its contract with the firm but, far from being any kind of “gotcha”, that contract showed that AstraZeneca had simply promised to use its “reasonable best efforts” to fulfil the order, the same form of words it used with the UK, which also saw some late deliveries. The rights and wrongs of that dispute, though, are beside the point. The EU’s quarrel is with AstraZeneca, not with Britain.

In pursuit of its quarrel, Brussels announced plans to block the export of vaccines from a completely unrelated company, the American corporation Pfizer, to Britain – vaccines which no one disputed that the UK had purchased, and on which the EU did not pretend to have any legal claim. 

In other words, Brussels was threatening to halt the sale of life-saving drugs to a neighbouring country, not in response to any provocation, but simply because it was cross that that country was further advanced in its vaccination programme. 

It gets worse. In order to deflect criticism from its hopeless record in ordering vaccines, the European Commission aimed its law expressly at Britain. Its export ban did not apply to other neighbouring states, such as Iceland, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine or Belarus. The only country in the vicinity to be targeted was the UK.

It gets worse still. To make sure that no vaccines could enter the UK, the Commission announced that it was excluding Northern Ireland from the single market arrangements which it had previously insisted were so critical to the peace process. Incredibly, it didn’t notify Britain or Ireland in advance, and its move united every party in Dublin and Belfast against it (as well, for that matter, as every party at Westminster except the SNP), eventually forcing it to back down. Still, a point was made – a point that cannot now be unmade. For four years, EU negotiators claimed that the merest possibility of a border in Ireland would risk a return to terrorism, and worked to convince the world that this was a risk that Britain was somehow prepared to run. Yet it took precisely 29 days before the EU itself announced such a border.

It gets even worse than that. Annoyed at Britain’s success, European leaders started casting doubt on the efficacy of the AstraZeneca product. Engaging in the kind of nuttiness which gets people banned from social media, Emmanuel Macron claimed that the vaccine “didn’t work”. In other words, the EU is breaking every norm of civilised behaviour and threatening expropriation over a vaccine which, from sheer sour grapes, its leaders claim is ineffective.

Let’s summarise. The European Commission elbowed aside its member states, which had begun their own procurement programmes, and insisted on negotiating en bloc for the 27. It moved slowly and bureaucratically, reportedly because it was holding out for vaccines produced by Continental firms. In the end, three months after Britain, it signed a contract with AstraZeneca similar to that which some of its nations had tried to sign earlier. As criticism mounted, it panicked and lashed out – smashing the principles of due process, private property and free trade in the process.

Eurocrats are behaving not so much like mini-Trumps as like 1960s Nasserite dictators. They are deliberately disrupting supply at the height of a pandemic. And their petulance, shockingly, is aimed at the only pharmaceutical company in the world which is high-mindedly offering the vaccine to all comers on a not-for-profit basis. 

The British government, like AstraZeneca, wants to spread the inoculation programme globally, reaching countries that can’t afford their own vaccines. This is the thanks we get.

For at least some British Remainers, the events of this week have served as what Western Communists used to call a “Kronstadt moment”. Kronstadt, the site of a naval mutiny against the Bolsheviks in 1921, became a shorthand for the moment when a previously loyal party member suddenly grasped the true nature of the Soviet regime. For some, it came with the 1956 Hungarian rising, for others the 1968 Prague Spring. For some, it never came at all. But it always involved a wrenching mental reset, a readiness to look again at old certainties.

Consider the assertions made by the two sides in the 2016 referendum. Eurosceptics argued that the EU was slow, introverted, bureaucratic, inefficient, ready to make up the rules as it went along, a bully and a bad neighbour. Europhiles saw it as principled, internationalist, effective, generous, rules-based and committed to global trade. If we treat those two views as verifiable claims, which has just been falsified? 

When Remainers, including Labour and Lib Dem MPs and every expert that the Guardian could wheel out, argued last year that Britain’s refusal to join in the EU’s procurement scheme would cause needless deaths here, they undoubtedly believed it. But it is Boris Johnson’s conviction that Brexit would mean a more agile Britain that turned out to be right.

More agile – and, I hope, more generous. It is a pity that, instead of quietly asking Britain to sell it some spare doses, the EU behaved so peevishly. But the UK should hold itself to a higher standard. Because of our successful procurement programme, we will end up with a vaccine surplus this year. We should use that surplus to benefit less well-stocked nations – our friends in the Commonwealth, naturally, but others, too. We might, for example, prioritise Ireland, to which every town in Britain has family connections. We might help our oldest ally, Portugal, currently experiencing a surge of infections. We should, in short, be the positive global force that the EU is failing to be.