We are standing in a fresh-mown London park. The showers have kept away for this fine cobalt day, as the crowds loiter around the marquee. Lord Teddy Taylor has just concluded his welcome speech, congratulating in particular the guests who have just received their MBEs from the King. These are honours that have been a long time coming, granted for services to political campaigning. In one case over fifty years of grassroots activism dating back to the 1960s, has only now been recognised another ten years on from when Britain left the EU.

The service they rendered was fighting the argument on corners, on high streets and in markets, leafleting the public about the costs of EEC membership. At the time most people thought of them as eccentric. In retrospect, thanklessly they kept the flame burning.

The case has been proven by just how the EU has changed by comparison over the last decade. The Euro has pushed member states into adopting yet more tax harmonisation, and a role for the Board of the Central Bank in setting national rates.

Regions, such as Catalunya, Flanders, Northern Italy’s ‘Padania’, and Bavaria, have used Subsidiarity to pull more financial management down from Brussels, bypassing their national capitals and conducting it at their level. The effect is already being felt as several national governments see their centralised power ebbing away. Regional governments push for more money by linking up with their counterparts in neighbouring provinces. Belgium barely now exists other than in name. Such is the alchemy of European federalism.

Defence policy has had a disastrous run in the EU. Britain’s withdrawal from the emerging European arrangements had many consequences. It freed up the British defence industry from several contracts that the defence consortia would have chained it to, producing inferior products at higher price years after the deadline , a lesson all too slowly learned from the military Airbus, Eurofighter, Eurologistics, Euromissile and Horizon Frigate projects. Withdrawal had protected Britain’s special bilateral arrangements with the Americans over the transfer of technologies, and its sharing of intelligence, neither of which Washington trusted leaking out to the continental Europeans. And it woke some European capitals up to the fact that if they wanted to give Brussels some muscles to flex, they would have to pay for them.

By December 2011, the Americans had left Iraq, and a few years later, except for small numbers of trainers and special forces, Afghanistan had been vacated too, leaving the fight to an invigorated Afghan National Army. Yet of itself that did not leave the world a safer place.

The developing ‘European fist’, however, barely came out of its pocket. The brass buttons and brass bands of Eurocorps were not deployed during the Euphrates water dispute; the EU turned to Turkey as its proxy. An EU task force was not despatched to intervene in the South China Sea crisis over the Spratleys, since the Council of Ministers split over trade with Beijing. During the Djibouti incursion, the French were forced to act alone. More embarrassingly for European unity was when a German supplier for the Iranian Bomb was kidnapped by Mossad during a ‘holiday’ in Eritrea. Protests by a delegation to Tel Aviv, led by a Greek MEP, brought the smart riposte that it had been another German armourer who had sold the Turks cannons that brought down the walls of Constantinople.

In short, the EU never had just one foreign policy, it rarely had fewer than five; but in trying to have five, it ran none at all.

Within the EU, integration after 2010 ran more swiftly in other areas. The reality of having a single external frontier, no internal borders, a common immigration system, an embryonic Euro-FBI, and ID cards backed up by a computer network did reduce still further the sense that travelling from Santander to Biarritz, or from Amsterdam to Cologne, you were leaving a country and entering another. The programme of training the personnel the same way, sometimes communally in ‘European administrative schools’, certainly made the public officials feel more as if they were part of a common European service, especially now that the uniforms are standardised. The project of building a country called Europe, which ordinary people could see all around them and to which they owed their loyalty, began to become more visible in the polls.

It was further helped by the grands projets that French Presidents love; big symbolic schemes that left a huge imprint, and in this case came plastered with EU flags, billboards and publicity showing that the money came out of what was now openly called the “EU federal budget”. Examples included the Sicilian bridge, ‘linking Scylla to Charybdis’, to quote the movie advert that would so often be lampooned, the trans-Europa single rail network authority, and the new Brussels superministries.

Two of these ministries in particular drew attention for their lavish marble facades. The former DG Environment, lately renamed the European Environment Ministry, is perhaps a little ahead of itself in that it hasn’t formally been given a minister in any European treaty, but then this is how Brussels has always worked. Its power is really only matched by the Office of Federal Taxation, though here again so much lies in a name hiding a turf war between the Commission and the European Central Bank.

The Bureau of Shipping, covering the single-flagged EU merchant and fisheries fleets, comes a poor third in the grandeur scale, despite the tropical atrium. Yet it pays to look beyond the bronze iconry and unhinged abstract art when assessing other real centres of political power.

The Commission’s Department of Education only exists on its letter heads. Formally speaking it remains a Directorate-General but its role is betrayed by its reach. Two hours of every secondary school week is given over to European Studies.  Science lessons, for instance, explore the common ancestry of the discoverer.  European language classes are compulsory at the expense of Russian, Mandarin, Japanese and Urdu. History classes concentrate on the founding fathers of the EEC. Bonaparte and Caesar provide comparisons of past attempts to unite Europe. Hitler and Stalin are co-opted as reasons why the EU was created and needs to succeed. All this is reinforced by the Department’s standardised school books, teaching about the successes of the European Union from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, so that the schoolchildren of today can grow up to become the European citizens of tomorrow.

The staff naturally liaise with DG Culture, also today in 2020 a self-styled ministry. This is responsible for TV and Radio Europa, as well as an array of festivals, street parties, and proms across the EU and beyond. It is the new Jesuit Order in the EU’s struggle for the citizen’s allegiance and identity. It embodies the spirit of the twelve star flag, and showcases Europe’s unity by co-opting its greatest composers. Beethoven, Debussy, Verdi, and the like are wrenched from time and nationhood and made to emphasise the common citizenship and the mutual genealogy of the audience.

Other Directorates General are just as busy, but keep lower profiles. The Health people are occupied with putting together the framework for a common EU medical system. The skeleton for a common employment and social welfare system is in place, with legislation in the pipeline for a uniform welfare payment – the ‘first true EU tax on the pay check’. The flip side is that the red tape is again starting to flow, as bigger departments justify their importance by passing new laws to transcend borders. Sadly, the effect is a negative one, and already we are seeing a repeat of the economics of the turn of the century as businesses look to rebase themselves where costs are cheaper and interference less onerous, including, but not exclusively, Britain.

If Washington DC was Rome on the Potomac. Brussels DC is Naples on the Charleroi Canal.

It is a fairground for lobbyists, and the world capital for pressure groups. Take the Galileo programme. Billions of Euros wasted on a satellite system that duplicated the American GPS network and whose only function was to help Chinese missile cruisers  wargame off Taiwan. That programme kept lobbyists in Dollars, Yen and Renminbi for much of the early 2010’s. Then there is the constant lobbying over what counts as approved state aid, interpreted as an essential grant that keeps a social group or community going. For the past thirty years, the unofficial line has been that if it smelts, burns, types or flies and carries the country’s flag, the Commission will bend the rules to allow governments to subsidise it.

Sometimes the lobbyists get trumped by the mob. Back in 2012 the French had their own version of Britain’s ‘metric martyrs’ with a group of vintners ferociously defending their vineyard traditions. A few thousand angry farmers, joined by traditional German brewers, scuppered those proposals. It certainly proved far more effective than the failed lobbying within the system that the Dutch Government resorted to during the Musandam standoff in 2015. The threat to the Gulf oil supply had led to the Union taking control of the Netherlands’ North Sea reserves in order to guarantee gas supplies to member states. Public opinion in the Netherlands was outraged, but the Lisbon Treaty articles were there for all to read, and Brussels had the power to do it. But it could no longer do so to Britain.

So in summary we can say this much of the current European Union; that in 2020 it is where it would have been in 2035 if obstructionist Britain had not left. Ever-closer Union made these changes inevitable in all things other than timing. When we visit Brussels we see poop deck territory, the superstructure of a federal state, from where instructions are piped down to the member states’ civil servants below decks.

The difference is, of course, that Britain is not an ordinary seaman in the same boat.

By taking the big step in 2010 and breaking the cycle, the UK in 2020 is considerably better off, with an economy that now it has regained its competitive edge, is outpacing its EU competitors.

Meanwhile, the sheer amount of money saved has been astonishing.

Net payments over the whole of Britain’s membership, from 1973 to 2010, ran to £81 billion. That was the amount paid in total by Britain, just in membership fees, once all the grants it had received had been subtracted.

Gross, it ran to a quarter of a trillion Pounds, donated to the EU to be managed on our behalf.

It was a major show of trust in the efficiencies of a foreign civil service, quietly managing an ambitious political project that this country’s leaders openly rejected. But as history now effortlessly proves, it was a trust that was deliriously misplaced.

If you haven’t received your book yet, you can be assured that we’re processing all of them as fast as possible. You don’t need to take my word for it, either – here’s one of my colleagues battling the heap of envelopes today!

Associated membership was the name given for the arrangement. The British got their deal; Free Trade and Friendship, accepting the price of a four year wind-down of the old system of contributions to the EU budget. Some were disappointed not to pull the financial support more quickly; this proved particularly acute in November 2010, when the country teetered on the edge of a national strike. Huge cuts had been required across government departments to stop the country going bankrupt. MPs had grudgingly agreed a token pay cut; some of the new intake had excelled in volunteering for more, though even this did not endear themselves to the GPs who were already limiting their hours in protested anticipation of a major pay slash. Nevertheless, in this context, a settlement that removed a major diplomatic distraction, while starting to return billions of pounds to the Treasury and defibrillate the economy, proved a significant and timely fillip.

So thirty nine years after joining the EEC, the UK rejoined the ranks of self-governing countries of the world. It was, fisheries excepted, a mostly amicable parting. In its place arose a bilateral treaty that spelled out in basic terms that advances made in freedom of movement would be kept, under safeguards; free trade would be advanced bilaterally; goods imported from third countries would not be Trojan- Horsed; and countries would cooperate in areas of common interest.

Parliamentarians were now extraordinarily busy. For once, the agenda was driven not by the weight of new regulations, but by Queen’s Speech after Queen’s Speech filled with references to bureaucratic burdens that were being repealed. A Cabinet Member was even dedicated solely to the task.

There were two further direct developments. The first was rapid. Within hours of the announcement, the United Kingdom Independence Party announced that its time had passed. Arguments still remained about the exact trading terms with Brussels and the appeal structures, but the reality was undeniable. The country was breaking away from the structure of a future United States of Europe.

The shift of many of these ardent wet-weather political activists, once their hangovers had diminished and they concentrated on the uncertain 2014 General Election, proved a significant factor in the election of the second term Cameron Government. It’s commitment to ‘run British politics for what was right rather than for re-election’ earned it short-term enemies but gained it greater respect.

The second consequence was more of a pinball effect, or as one Italian commentator mysteriously put it, “a burning turtle”. Warsaw, Prague, Tallinn, Dublin, Copenhagen and Stockholm had all now seen that there was more than one deal on offer. If they so chose, they too could seek a form of association that did not mean they would leave, as their children’s legacy, the loss of nationhood. For the first time in forty years, musty consensus broke. The democratic genius flourished as new deals were struck, and a son-of-EFTA became reality.

Not everyone was happy. A number of former MEPs, who had become redundant overnight, begrudged their changed circumstance. They had ended up with a particularly generous pension, though only after a few weeks of hairy conversations with their bank managers when they discovered that, along with other Brits formerly employed in the European institutions, no government actually had any liability to pay their salaries or pensions. It was the last unfunded black hole of Britain’s EU membership.

However, there were enough former EU officials in the House of Lords to pull strings and find jobs for the boys. Those peers grumbled well enough, but the number of stories that now emerged from former staffers about how the system used to be run kept most pro-Brussels heads down, and incidentally triggered some valuable reforms as member state governments forced through changes.

Come 2012, Boris Johnson’s Olympics for a brief spring highlighted a Britain that had emerged from the immediate spectre of bankruptcy and was beginning to regain its confidence. The Games were not as elaborate as once anticipated – indeed the ceremonies made a 1948 – like virtue of being frugal in a time of scarcity – but the changed politics had provided a psychological uplift. The floats and fireworks looked back on the merchant adventurers and heroes of the last Elizabethan Age but they also suggested that the same spirit would be unleashed again in the years to come.
 
The British had learned an unvarnished lesson from the brutal statistics of old EU membership.

The daily cost of the Olympics ran at the same level as the daily tariff of Britain’s former EU membership. But the Olympics had lasted a month, not four hundred and fifty.

Thanks to such visual comparisons between white elephants, the price tag of policies such as the CAP was made abundantly clear to everyone . A question of Bread and Games, then.

A second crucial element was a clear cut pledge to restore the Social Chapter opt out, which by definition meant that a renegotiation of the treaties was on the cards.

Much to their surprise, the new Government found that, in an ionised political atmosphere, these commitments began to build their own momentum, carrying it forward to contemplate a more fundamental realignment in ways that even a year earlier it would have thought unimaginable.

The red button was a promise made in late 2009 that had appeared to be little more than a sensible accounting exercise. It was a pledge on entering office just to do the sums. Treasury officials would be quietly instructed within the first week of the new government to begin a cost-benefit analysis of EU membership.

The concept had long been highly controversial. On at least two occasions, previous Chancellors had quashed research looking into the figures. Both Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown had pulled the plug on the suspicion that the figures likely to emerge were going to be embarrassing; in Chancellor Brown’s case, the analysis was pooh- poohed as a stunt by relatively junior staff on their own initiative.

Treasury staff were tasked with coming up with the basic audit: net and gross budget contributions; cost of red tape; impact on trade with EU member states; tariff barriers with the rest of the world; projected emerging markets, and so on. Other government departments were invited to contribute to the more broad brush aspects in areas relating to them. Civil servants took to the task with fascination and aplomb.

The five pages contributed by the Leader of the House were the most contentious, dealing with the abstracts of democracy and accountability, though the Home Secretary’s chapter also sparked some Cabinet controversy in the civil liberties paragraphs.

In any event, the Treasury officials beavered away over the late spring. The initial figures quickly leaked, hardly surprising given the sums involved. The early working draft revealed that there was a division of opinion. One group of civil servants took a laser beam view and held that EU membership cost the UK four per cent of its GDP every year in fees and bills. A second group, however, held that this figure did not reflect accurately the subsidiary and more widespread damaging effects of membership, and held the true figure to run at between 8 and 9 per cent.

The British press were staggered; ‘Mugged!’ bellowed the front page of The Sun. The continental press in turn took a particular interest when the figures across the EU as a whole were released. This was originally intended to be kept from the final document for reasons of diplomatic nicety. They ran at €1,219 billion per year. With 500 million EU citizens, that cost an average of nearly €2,500 per EU citizen every year.

Attempts to rubbish the statistics were blown out of the water by former European Commissioner Gunther Verheugen, who was interviewed in bronzed beachfront retirement and restated his former claim that EU red tape alone cost businesses €600 billion, or around a twentieth of the whole EU economy.

The conservative Treasury estimate now looked excessively cautious, and consensus settled at a cost to the UK (depending upon the Pound/Euro exchange rate) running in the order of between £117 billion and £134 billion per year.

Against this, the benefits looked weak. This was because there remained considerable uncertainty as to what tariff and non-tariff barriers UK exporters would face if the country were not a member. The Department of Business had already for some time assessed that even outside of the EU, the UK would still enjoy preferential access. In the worst case scenario this would be the ‘most favoured nation tariff’, a misnomer, as this provided for no preferential tariff, though in turn it would itself encourage the UK and EU exporters as well,to establish a free trade agreement.

The wild card was over non-tariff barriers, particularly differences in regulations, such as Health and Safety rules. The best case scenario was initially viewed as a deal permitting full continuing access to the Single Market similar to that of members of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), though without influencing the legislation that governed it.

On review, however, that position was struck out as too much a legacy of an old political holding line, designed to distract MPs from possible alternatives. New choices were explored; a bilateral trading agreement, such as that between the EU and Canada or Mexico, which were ‘EEC Treaty Lite’; reinvigorating and expanding EFTA, and re-establishing a broader bilateral deal; or adopting a unilateral quid pro quo arrangement so that if legislation hampered UK exports, similar levels of bureaucracy would be placed on EU imports until the situation was fixed.

There were as a result several possible costings as to how trade would be affected in the new post-EU world. The one thing that officials agreed on was that in each case, developing WTO rules had made international trade a very different proposition from the time of the UK’s accession to the EEC. World tariff levels had plummeted, so the physical trade benefits of membership had diminished considerably and were outmatched by the costs. The sums that had encouraged joining the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s and which until 1976 had still seemed to justify the decision, now clearly produced a result in the opposite direction.

The officials tallied the costs with the benefits that couldn’t be achieved with a bilateral arrangement. They came up with the bill for the political project of building a country called Europe.

All told, membership cost Britain around £100 billion more than it brought in, nine tenths of which were due to the bureaucracy. The remainder came straight out of the till every year.

Britain was paying a premium to belong to a gym whose other members beat it up.

It now became clear why such a report had previously been quashed. Journalists went mental. MPs were outraged. Tax payers were flabbergasted. The call had already gone out for a new Fontainebleau deal. Many started to demand something far more radical; a couple of billion in rebate this time was not going to wash.

Jack Connolly is a senior official with the UK Border Agency.  He tells us he’s seen some big changes for the better since 2010.

‘Once we were out of the EU, the government quickly set up bilateral agreements with the EU, the US, and Commonwealth states, and workforce mobility hasn’t been disrupted at all.  The government took a leaf from the Canadians’ book and set up a points system that recognises the kind of skills we need and can be tuned to whatever demands there are in a particular year.   For instance, this year the list is topped by medical professionals but last year it was forestry workers and before that, electrical engineers for that new motorbike production plant.  We don’t get the problems we used to get before 2010 when workers from here would down tools over contractors bringing in people from other EU countries for jobs the local workforce could have done just as well.’

From Jack’s point of view, his job is much less fraught than it used to be. ‘Before the change,’ he says, ‘the public didn’t really trust us to protect them from illegals and the traffickers who exploited the EU system.’ 

What about asylum seekers, we ask? 

‘Asylum policy is a lot more transparent now.  People can see how it’s being done.  It’s efficient and judicial review is quick, decisive, and not affected by the pressures from Brussels.  We don’t keep applicants hanging around, certainly not if they have a skill set where they can be contributing to the economy while their case is reviewed rather than spending years waiting on the dole.’
  
Back before 2010 there had been a lot of media attention given to the political fallout around immigration and asylum. This was because of an unhealthy combination of several key factors.

In the first place, the Government seemed to be incapable of managing immigration, unlike successful historic migrant economies such as Canada or Australia. For instance, it underestimated the number of Eastern Europeans migrants coming to Britain after EU enlargement by a factor of 1000 per cent. The discovery of illegal immigrants working in airports, alongside Gordon Brown’s car, and in the Home Office building itself, made a very public fool of the department.

‘Secondly, the public perception was that there must be very large numbers of illegal immigrants in the country because the government was self-evidently incapable of providing an exact figure.

‘Thirdly, it was clear that public services, particularly transport and education, were already approaching capacity in the South East, and ministers did not appear to be taking migration statistics into account for future planning.

‘Fourthly, there was a belief that the legal service was weighted in the favour of those trying to abuse the system, and was indeed rewarding some of  their solicitors, while those who were genuine asylum seekers in fear of their family’s lives, were disadvantaged.

‘Fifthly, there were widely publicised cases, driven by the European Courts with Strasbourg in the lead, where deportations authorised by the UK courts were halted, judges ruling that even if claimants were flown back to a safe part of their home country, they might somehow still be at risk. It made it more ridiculous that destinations Brits happily travelled to on holiday were among the countries barred. It also made Brits angry that in some cases asylum seekers were clearly travelling a lot further than they needed to in order to reach a safe country. Something was clearly wrong with the British system if Calais was merely a transit point for refugees.

Mr Connolly concludes with some words of context.  ‘People today just don’t realise how bad it was getting in the early 2000s with extremists even getting elected to public office. The break with the EU policy has rescued the UK from this mess.’

We talk to Jane McAlister, a prominent lawyer, about how things are different today.  She sees changes in the way both civil and criminal cases are handled.

‘You have to appreciate,’ she says to us, ‘that the European and British approaches have always been very different; they have a quite separate history and they’re founded on dissimilar concepts of what law and justice are about – and how they should be pursued and administered.  What I’d call the European basis of law and justice has tended to be imposed from top down.  Codes and written regulations form much of the framework.  Here, it’s been more organic, and it’s been less state-driven as a result.

‘I’ll give you an example,’ she says, ‘from before 2010. When a judge in another country signed a European Arrest Warrant, as long as the paperwork had been filled out correctly and if the subject was in the UK, our police were responsible for picking up and delivering him or her to some overseas jurisdiction, no matter what.  It took until 2009 for the paperwork to change so the issuing authority signed off that an attempt had been made, during a trial in absentia, to notify the defendant that he or she was due to appear in court.  Astonishing, if you think about it – several years just to consider whether the subjects of deportation orders had even been told there was a case against them and they might want to defend themselves.’

We ask her whether the issues around Human Rights still cause as much sound and fury as they did a few years back.

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘the first thing you have to do is remember your institutions.  The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights was never a part of the EU.’ 

We express some surprise.

‘It wasn’t.  It was created after the War to provide legal remedies against totalitarian regimes repressing their citizens as they’d done in the 30s and 40s.  But it has inspired so many of the institutions in Brussels, including the European Court of Justice, and it’s been used to influence social policy-making in the EU, mainly from the position of neo-liberal ideology.  Its interpretations were allowed to arch over politicians responsible to their electorates, and those who objected were anathematised as enemies of reason.  The best thing we did was to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and then voluntarily re-subscribe but with new protocols that defined clearly what were the “basic rights”.  By enunciating those and helping to draft a Guiding Statement of Basic Principles, we’ve stopped “Human Rights” being the engine driving the boat into uncharted waters and transformed it into an anchor.  It was no bad thing to be concentrating on responsibilities and freedoms rather than on spectrally-silhouetted privileges.

‘Mind you,’ she goes on, ’a lot of lawyers were very put out about all that.  I know several of them, well.  Some firms made a lot of money – public money – fighting cases they themselves had identified as worth pursuing.’

We ask what’s changed in the way criminal justice is dispensed here.

‘After 2010, we had this big national debate over the criminal justice system.  A lot of people felt it had leant in favour of the criminals, big and little, for a long time past and the stimulus for that had come from the EU.  The debate resulted in a set of compromises, mixing education and opportunity for reform for early offenders with some startling ideas about dissuasion. These ranged from limiting television in prisons to five channel black and white sets unless good behaviour earned you something better, down to testing those perspex “dis boxes” on high streets, you remember them, very popular locally though civil liberties people complained it was like bringing back the stocks.  Still, no matter where you stood in the argument, it was undeniable that many of these proposals would have been impossible under the direct influence of the EU system, and under the Strasbourg courts too much about Rights rather than wrongs; all carrot and no stick.’

Has law enforcement changed?

‘In some important ways, not much,’ she says. ‘We’ve had close co-operation for years between our police and their counterparts in the EU member states and that didn’t stop when we changed the relationship.  Maybe you recall when the Sorensen Gang hit the headlines in 2014. There were three of them, wanted in three EU countries for armed robberies and wounding.  They made a break for it over here.  They’d got fake Euro-IDs, which at the time were recognised as passport equivalents – thank goodness those were discontinued once it was clear the continental ID card system was just as forgeable as the €500 note – but they forgot that, even though we’re outside the Schengen and Europol systems, we’ve always cooperated closely with their institutions in sharing intelligence. Once they’d been tipped off, ENSIS identified the gang’s location; Special Branch and CO19 moved in for the arrest; a judge reviewed the case for removal; the three were extradited.

‘What’s important is that cooperation’s under British management on British turf. In a global economy, with globalised criminal networks operating across borders, and hiding their stash in investments and bank accounts around the world, global, not just European, cooperation is the key.

‘But, yes,’ she ends, ‘because we’re no longer a party to the old Treaties, we’ve avoided some of the nastier scandals that law enforcement has got involved in over there, like travel details of critics of the European Commission being stored on the Europol database, which were accessed on several occasions by the Belgian Police who relayed them to the European Commission’s security people.  Or the time Europol took the lead in breaking down the wrong door during a joint operation. Individual rights sometimes seem to take a walk on the wild side in the EU today’

The programme ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Whether you think that we should pull up the drawbridges, that we should have a more constructive relationship from outside the EU, that we should be inside lobbying for reform or – as one interviewee suggested – that being outside the EU would mean we were no longer able to buy French wine and cheese, it’s well worth a listen.

Eric Parker is planning on retiring from dairy farming next year. A few years ago he was saying that the business was a mug’s game. Yet now he is happy that his son, Bill, is stepping up to the mark. ‘The reforms that we made here as long ago as the late 1970s have set us a good thirty years ahead of our competitors, who’re only now anticipating major farm mergers and takeovers’, he says.

‘I always felt, when we were in the EU, that what I thought of as ‘the continental culture’ actually revelled in making rules and regulations.  One irony, of course, was that having had the pleasure of making them, if they didn’t suit on some occasion or other they were equally happy to ignore or evade them. On the other hand, in DFEA, DEFRA, and MAFF before that, the  civil servants have always been far more enthusiastic about following rules. We’re not perfect here, but we do tend to prefer the more straightforward way of doing things with fewer regulations.  I don’t get the endless packages of paperwork through the post I used to a few years ago. It was irritating to think that I’d become a form-filler rather than an agriculturist.  Now I can get on with my job without filling out endless paperwork to prove I’ve complied with health and safety, and we tend to rely instead on basic rules and common sense. Some of the regulations were stupidly burdensome like the one that required us to transport away dead livestock in a manner not far short of what you’d do for the mother in law.  Thank goodness we got rid of those. And some ten years of over-intrusive red tape.’

‘Mind you,’ he goes on, ’things didn’t get better all at once.  Leaving the CAP didn’t result in some miracle overnight transformation.  In my own business, for example.  Now, fifty years ago, we were mostly self-sufficient in milk here. Under the CAP, the system had become so corrupted and dairy farming in Britain had got so damaged that many farmers turned to dealing in quotas rather than selling milk at depressed UK gate prices. Once we were no longer bound by the EU treaties, it was possible to make reforms to rescue the dairy industry. I mean we’d suffered from quotas suppressing British production in favour of guaranteed French imports.  All that’s come to an end.  And, thanks to that major public push by the Ethical British Produce campaign back in 2014, and that grand lass Joanna Lumley, supermarkets were shamed into negotiating an extra 4p in the pint deal with us and a guaranteed future profit margin, in return for us supporting basic Compassion in World Farming principles. 

At milking time, he calls us in to see how it’s done and points out with pride the healthy animals and the yields he’s getting.

‘What’s really encouraging is that for the first time I can remember, livestock breeding’s beginning to be a profitable industry. East Asia, especially China, is starting to buy British dairy produce, just as world food prices increase again.
And that brings me to something else very dear to me as a dairy farmer.  When we had that brief scare six years ago about bovine pleuropneumonia, the government and the industry acted fast to set up a highly localised cull together with swift vaccination and registration of nearby livestock.  The chain of authority was clear from the start.  If we’d still had then to depend on the Commission and the Council of Ministers to agree what to do, we’d probably have had another stock disaster.  Getting that 72 hours start on the problem was critical.  Even the NFU said so.’

After we talked to Eric we met an agricultural writer, Sarah Ryder. The daughter of a farmer herself, born and brought up in the Dales, she gave us a picture of what benefits – and also what problems – have followed from Britain’s present relationship within a trading area rather than a growing federal superstate.

Sarah started by telling us about the impact our leaving the CAP had had on the rest of the membership of the EU.

‘When we left they faced a four year reduction in the CAP budget and there was a growing unwillingness to fund French farmers.  What the remaining EU countries did was shift to a part-state funded system to plug the gap. Once this became established, it provided a massive push to reform. The tax-paying public in France, Spain, Italy and Germany felt for the first time in decades that they themselves were paying to subsidise food, and more expensive food at that. They could see how much was wasted and how much was off-loaded, dumped actually, at knock-down prices and who was profiting from it at their expense. Quite quickly they began to take a direct interest in what was going on. Since it was their money, they started demanding it be spent well. Their political representatives also woke up to the fact that their constituents were not all working on farms. Movements for reform have begun to spring up everywhere, popular campaigns demanding real change.’

We ask her what has changed for the better here.

‘Leaving the European Union meant Britain dropping the Common Agricultural Policy. What happened initially was that the UK ended funding for the central CAP budget and set up its own UK-CAP in parallel. At the outset, DEFRA simply match-funded existing grants paid out in the UK while future policy was debated. Yet this simple action saved British taxpayers one billion pounds a year, through no longer having UK taxes subsidising foreign farmers.  The most important thing though, has been that our government’s been able to retarget where agricultural aid ends up. When we were still under the CAP, too many who got the money weren’t the ones who should’ve got it; grain barons, major land owners on prime land, and the really bizarre cases. Between 2002 and 2007, CAP funding of £223,000 went to a defence laboratory; £112,000 to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets; £88,000 to a hotel chain; £42,000 to a coal mine; £28,000 to a gypsum mining company; £27,000 to British Telecom; £16,000 to a water company; £14,000 to a racehorse trainer; £5,000 to Eton College; and thousands of pounds for caravan sites, museums, cathedrals, airfields, sports clubs and so on. It seemed you could get farming aid if you played tennis on it or landed a plane on it. All that’s been stopped.  Now you only get it if, like any farmer you speak to, you keep livestock or grow crops on it.’

Sarah takes a fat file down from the shelf above her desk. ‘It’s also very helpful that we’re not contributing to insanities like these.’  She shows us evidence of EU spending – quite a chunk of £6 million – on promoting produce.  As she says, ‘you don’t have to promote this industry.  None of us has any choice about being a consumer of agricultural products.  What else do they think we’d be eating?  And, look here, another nearly £6 million on PR for the CAP – they called it “enhancing public awareness.”  The only beneficiaries of that expenditure would be the agents doing the PR campaign.  Oh, and they provided well over £100 million in aid to producer organisations that could lobby on behalf of the CAP.  Perhaps no one should be surprised that the Commission had a contingency fund of £12 million to cover the costs of being sued and fined for mismanagement.’  She closes the file. ‘This is from 2009. The wage bill for the senior people running the CAP was around £72 million.  They’re spending over £5 million a year on their office furniture,’ is her parting shot.

Jim Thomson is rightly proud of his new thirty footer. Riding high in the dockside at Peterhead, the Annie is the newest addition to the Scottish inshore fishing fleet. Along with two other recently built vessels in the harbour, it symbolises the recovery of the industry today in 2020, after a period of forty years of decline.

Back in 1970, there had been 21,443 fishermen in the UK, with around one in seven of the workforce working part time. By the time of Britain’s EU renegotiations in 2010, there were just over 12,000.

Four in ten jobs at sea had been lost. But the pain was far more widespread, because for every sea-going job there were ten sustained on land maintaining the boats and processing what they caught. All told, accepting and implementing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) had cost British coastal communities 115,000 jobs.

However, as Jim tells it, ‘As soon as we stopped being in the CFP, DEFRA immediately banned all dumping of fish at sea.  That change had an immediate economic effect, because £130 million of fish that would otherwise have been dumped at sea now was landed. This was just the initial one-off bonanza, though.  We brought a new system into play involving the ‘carry over’ of quota, negotiated at local community level. Where boats caught more than they were supposed to over the course of the season – and that was typically accidentally, as a result of fishing for other species – the catch would still be landed, weighed in order to add to the scientific understanding of the stocks, sold, and then reduced from the allowed catch limit for the following year.

‘And what we’ve seen, with no longer a third of fish being caught and dumped, the stock has slowly begun to replenish. It’s taken a long time and we’ve still got a long way to go to get to anywhere like the levels we had before we joined the EEC, but what’s happening now is quite clear. Letting the fish we used to dump grow to maturity doubles the stock size by the time they reach the age to spawn. I think we can say our territorial waters have scraped past a Grand Banks-style fisheries collapse, but only just.’

Jim Thomson’s new boat is a sign of the confidence that is re-emerging in 2020. ‘When we left the CFP,’ he says, ‘it meant that the industry was suddenly freed from much of the red tape burdens.  Cheaper fish makes a massive contribution to lower food prices and there’s a straight line back to the public paying less tax every year because the cost of food is factored into social security payouts. On top of that we’re still recouping millions of pounds every year by selling fish that, under the old rules, we had to dump, dead, back into the sea.

‘OK, we’re still a long way from recovering the £2.1 billion we lost when we had to surrender home waters rights, and even further from making up the £2.8 billion that was the total economic cost of the CFP while it was running.  But,’ and his eyes pass out to the gulls on the shoreline, ’come the next generation, when Annie is old and rusting and about to be cut up, you’ll see. The stocks will be back, the harbours will be filled, the foreign boats mostly gone, and the ports will be alive once more.’

We ask Jim what it had been like in the industry before 2010.

‘How long’ve you got?’ is his response.  We encourage him to dig into his experiences and memories.

‘Well, just look at the sums.’ he says, ‘You maybe don’t know that in 1973 British fishermen landed 1.1 million tons of fish.  By 2006 that’d dropped to just over half and it was mostly down to fishing by other EU members in what’d been our waters.  Incidentally, one big reason the Norwegians wouldn’t join the EEC in the early 70s was that they saw what would happen to their fishing industry if they did.  Our politicians either didn’t foresee that, or they did but reckoned it was a price worth paying.

Jim jabs at us with his forefinger, ‘Then there’s all that subsidy. Most of it went abroad by far. It’s ridiculous. Even the grants we got here, a lot went to boats that were owned by foreign companies.  They paid the grants by tonnage and though only one boat in fifty was foreign-owned, they were mainly the biggest ones so they actually made up a about a sixth of the total tonnage.  When the government tried to see to it that EU grants to Britain only went to UK-owned vessels, the foreign owners cried foul and got compensation through the courts.’

Jim’s warming to his task now.

‘And do you have any idea what we, in Britain, all paid for this?  I was reading a report last week when I heard you were coming. Well, it added £138 million to the social security budget, as the unemployed from the fleet and in the support industries had to go on benefits since there wasn’t any other work. Someone who did the sums reckons the fishing communities took another £27 million hit in social deprivation. Anglers faced the prospect of new legislation that even on a low estimate looked like £11 million in bureaucratic costs. £65 million went in support to foreign industries. £12 million was passed to the European Commission to buy licences, mostly for the Spanish to fish out third world waters. I could go on and on and on.

We fishermen were not the only ones who got hurt. Many of these costs carried across to the consumer, not least because we had less fish to sell in Britain.  The average household ended up paying £186 each year extra as a result. Don’t fret, I did the maths – £3.58 a week. And that on top of the prices added at the check-out through the Common Agricultural Policy.

‘But that financial burden wasn’t all. The CFP had a terrible ecological impact as well.  When I used to meet up with people based in Grimsby, Hull and Boston they used to tell me about some of the rules that bureaucrats would dream up; like the one that forced them to rub each individual fish’s belly to tell young herring and sprats apart.’ He chuckles, grimly, ‘ – quite a job when you’ve got  a full hold.

Jim wasn’t pulling our leg.  The Government’s own estimates from 2007 showed that for that one year alone, in just the North Sea area, and just looking at three types of fish, 23,600 tonnes of cod, 31,048 tonnes of haddock, and 6,000 tonnes of whiting were caught and then simply thrown back dead over the side of the boat, to drop to the sea floor and pollute the bed.  It meant we were dumping over three times the cod limit authorized by Brussels for British fishermen, six sevenths of the total for haddock, and two thirds of the permitted catch for whiting.  That 60,000 tonnes of dumped fish would have filled a 200 metre long supramax bulk carrier ship, or, to put it another way, it would have kept Billingsgate fish market stocked for two and a half years. We can put it in an even more dramatic way.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation put its total estimates of North Sea discards at up to 880,000 tonnes. It’s as much bulk as if we’d harpooned 200 sperm whales every month, and then just left them to float dead in the sea.’