Let’s not be beastly to the Brits
Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, joined enthusiastically by the French President Emmanuel Macron, wants to stop individual EU members deciding who can or cannot enter their countries and instead have EU-wide border controls. In particular, the Brits, with the nasty variant they have imported from India, shouldn’t be welcome anywhere without lengthy and expensive quarantines.
At one level, it’s the big countries again insisting that The Project goes on. The EU cannot let member states all do their own thing. This is a political as well as an economic union, and it is darn well going to decide political issues, like immigration policies, centrally. That’s a bit harsh, though, if you are a tourist country like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy or Malta — the latter being the most-vaccinated country in Europe and far beyond. Not surprisingly, they are objecting to the Chancellor’s idea. They want to control their own borders with the non-EU world, and apart from a few places like the Balearics, British tourists are welcome because those countries rely so much on tourist cash.
And there’s the rub. The two biggest travelling countries in Europe are — or were, before all the travel bans started — and the UK and Germany. There are no border controls in the Schengen that covers much of continental Europe, so (legally or not), there is nothing to stop a German travelling to the Riviera or a Belgian taking a holiday in Tuscany. That kind of internal control is difficult or impossible, which means that once the virus enters Italy, France, Spain or elsewhere, it can be spread round the rest quite easily. Lacking that internal control, Merkel and Macron want to conceal their powerlessness by creating outside controls. It’s a policy of doing something, however pointless, to show that you are doing something.
The single border policy plan is bad business to Europe’s tourist destinations. It’s not even good economics for Germany, which before the pandemic employed two million people in travel and tourism, accounting for nearly 4% of its economy. And after more than a year of lockdowns and restrictions, the travel industry needs all the help it can get. So, what’s the idea of keeping out the Brits? To hope that continental carriers prosper at the expense of British ones, just like the hope that Frankfurt will prosper if the EU’s nasty to the City of London? If so, that’s just wrong, and the worst kind of grudge politics.
Of course, being beastly to the Brits plays well in Russia and China, and Angela Merkel thinks she needs Putin’s Nord Stream 2 gas and China’s billion customers. Both are hostages to fortune. She would have a much better friend in Britain.
Sure, our case rates are rising, driven mostly by the Delta variant. But then we’re testing so many people, particularly kids in school. So it is not surprising that we will find more cases than many other countries, including EU ones, who test far less assiduously. And those cases are leading, it seems (though these are lagging indicators), to less hospitalisation and deaths than before — perhaps again because so many of them are schoolchildren. Let’s see what happens when the schools close for the summer.
More than that, nearly 50% of Brits are fully vaccinated. In Germany, the next highest by a long way in Europe, it’s only 37%. And the vaccines are effective — more Brits are dying of Pneumonia and Flu than Covid-19.
Lastly, in the UK there must be a sneaking suspicion that this is the big EU heavyweights just being beastly to the Brexit Brits. A case of “Let’s show them, and EU member countries, that there are penalties for leaving the club. It will discourage anyone from daring to follow. Oh, and there are elections coming up before too long. The economy’s tanked, so a nice bit of foreigner-bashing will go down well.” It’s bad diplomacy, dismal economics, and nasty politics.