The Monty Python Question

For Times of TW

Europe – the Monty Python Question      

Remember that sketch from the Life of Brian ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’  John Cleese ends up conceding a long list: “apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?”   Well I feel a bit like that over Europe.

            The trouble is it’s rather an easy target.  A parliament that can’t decide whether it’s based in Brussels or Strasbourg; a commission that no one understands and a council of ministers who seem only to have their own narrow national interests at heart.

            Add to that a bloated bureaucracy, overpaid officials and politicians with large expense accounts and apocryphal stories of banning bananas that are two bendy and you have a toxic mix that plays right into the hands of euro-sceptics.

            But I remember life before the EU, or the EC, or the EEC, or even the European Coal and Steel Community that started it all. Holidays on the ‘Continent’ as a child when you were only allowed to take £50 out of Britain were a bit of a nightmare.  Every border you crossed involved passports and customs and currency exchanges.  Export businesses faced a plethora of red tape. Living -or worse working - in European countries entailed labyrinthine complexities.

            Later I went to the USA and was struck by how easy it was to move from one State to another. They had different laws, but they shared the same currency and had no border controls and no trade restrictions.  Together they formed the most powerful trading block in the world.  Each had its own ‘sovereignty’ but all recognised the federal government in Washington.  It seemed such an obvious model.

            As a journalist I’ve covered dozens of stories of regional factionalism or, put another way, desire for regional recognition and identity. The Basques and the Andalusians, the Cornish and the Welsh, the Bretons and the Languedocians The Scots and the Irish.  Many outside the centre question the relevance of national parliaments whether in Madrid or Paris or London.  Devolution has become fashionable and desirable.

            Why, then, do we cling on so desperately to the “nation state” model?  What is so great about a kingdom or country that contains swathes of the population that don’t want to be united into a whole?

History shows that, anyway, national power blocks are a shifting sand. Italy before unification. Yugoslavia before communism. England before it was invaded by the French who then conquered and amagamated Scotland, Wales and Ireland.           

Well, there’s a solution.  Abolish – or at least downscale - national legislatures; increase the power of regional parliaments, and for macro decisions, look to an over-arching federal power - The United States of Europe.

            Economically this surely makes sense. The world has divided into bigger and bigger trading blocks – the US has held sway for more than a century; China is the new kid on the block; other South East Asian countries have huge trading power;  India is emerging; Africa has an abundance of natural resources and cheap labour; South America has the potential; and who knows what post-Soviet Russia might yet do?

            If you listen carefully to the current debate you don’t find many British businessmen calling for us to leave Europe.  They know the advantages of a single market with no trade barriers.  Many would like a single currency if it could be made stable.

            So mainly the opposition to our membership of the European Union comes down to a loss of ‘national sovereignty’ (or perhaps a chauvinistic dislike of  ‘Johnny foreigner’). And thus we come back to the Monty Python question: what has Europe ever done for us?

            Well, according to Simon Sweeney a lecturer in international political Economy at York University, not much…. apart, that is, from providing 57% of our trade; structural funding to areas hit by industrial decline; clean beaches and rivers; cleaner air; lead free petrol; restrictions on landfill dumping; a recycling culture; cheaper mobile charges; cheaper air travel; improved consumer protection and food labelling; a ban on growth hormones and other harmful food additives; better product safety; break up of monopolies; Europe-wide patent and copyright protection; European arrest warrant; cross border policing to combat human trafficking, arms and drug smuggling; counter terrorism intelligence  ... and on and on and on.

Oh yes, and there’s one more thing.  As Cleese was reminded in the Life of Brian … peace.  That was one of the original concepts for a unified Europe, an end to centuries old feuding and fighting between – yes, separate nations.  The EEC/EU has not done a bad job in its first 67 years.  Personally, despite all its faults, I’d prefer to rely on its military, economic and social protection now and for future generations.