Julian Priestley Memorial Lecture 2024

Julian Priestley Lecture 7 May 2023

Annette Dittert, German ARD TV bureau chief, London

 

Before I begin, I would like to thank you very much for the invitation to hold this year’s Julian Priestley lecture. I feel immensely honoured – and somewhat apprehensive, as I am holding this memorial lecture without actually having known Julian personally.

So since being asked to stand on this stage today, I have read a lot about him – and am certain that he himself would have been quite happy to see a German citizen here tonight. His passionate commitment to Europe was deeply rooted in the political vision of the EU’s founding fathers and mothers: to build bridges between its countries and their citizens – and in the strong belief that listening to different perspectives can create more than the sum of its parts.

In this sense, I am always happy to contribute my perspective as a German in the UK. Then again, having lived in Britain for more than 15 years now, I often feel more British than German – not a citizen of nowhere, but a European whose heart can easily beat for two countries at the same time. And mine certainly does beat for Britain. It’s home.

In Julian’s thinking, this was an entirely normal state of mind in a united, more centrally-governed Europe – ‘centrally-governed’ in the proper sense of the term, by the way, not as an evil superstate, as the lazy, yet successful distortion of some Brexiteers would have it. What Julian fought for all his life was a stable continent, with Britain at its heart. Political cooperation instead of competition and rivalry. Julian believed in compromise, and ultimately always stood up for the core principle of the EU - that political and moral base on which it was founded to create lasting peace after the war - namely the principle of liberal democracy.

If illness and an untimely death had not taken Julian away from us, he would probably have been horrified to see how the political culture of Brexit became an attack on this core principle. Yes, the worst and most lasting damage inflicted by the Brexiteers is not of an economic nature – as tragic as that may be – but rather the erosion of the foundations of liberal democracy, and the persistent decay of Britain’s political culture. The Brexit Referendum of 2016 was, in a way, the first major outbreak of a right-wing populism now sweeping the West. Here, Britain was ahead of the pack, genuinely ‘world leading’: the referendum came even before Donald Trump was elected.

After the acrimonious post-truth Referendum campaign, Theresa May declared Brexit to be “the will of the people”, one of the tropes of authoritarian populism, a new political approach which then only worsened under Boris Johnson, who unlawfully prorogued Parliament in 2019. And neither of his successors, not Truss nor Sunak, have done anything to change direction.

On the contrary. Just a few weeks ago we saw an extraordinary attack on the principle of the separation of powers, one of the most important pillars of liberal democracy. Besides its moral flaws and flagrant impracticalities, the Rwanda Bill has set an extremely dangerous precedent by legislating against the Supreme Court. Declaring by law that Rwanda is a safe country, after Britain’s own highest court came to a well-founded ruling that this is not the case, is nothing short of Orwellian – and is one of the most bizarre things I have had to report on in Britain in recent years.

No matter what you think about immigration, and how to solve the small-boats issue: passing laws that assert lies the government wishes to be true is not something healthy political systems do. And, in my view, it was the Brexit campaign and its methods that opened the door to this approach of legislating against reality.

But there is also some good news: 8 years on from 2016, we have now reached an interesting and extraordinarily important crossroads. If you look at the polls, or travel the country reporting on it like I do, you will know that a clear majority of the electorate has now understood that they were lied to and that Brexit was a massive mistake. With Labour on course to win the next general election, there is now a genuine chance for Britain – or better, for Westminster – to come back to its senses, however lengthy, tedious, and frustrating that process may be. And lengthy and tedious it will be.

Because, as this brief introduction has hopefully made clear, reversing the negative effects of Brexit cannot consist in simply realigning or moving closer to the EU – even if re-joining the Single Market or at least the Customs Union will ultimately be an unavoidable step for a new Labour government serious about getting the British economy growing again.

Reversing the negative effects of Brexit has to go much further and deeper. It has to concentrate on getting rid of the vacuous populism of recent years, on abandoning the dishonest divisiveness and performative cruelty that sustain it and that undermined democracy in the aftermath of 2016. But it also means looking at why and how the British democratic system proved so utterly defenceless when it came under attack.

Only if it makes a serious start to this will the UK once again be viewed as a reliable partner in Brussels, one with whom, in an atmosphere of trust and mutual goodwill, a genuine rapprochement can be considered. The prerequisite for this will be a Labour government that knows how the EU functions and is able to negotiate accordingly – one that is well prepared and does not simply assume that everyone would welcome Britain back to the fold no matter what. As most of you know, they won’t.

The EU that Britain left in 2016 is not the EU a future Labour government will encounter when in power. European political dynamics have changed since the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Poland, after having thrown out its own populists, is now back with Donald Tusk as a powerful and influential player in Brussels; meanwhile, the Franco-German motor is stuttering, to put it mildly. And with the European elections only a month away, there may soon be a whole new wave of far right MEPs sitting in the European Parliament. Yet as the EU grows ever more complicated, knowledge in Britain of what is going on there has decreased, both within the civil service and among politicians: a logical consequence of Tory governments shutting down institutional backchannels with Brussels.

In this overall context, if Britain wishes to set about creating closer ties with Europe again, there are three important questions – questions to which I will now attempt to provide answers.

Firstly: What where the weaknesses in British democracy that were aggravated by Brexit and made it so easy for the Tories to undermine the very pillars of liberal democracy?

Secondly: What kind of Europe will Britain now be dealing with? What if the genie of anti-democratic populism we are now perhaps starting to banish here is about to escape out of the bottle on the other side of the Channel?

And thirdly: With the EU having become more complicated since 2016, what are the opportunities that might arise from the new threats it is facing for Britain if and when London wants to set up a new relationship with Brussels?

Let’s start with the first point:  What where the weaknesses in Britain’s democratic system that made it so easy for the Tories to circumvent it and made it so vulnerable for the peculiar kind of British populism that came with Brexit. And how can these defects be repaired?

First and foremost: by facing up to its problems. This is the German in me talking. Now, the famously well-organised Germany is not all it’s cracked up to be (no, our trains don’t run on time, either!), but we certainly don’t have a problem with acknowledging problems. And once the issues at hand have been identified, then we try and develop strategies to fix them. This, however, is not what Britain generally, nor the Labour Party specifically, has decided to do.

Instead, there is a conspiracy of silence, and we are still living under Brex-omertà, as Neil Kinnock branded the weird fact that, even 8 years on, no-one dares to call a spade a spade and Brexit a... Brexit.

Well, you’re laughing, but in my job as a foreign correspondent, I have to try and explain this to perplexed Germans who very much like to tackle problems head-on and simply can’t understand the unwillingness to be honest about the elephant in the room.

So let me share with you one or two thoughts which sometimes cross my mind when trying to explain this to my audience in Hamburg or Berlin. These thoughts have led me to conclude that this stubborn refusal to confront the reality of the Brexit mess is not just accidental, but comes from a deep-seated dynamic in British political culture.

Let me start with something that annoys me week in, week out when watching British politics in action: And that is the brutal, nonsensical pantomime that is Prime Minister’s Questions. Yes, I really have to watch it all every week: it’s more a less a part of my job description! And to my mind, this mad little ritual neatly embodies something that is wrong with British politics in general: the deeply-entrenched adversarial nature of political discourse in Britain. As a politician here, you either win or lose. There’s nothing in between. The parliamentary front benches, famously two swords’ lengths apart, are testament to an almost reflexive need to compete – an urge I have encountered again and again, especially in England.

It starts young – at school sports events, for instance, even with primary-age children, and persists into adulthood. I remember being genuinely shocked after 2016 when the Tories kept branding everyone who hadn’t voted for Brexit as “Remoaners” and “losers” and that, even more astonishingly, no one really took issue with them doing so. It was taken for granted, normal. We lost, get over it. The often downbeat atmosphere at those big Anti-Brexit Rallies in 2016/17 spoke the same language. And they weren’t even reported on the BBC. This merciless disregard for almost half the electorate seemed such a stark contradiction to the wonderfully polite tone of everyday life in Britain, to the apparently respectful nature of dealing with one another I discovered when I first came here. Indeed, it took me quite a while to understand that this cautious politeness is not an expression of social equality, but rather about avoiding conflict in a deeply hierarchical system. It’s still lovely, of course. And makes life so much easier, obviously. But it masks a real issue.

For me the adversarial nature of British politics is just another side of the class system still very much engrained on this wonderful island. It seems to breed a perspective on the world that is zero-sum, win-or-lose. For one to go up, another must come down. Perhaps that’s why sports are such an obsession here. And consequently, British politics is also something of a spectator sport where there can only be a winner and a loser. There is no room for cooperation, and maybe that’s also one of the deeper explanations for Brexit. The “one plus one equals three” concept of co-operation among equals, so fundamental to the EU and to Julian Priestley’s thinking, seems alien here – certainly when it comes to politics. In fact, it’s worse: the idea of compromise and working together beyond national or party lines has an almost negative ring to it. It’s a ‘fudge,’ and a coalition – in my view, a perfectly reasonable way to govern – is labelled a “hung” parliament here. It’s a failure, a recipe for chaos.

So how does this insight help us answer the question at hand?  Because I think it is one of the reasons why Britain has proven so susceptible to populism – and why no-one wants to mention the B-word.

On a purely practical level, it’s simple: neither Labour nor the Tories talk about Brexit because there is no – ze-ro – direct political gain to doing so, and it certainly won’t win an election. Brexit was a mistake and no-one here wants to be associated with it, because that would make them a loser. And no one wants to be one, understandably, as you guys treat them so badly.

And so Keir Starmer is determined to win. Which means that he has to play the game. Instead of honestly explaining why Britain is in such a mess after Brexit, he avoids the topic altogether. Instead of exploring how we could find a way forward out of this mess together, Starmer is being disingenuous, explaining that “Brexit is settled” and that he will “make it work”, while knowing full well that this is not possible.

And as long as the ball eventually ends up in the goal and he doesn’t get a red card before the game is over, all is well.

But is it?

I don’t think so. While depriving the Tories of obvious lines of attack may be a good tactical move in the short term, the strategic price is high: Voters who would like to rejoin the EU or at least see a return to a customs union will have to hold their nose at the ballot box and hope Starmer is lying, or at least omitting parts of his plans for Britain’s future. And if Labour does indeed prove more radical in power than it currently appears – and, to solve Britain’s economic problems, it will have to be – others who voted for it may feel they have been deceived.

This is not the way to restore the trust in politics so badly damaged by Johnson, Truss and the Tory populism of recent years, and I am absolutely certain that Starmer is fully aware of this. Yet in a first-past-the-post electoral system, there is simply no other way to come to power. It’s a reflection of the adversarial political culture I’ve just described: candidates – and thus parties – either win or lose. And in this environment, there is no room for discussing problems and sounding out potential cross-party solutions ahead of an election.

So how is this standing in the way of tackling populism – specifically, the British breed of populism that came with Brexit? Because that kind of populism can only be beaten with a strong civil society, fair and equal, that believes in cooperation. Populism is not about factual policies, so it cannot be outflanked with policies – however radical they may be. Farage will always be one step ahead of you. And always tougher, always more radical. It’s a lesson Rishi Sunak has clearly failed to learn.

As populism is only ever about creating hatred, fear, and division the only way to defeat it is by surmounting the fear-driven divisiveness at its core, the them and us. What that requires is not cautious defensiveness, but rather a clear and rousing alternative that shows that there is a “we” in society – and that this society can support its weaker parts (and that this is a good thing).

If that sounds like pie in the sky, there are actually quite a few recent examples of where this has worked: Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who beat Erdoğan’s AKP party in last month’s local elections, knew how to harness decency and humanity. He praised the “language of love” instead of “rage”, and advised voters to hug a neighbour they disagreed with. Or take Poland, where Donald Tusk managed to defeat the right wing nationalist PIS by organising giant rallies he called “the marches of a million hearts”. He even took to forming a heart emoji with his hands wherever he appeared during the campaign. And if you, like me, thought in the beginning that this would look ridiculous on a middle-aged technocrat, you’d be wrong. His three-party coalition won a decisive victory, bringing out a historic turnout of more than 70% among the youngest voters, even higher than in 1989 after the Iron Curtain came down. Now, Poland is the first country on the road to recovery after years of damaging populist nationalism. What Donald Tusk and the Istanbul mayor did was to clearly demonstrate that there is no “will of the people”, that the (not-so) “silent majority” was always a myth. They showed that, in reality, there is no “them and us” and that the real majority is made up of the decent in society who want a healthy democratic system.

Which is certainly the case in Britain. Yet to translate this into electoral success, you need to give people a glimmer of hope, something that Labour clearly seems to be incapable of doing at the moment. And in my mind, the reason for this is not only the adversarial nature of British politics that undermines the very idea of a fair compassionate and equal society, but also the class system at the root of this culture.

What do I mean by that? Whenever I interview people in Britain about their society – and as I am currently doing a documentary on the English class system, I do that a lot – I detect a certain deference, a feeling of powerlessness, a willingness to accept hierarchies and persistent elements of privilege that I do not recognize in continental Europe. It’s a way of seeing the status quo as an immutable state of affairs which lets the country’s leaders get away with far more than is reasonable if they come (or pretend to come) from the upper classes.

I sometimes think we should all thank Boris Johnson for having cast a light on the numerous deficiencies of the British democratic system by so recklessly exploiting them: the remaining feudal elements, the non-existent checks and balances on governments with a powerful majority, and the ease with which sleaze and corruption can, almost unnoticed, permeate throughout the machinery of Westminster.

By way of example: Whenever I try to explain to my German audience the various opaque ways you can get into the House of Lords and become a lifelong legislator, there is a certain degree of bewilderment. And quite rightly so! How can it be that a Prime Minister can nominate not only his father to the Upper House, but also make a random intern who happens to have long blond hair a Baroness and the son of a Russian KGB agent a Lord? But although these moves were criticised in some corners, tutting disapproval was the limit of public outcry. And now, these people are accepted as wholly legitimate members of the House of Lords.

Just like the more than 90 hereditary peers next to them on the benches, all still – by convention –male and most of them only there because their ancestors were powerful land owners or distant relatives of the Royal family. And if one of them dies, they just appoint another one they elect among themselves. This is not what democracy is about. Do we really want birth-rights and errant Prime Ministers handing out important positions of power on a whim like medieval monarchs?

Ah yes, then there’s the monarchy itself. Thanks to several lengthy (and expensive!) investigative reports by the Guardian, we now know just how much power the royal family still wields. Sure, the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, but how can it then be that this monarchy is still able to vet bills without the public being informed – and then also make changes to proposed legislation which may affect their property without any public scrutiny? It famously took Alan Rusbridger and the Guardian 10 years and a trip to the Supreme Court to secure the release of Prince Charles’s “black spider notes” which showed how the heir to the throne lobbied senior government ministers on everything from badger culling to herbal medicines. The government spent more than £400,000 on legal costs in an ultimately failed bid to keep the memos secret, and Charles also managed to secure freedom-of-information exemptions for his properties.

Or to give you another recent example: When residents living in the Duchy of Cornwall wanted to buy the freehold of their own houses, they found this was impossible as the royal family had used a secretive procedure to vet three parliamentary acts preventing them from doing so for decades. And when the Labour peer Lord Berkeley, who is himself affected by this, tried to address the issue in the Lords, Tory frontbencher Earl Howe responded that the Government had no intention of changing the legal status of the Duchy of Cornwall because, if a future monarch has no heir, the duchy reverts to the Crown.

I have just recently met Lord Berkeley who might now, after years of stubborn insistence, be about to reach a compromise that will at least have the leaseholds on the houses affected extended, a typical British fudge, but still… better than nothing! When I asked him why even this – if you’ll forgive the pun: halfway house – had proved so very difficult, he answered: Because the government is simply afraid to pick a fight with the Monarchy.

Don’t get me wrong: in principle, I have nothing against the British monarchy as such – it’s probably one of the few “relatively” stable institutions the United Kingdom has at the moment – , but it is a remnant of a feudal past with no place in the political life of a modern democracy and so should be disentangled and separated from it.

What is more, the strange construction of the monarch as head of state that officially has to give royal assent to important government decisions actually allows British governments – already far more dominant than administrations in other democracies – to get away with even more by upholding the fiction that there is a balance of power. Yet, contrary to the way it looks when monarchs preside over the state opening of parliament, for instance, the royals never really dare to intervene – and, as the late Queen demonstrated in 2019, will keep from interfering with Downing Street’s plans even in the most extreme circumstances. The result is that what looks like a check on power is actually, behind the scenes, an uneasy stand-off which nevertheless allows both the monarchy and – even more so – the government of the day to do pretty much whatever they want. And another apparent check on executive power, the House of Lords, has, as Rwanda has recently shown, very limited possibilities to act as a counterbalance.

All of these undemocratic feudal vestiges, the overall missing checks and balances in the British political system, as well as the antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system, contribute to entrenching the thing that populism thrives on the most: Britain’s rife social inequality.

For this reason, Labour – if it comes to power – will have to do more than just restart the economy, which will be difficult enough: it will need to propose a real root-and-branch reform of the British system – reform of the kind it started in the 1990s. But this time, it has to get it right.

I don’t have the time to go into more detail here, but Will Hutton’s recent book “This time no mistakes, how to remake Britain” gives an excellent account of the scale of the challenge. As Hutton reminds Labour on every single page, half-hearted reforms won’t do this time. And not unimportantly, the surprise guest at the launch a few weeks ago – Keir Starmer – seemed to have actually read it and to agree with its conclusions, so I left the event feeling cautiously optimistic about things. (Then again, as we all know, fudge just tastes so good…)

All this will be all the more crucial in that the advocates of liberal democracy in Britain can no longer simply use European neighbours as role models – like back in 2020, when John Kampfner’s eulogy “Why the Germans do it better” became an instant bestseller. What might have been a slightly rose-tinted view then now seems outdated at best: Germany, and Europe have changed immeasurably in just a few short years. And not for the better. 

Which brings us to the second question:

What kind of Europe will Britain be dealing with in the next few years? Looking over at the Continent… Well, if you believe in the virtues of liberal democracy, then you might want to avert your eyes, because countries which were once edifying examples are now looking less reliably so. Take Germany, where the pro-Putin, far-right AfD – a political party officially declared, in parts, as right-wing extremists by the country’s internal secret service - is polling at about 30% while current chancellor Olaf Scholz’es  social democrats have sunk to half that. Viewing Germany from here, I see distinct parallels to Britain just prior to the Referendum on leaving the EU: dangerously naïve attempts by the centrist conservative CDU to parrot the anti-immigration sentiment of the AfD; and misguided self-assurance on the part of journalists convinced that they can take the right-wing extremists down by interviewing them when, in actual fact, all they are doing is giving them airtime. You can’t pick apart populists’ policies because they don’t have any. It’s all performative - just like Rwanda here.

Or look at France and Italy, where classic right-of-centre parties have more or less imploded. In France, the far-right Rassemblement National is now 14-16% ahead of Macron’s centrist alliance while Italy is being governed by Giorgia Meloni and her post-fascist outfit Fratelli d’Italia.

The only real beacon of hope at the moment is Poland – and it’s a bittersweet hope, tinged with trepidation at how difficult it is proving to re-establish the ransacked rule of law within the framework of captured democratic institutions. This, after all, is what is different about the new form of populism sweeping the western world: democratic institutions are not destroyed, but rather hollowed out from the inside until they are little more than façades behind which autocratic rulers can do as they see fit. It’s Potemkin village democracy – and now seems to be what Europe’s far-right are hoping to replicate everywhere. As such, neither Le Pen’s Rassemblement National nor Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia are now agitating to leave the EU: they’ve understood how damaging that would be for their country’s economies. Instead, they have an even more dangerous plan: stay inside the EU and try to do a Victor-Orbán-style inside job on it.

The European elections are just four weeks away, and on present polling, we can expect these national trends to be reflected in a far greater number of far-right and extremists MEPs – potentially up to 25%. Which means you can expect to read a lot of alarmist opinion pieces in the Telegraph and elsewhere over the next weeks about this being the end of the EU, etc. Which it won’t be. But it will make things more difficult in Brussels.

On this side of the Channel, meanwhile, we might have a completely contrary situation. In 2024, Britain now finds itself as the only major country in Europe where centrist social democrats have a realistic chance of a clear majority in government. So while Britain might be returning to its senses, parts of Europe seem set to take leave of them, and while this is – and I stress this – not the end of the EU, it is worrying, especially with the war in Ukraine opening up rifts across the continent.

Yet, somewhat counter-intuitively, I think that, in terms of a potential rapprochement between Europe and the UK, this state of affairs is good news for a Labour government in Britain if it decides to set a clear course towards Brussels.

Which brings me to the last question: what opportunities arise for renewed ties between Britain and the EU? And why am I optimistic?

Well, because the coming swerve to the right in the make-up of the European Parliament will not only have little impact on the EU’s stance towards Britain – it will actually be rather helpful.

How so? For one, on an EU level, the far-right parties are rather disorganised with a tendency to quarrel among themselves. Le Pen, for example, cannot stand the German AfD, as she finds their open extremism unhelpful. And Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a shrewd political operator, is doing her level best to keep it that way by making deliberately visible advances to parts of the right-wing ECR grouping in an attempt to drive a wedge between its constituent parties.  

Moreover, the rising threat from the far right in Europe means that a United Kingdom headed by a Labour government clearly wedded to the principles of liberal democracy will soon be more urgently needed in Brussels than ever before.

In this way, the bigger and real medium-term risk of a Le Pen victory in Paris is equally likely to drive more, not less UK/EU ambition. Include the potential effects of a second Trump term and closer cooperation will soon look more, not less attractive to both parties. Especially if, as currently looks likely, anglophile Ursula von der Leyen is re-elected: convinced of the benefits of closer ties between the EU and the UK, she would be an ally – and one who would also be in office until 2029, so for most of the first parliament of a new Labour Government.  

Security and the threats from the war in Ukraine will be another driver. In a recent essay, called “Progressive Realism”, David Lammy sketched out a vision of future British foreign policy, and while he remained somewhat vague, the overall direction is clear. Building on an earlier pledge by Keir Starmer to try and negotiate a new security pact with the EU after the 2024 UK election, he floated the idea of Britain attending the EU foreign affairs meetings (albeit without seeking ad-hoc membership) – an idea first raised by William Hague immediately after Brexit, but jettisoned by Boris Johnson when he came to power. This is crucial, as reengaging with EU institutions and recreating the institutional framework destroyed after Brexit will be an important first step in any rapprochement.

Also: Once accession talks with Ukraine or the Western Balkans get more serious, there will eventually be changes to the nature of a potential EU membership. In a policy paper by a Franco-German think-tank in September 2023, there were the first real calls for different tiers of member states. And indeed further enlargement – especially with Ukraine – is only really conceivable with something of this kind. Yet typically for the British press, this interesting and highly-complex theoretical paper was reported misleadingly as something that would soon be on offer for Britain under Keir Starmer – seemingly because it happened to coincide with a visit Sir Keir made to Paris that same week. In reality, Britain was not mentioned at all in that paper, so it really had nothing to do with the future relationship between Britain and Brussels.

This, by the way, shows one of the dangers Labor will have to avoid: any rapprochement with the EU runs the risk of being completely distorted here – all the more easily because the country is even less informed today about the way the EU works than it was in 2016.

But still, the point stands: a two-tier structure or options for more loosely-associated memberships is something that might be a realistic mid-term option. While the EU is currently not ready for any kind of enlargement, it is now facing internal and external volatility of a wholly new order, and this may soon produce ideas that would have been unthinkable 5 years ago. 

And so, with this look into the near-future, let me conclude. 

I know there is a lot of you here who fought against Brexit and still hope that Britain might re-join the EU – and do so sooner rather than later. As we all know, though, this is not on the cards for the foreseeable future. Yet this fact has rendered something else clear – and made other things possible. The coming years are an opportunity to recognise the deficiencies in Britain’s own democratic structures and repair its own system in order to protect it from future attacks. What is happening in Poland at the moment is highly encouraging in that regard. It shows: what one generation does, another one can undo. It is possible to repair a broken democracy. Over there, a whole country is now talking about the rule of law and how to fortify its Supreme Court against future attacks from the nationalist PiS. On the precipice, at the eleventh hour, there was a civil awakening in Poland that is genuinely uplifting, the emergence of a new desire to defend liberal democracy – especially among the young.

And even if the extent of state capture in Britain is nowhere near what happened under the Polish populists, there is a lot to learn from the current democratic rehabilitation in the East. It is about a society taking its fate into its own hands again. It is about cooperating, about making “them and us” back into just “us”.  It is not about winners and losers, but about how to create a society where, even if not everyone can be a winner, you don’t ride roughshod over those who lost as if they deserved their fate. “You lost, get over it.” This really encapsulates the cruelty of British populism in a nutshell for me. We need to learn that life – that politics – is not a football game.

Let me finish it in the spirit of Julian Priestley, with his commitment to the idea of a Europe where joint politics produce more than the sum of its parts: the Britain of today needs a more cooperative, a more modern and mature form of politics to safeguard and fortify its democracy. It needs to get serious about creating a more equal and better educated society, one that is able to fight off future populist attacks on its democracy. Because they will come. But the good news in all this is: a clear majority in Britain now seems to have understood that the country took the wrong path in 2016.

As such, in this moment of clarity, we might now have the chance to recognise and remedy those deficiencies – and the chance to restore Britain to what it was once perceived as in Europe, Germany especially: a pragmatic, yet compassionate country and a respected member of the European community of nations.

And, last but not least: Europe will need such a Britain.

 

 

 

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