British liberals have created a Europe of their imagination, but how
closely does it resemble reality?
The apocryphal newspaper headline
— “fog in the channel, continent isolated” — famously
said something about the British mindset. It’s hardly surprising that we are
insular — we are literally an island after all — but this insularity is
something that curiously crosses all barriers in British social and political
life, whether of Left or Right, middle or working class, and on almost every
issue.
This is true even for British liberals
who, reeling since the night of 23 June, 2016, have made the continent a sort
of spiritual home as they’ve become alienated from their countrymen.
Right-thinking Britons see their country
as an embarrassment sliding towards populism, a sad contrast to the moral
superpower that is Germany and France under centrist leader Emmanuel Macron.
Yet the Continent of the Anglo liberal imagination is as unreal as the supposed
nostalgic Britain of yesteryear loved by Leavers.
Italy
Britain, many people fear, is moving
away from the European dream and towards fascism. It’s such an
established meme that even the most recent BBC Agatha Christie adaptation was a
thinly-veiled analogy about 1930s fascism and Brexit.
Yet people keep on coming to this Nazi
hellhole, with the fabled “Brexodus” of migrants leaving the country actually
seeing an extra 212,000 people arriving last year, and with record numbers of foreign students, too.
The fascist Brexit Britain theory is
held among a minority of Remainers because they’re measuring the country by a
theoretical ideal rather than comparing it to other — real — countries. So
while the hate crime “surge” following the referendum mostly involved very
minor incidents, Italy saw a number of openly racist murders during the late
2010s.
Whether they’re connected or not, Italy
has also had a populist Right-wing government in power for most of the past
four years, and the Lega may well return — at around 33% in the polls, it is by
some distance the most popular party. Italian politics has been, as long as
anyone can remember, chaotic and unstable, which makes me wonder if Mary Beard’s Italian colleagues who make her feel
“embarrassed” about Brexit have been paying attention to their own
country.
France
A central theme of fascism is a love of
violence against ideological opponents, and so a visitor from outer space with
a vague understanding of our human political philosophy would probably conclude
that there was only one fascist state in the EU — France, where the brutality of the police is on a scale that would be
unfathomable in England.
Among the recent victims of the
gleefully violent French police is a teenager who lost an eye in Strasbourg and
an elderly woman in Marseilles who died from her injuries after being hit by a
rubber bullet. Just this month prosecutors launched a probe after a video
appeared to show a policeman firing point-blank at protestors
with a riot control gun.
France is quite far down from Britain in
the Freedom International rating, and treats minorities
like Roma in a way that would do more than embarrass liberal Brits.
Right-wingers often complain that the
horrific behaviour of the French police towards the gilets jaunes has
received scant coverage in the BBC; certainly if Hungary or Poland treated
their citizens like that, I’m pretty sure it would be on our news more. But
then France has always been a politically violent country.
The last mass murder of protesters in
England occurred in 1819, when 18 people were
killed by authorities in Manchester; in France police in Paris killed
up to three hundred unarmed
protesters in 1961.
Had anything even vaguely comparable
happened during the US Civil Rights era it would have been the subject of about
500 films and even my children in an English primary school would now be
learning about it now. But then Anglo liberals are fascinated with
the Anglo world; not so much by the continent.
France is different to England, in some
ways far more traditional; for example, the
same-sex marriage campaign there was opposed by enormous protests, while,
like many continental countries, it has a 12-week limit for abortion, when even
talk of a 20 weeks-limit would have the Anglo commentariat dressing up in
those Handmaid’s Tale outfits.
Germany
Germany also has strict laws on abortion
and its rate is around a third that of England, while it only passed same-sex
marriage in 2017, against the wishes of liberal idol Angela Merkel.
But no one cares, because a certain type
of Anglo sees Germany as flame-carrier of all that is good and
forward-thinking, locked in a battle with the forces of darkness towards the
east — Hungary, Poland and especially Russia.
Yet Germany is, if not Russia’s ally,
then a close trading partner; it has far, far better relations with the country than Britain does, largely built on energy
supply, and Germany’s support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline makes
it far easier for Moscow to exert pressure on the west. Europe’s
biggest economy also gives far less in international aid than Britain, which donates more
than any other country in the continent and is, proportionally, the sixth-most
generous.
Scandinavia
Even more so, Scandinavia is seen as an
ultra-progressive paradise to British progressives, especially those who — like
me — enjoy Borgen. Yet neither Denmark nor Sweden are as social
democratic as Anglos believe, with large private sector involvement in areas
run by the state over here; in Denmark even the ambulances are privatised, while
Sweden is fiscally more
free market than the US, and has three times as many private health
operations as Britain (proportionally).
Denmark also has immigration
restrictions that would have British academics in full “Toby Young has said
something” outrage mode — and these were put in place by its centre-Left party.
Are the Danes racist bigots? By any
measurement they are among the most tolerant, liberal people on earth — they
just don’t share the Anglo elite’s belief that immigration controls are necessarily
immoral, a worldview that makes us quite unusual globally.
The Nordic countries generally also have
fewer females in top jobs compared with the United States, and a smaller proportion of womenstudying STEM subjects than Islamic countries like Malaysia and Oman.
British progressives see patriotism, and
particularly its violent, heroic element, to be positively primitive. Because
they’re not keen on the idea of dying for their country they assume other
liberal nations are like them — and yet the Swedes and Finn do not feel the
same way and are positively gagging for a chance, way ahead of any other
non-ex-Soviet European state.
Racism
Although Britain has fallen to fascism,
it curiously remains by most measurements one of the least racist countries,
the least worried about inter-racial marriage, or living next door to people of a different race.
Britain is also unique among European
countries in having a tiny education gap between the children of natives and
immigrants, whereas in every continental country it is large.
Europeans are far less pro-immigration than Americans are, while Britons
are among the most pro-immigration of Europeans, and public attitudes towards immigrants have softened further since
the referendum.
Americans and Britons also have stronger
sensitives about race than continental Europeans. Recently Italian football
authorities decided to take a stand against racism in the game, so they hired
artists to paint… monkeys. Many Italians are of course embarrassed by this,
but something like that would never have seen the light of day in England.
On a similar note, every December lots
of Anglo-liberals are shocked to learn that the Dutch have a festival once a
year where people black up as Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”.
Although it is true that the Netherlands
is a more liberal — and generally better — version of England, it is different
to ours. It also has a far stronger religious element, which might surprise
people who rarely travel beyond Amsterdam. Britain’s progressive sibling even
has its own Bible Belt, where women are discouraged from wearing
short skirts and swearing is even prohibited in some communities.
Healthcare
Perhaps no subject brings out the
parochial Brit more than healthcare, most of whom believe that there are two
systems in the world: our NHS, and the American system where paramedics rifle
through your wallet before giving you CPR. Most remain blissfully unaware
that many of our neighbours do not have an NHS. Germany
doesn’t. France doesn’t. Switzerland doesn’t.
Germany and France both have the “Bismarck system”, not the “Beveridge Model” used in
Britain, and have much better healthcare outcomes.
Citizenship
When the Home Secretary suggested that
London-born jihadi Shamima Begum should be stripped of her nationality it was
widely denounced as racist by UK media, American media, and even by Al Jazeera, the network owned by the not-at-all-racist
Qatari state.
Is taking away the citizenship of a
jihadi born in the country that odd? The Germans do it, and so do the Danes, and I wouldn’t call either of those
countries fascist dystopias. Even the proposal to allow a jihadi bride with two
children to return to Norway has brought down the country’s government, which includes
the populist-right Progress Party.
But then the whole idea of jus
soli — that being born in a state confers some natural right to live
there — is far from universal. The French have long had it, and so have the
Americans, yet it’s never been the norm in Germany or other countries. And
why would it? Different countries have different traditions.
Free movement
Despite all the despair about Brexit
taking away our freedom to live, love and travel the world, not
many Brits choose to live in continental Europe.
Most who do are retirees in Spain, who
aren’t taking the opportunity to explore the world but just want less winter in
their autumn years. There are just 6,000 Brits in Poland, for example, about
0.6% of the number of Poles in Britain, while even the numbers in France are
small compared to the French diasporas in London, and the age difference between the two groups is significant.
This isn’t a criticism – I live about 10
miles from where I grew up – but the rhetoric of Europeanism and of free
movement isn’t matched by the reality.
Likewise with students and their
opportunity to explore the continent; lots of young Britons would like to
study in the EU, but then several non-EU states take part in the Erasmus scheme
too, and the country they most want to live in is, of course, the United States.
International affairs
People who worry that Britain’s
relations with our European partners also need to bear in mind that Italy and France are now so at loggerheads that
they’re engaged in a sort of proxy war in Libya, each backing different shady militias in
that benighted country.
In contrast Britain, France and Germany
have grown increasingly close on military matters since 2016, a by-product of
the United States’ inevitable drift away from Europe towards Asia, with various joint statements reflecting the stronger three-nation
alliance.
There
are two continental Europes: the fictional one of the British liberal
imagination, and the reality; both are indeed lovely places, but they are
rather different to each other; and despite globalisation, the internet and all
that business, the continent still remains very much isolated.