John Marriott

By John Marriott Columnist

We had a referendum on EU membership nearly three years ago and there was a “clear result”, at least as far as Lincolnshire was concerned. Many people hoped that this would be an end to it. “After all, what part of ‘Leave’ don’t people understand?” I hear many of you asking, and you may have a point.

However, what many people choose to ignore is the fact that, of the voting population in the country as a whole, around 38% voted to leave, around 35% voted to remain, while around 27%, for reasons ranging from apathy to a genuine feeling of confusion, never voted at all. Hardly a massive majority for anything. ‘In or out’, ‘yes or no’ was always a crude choice on what was really a many faceted issue. Yet some people like to live their lives in black or white, whilst some of us prefer to live our lives in colour, so to speak.

As a pragmatic rather than fanatical Remainer, I could live with a ‘deal’ that saw us still having close economic ties with our treaty partners for the past forty years. I don’t support further fiscal, financial or political integration as far as the UK is concerned. Not all EU members support a Federal Europe, let alone an EU army. Indeed, we already have opt-outs. I could support the free movement of LABOUR but not of PEOPLE, just as I could support the repatriation of powers regarding agriculture and fisheries, provided that our farmers and fishermen realise that, for this to work to our advantage, they really need to step up to the plate. People argue that staying that close without a say would make us a vassal state. Really? As a country that would have to ask US permission to press the nuclear button if, heaven forbid, the need ever arose, we are hardly totally independent now.

Those people who just want us to ‘get out’ in the hope that this impasse will end may have a point. If only life were that simple; but it’s not. What if the dire predictions about the consequences of our crashing out of the EU were to come true? Are we prepared to take that risk? What I support is a compromise between that view and the view of those, who support a so called ‘People’s Vote’, because they reckon that Remain would win this time. Supposing we did get another vote and neither side of the argument scored a significant win, say, by at least 10%? That would probably take us back to square one.

The next few weeks are going to be crucial. If any further government plan fails, then it may well be up to Parliament to ‘take back control’, control which it really always had, especially with our unwritten constitution which some people appear to be willing to make up as they go along. As the EU has said, the ball is definitely in our court. After all it’s we, who want to leave them. The first thing that UK needs to do, if there is no significant breakthrough at Westminster in the next couple of weeks, is to apply to have Article 50 suspended at least until the end of June. Any longer and we would probably have to field candidates in the upcoming European Parliamentary Elections. Then, through a series of indicative votes, which need to be free from political party whipping, we may just be able to come up with a compromise deal that finds a parliamentary majority and hopefully the approval of the EU.

Also, isn’t it about time that the arch Brexiteers came up with a viable plan of their own, instead of just blithely parroting the idea of ‘trading on World Trade Organisation rules’? It’s really not that simple, as leaving the EU would rescind our WTO membership and we would most likely have to reapply to join as a sovereign nation and there are several WTO members, who have already indicated that they would oppose this.

If we do cobble together a deal that is acceptable to the BRITISH Parliament and the EU, perhaps then, to give the people a final say, we could consider holding a so called ‘preferendum’ where voters, instead of being given a binary choice, were asked to number, if they wished, in order of preference, options such as: Brexit with no deal / Brexit with a deal / Remain. If no option passes the 50% mark, the option with the least support could be eliminated and its second choices, if any, could be reassigned until one choice came out on top. Too complicated? Well, if you can’t count up to three then you might have problems. In any case, to achieve this would require the amount of time that would stretch Article 50 towards the end of year. And we haven’t even begun the transition period yet! The real problem is that, by the time this article is published, we might, as our American cousins say, be in ‘a whole new ball game’. But, please, please, please, don’t make that ANOTHER General Election!

Over to you, Westminster. It’s time to take back control!

John was a councillor for thirty years, finally retiring in 2017. A schoolteacher by profession, he served on the North Hykeham Town Council (1987-2011), the North Kesteven District Council (1987-1999, 2001-2007) and the Lincolnshire County Council (2001-2017). He was also a County Council member of the former Lincolnshire Police Authority for eight years until standing down in 2009. In 1997 he was the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham. He is currently not a member of any political party.

By John Marriott Columnist

The question of our country’s status as a world power in the light of a departure from the EU, with or without a deal, has been raised again recently. Whether or not we have another referendum, because that is really what a People’s Vote is all about, is not what I’m writing about. What continues to intrigue me, however, is what drives so many people, especially in places like Lincolnshire, to think that nothing fundamental has changed on Planet Earth since those schoolroom wall maps used to show all those areas of pink around the globe. You probably know the sort of throwaway lines that we heard at the time of the EU Referendum and still hear now: “Get back control”, “Put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain,” “the unelected Brussels bureaucrats,” etc. 

In a speech at West Point Military Academy in December 1962, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said; “Great Britain has lost an Empire but not yet found a role.” To be honest, the writing had been on the wall since at least the end of WW2 when Churchill was to all intents and purposes bypassed by Roosevelt and Stalin at both the Tehran and Yalta Conferences. The post war world was very much their creation. In 1956, following Colonel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, our ill-conceived joint venture with France into Egypt (aided and abetted, as we now know, by the fledgling state of Israel) and our swift withdrawal after President Eisenhower’s ‘threat’ to ruin the fragile British economy by selling off his country’s pound sterling bonds, should surely have confirmed our status in the world power league even back then.

Please don’t accuse me of a lack of patriotism. For a small country in terms of geography and population we have been punching above our weight for centuries — but more often than not in alliance with others and still do in many fields. Whatever you think about the circumstances that led up to it, the fact that back in 1982 we could ship troops half way around the world and retake the Falklands was a massive achievement in military terms alone (and probably guaranteed the Tories another decade or so in power). Also, I do not subscribe to the view that our colonial heritage was altogether an unmitigated disaster. Space does not allow me to mention all the sporting triumphs over the years, nor the literary heritage our cosmopolitan language has given the world, nor indeed the breakthroughs in science and technology that began on these islands.

Having studied, lived and worked abroad for a number of years as a young man, I got an early impression of how many parts of the world viewed us. This has not changed. You can’t get that from a couple of weeks each year on the Costa del Sol and certainly not from a cruise around the Mediterranean. The few years I spent on the Canadian Prairies and the North German Plain were an education in international relationships in themselves and I returned to these shores with a very different view of our place in the world from the one I had before I left.

We British are blessed and cursed in equal measure. Living on an island has enabled us to avoid the kind of traumas that have over the centuries been visited on our friends and neighbours across the Channel. The adoption of English as a ‘lingua franca’ in many parts of the world has made us lazy linguistically – and I should know having spent 34 years of my professional life trying to teach German and French. Many of us, from all so called classes, still exhibit that sense of entitlement and what used to be called ‘splendid isolation’, which is no longer justified. As the postal lottery slogan goes: ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it’.

These factors amongst others may explain why many of us are such reluctant ‘Europeans’. We are in many ways different from our European partners. Living on an island possibly accounts for that. The cynic might say that, whilst we usually stick to the rules, many of them seem quite happy to bend them, and he or she would not be entirely incorrect. Perhaps, had we played the same game, we might have done better.

On the political level, one side of me can see why some of the arch Brexiteers want us out of the EU with no deal at all. For them a post Brexit UK could be an entrepreneurs’ paradise, with a race to the bottom as far as employment rights, health standards, environmental protection and basic freedoms are concerned. For Corbyn’s Labour Party, exit from the EU could create the conditions for the kind of ’backs-to-the-wall’ siege economy necessary to bring in the kind of changes that have been tried around the world and found wanting. It might have worked between 1939 and 1945 and throughout the post war austerity years — but back then we lived in a far more ‘take-it-nor-leave-it’ world than we do today.

So, as some of us have come to realise, Britannia no longer ‘rules the waves’, if it ever did to the extent that certain newspapers would have us believe. However, she is still very much afloat and, who knows, given the present state of world affairs, if she is canny enough, she might still come out of this with a smile on her face — but you need a great deal of finger crossing for that to happen.

As Robert Burns famously wrote: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”; or as Harold Macmillan was alleged to have said when asked by a journalist what might blow his government off course; “Events, dear boy, events.” Let’s see whether EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier and his friends are still smiling after next year’s EU parliamentary elections and if the current trade war between President Trump and China, among others, hots up any more. The world is going through turbulent times, both environmentally, economically and politically which, in many ways, make our own little local difficulty seem small beer indeed!

John was a councillor for thirty years, finally retiring in 2017. A schoolteacher by profession, he served on the North Hykeham Town Council (1987-2011), the North Kesteven District Council (1987-1999, 2001-2007) and the Lincolnshire County Council (2001-2017). He was also a County Council member of the former Lincolnshire Police Authority for eight years until standing down in 2009. In 1997 he was the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Sleaford and North Hykeham. He is currently not a member of any political party.