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Should we look back on the year with anger, sadness, horror, shame or joy? Over to you to judge..

It has been an eventful year and be very difficult to do justice in a few words. I would like instead just focus on a couple of recollections.

A holy land?

It is salutary to reflect how a year will go down in history and what date will stand out. Last year it was 24th February, this year without doubt it will be 7th October. The appalling surprise Hamas attack on Israel has changed the world forever. Now, almost 3 months on, we are daily seeing the knock-on effects. The innocent civilians of Gaza, one of the most densely populated parts of the world, of whom half are children, have no escape from the merciless onslaught we are daily witnessing on our screens.

But there is collateral damage way beyond Gaza. Israeli forces are set to be tied up for years as an occupying force in hostile territory, leaving opportunities in the north for Hezbollah and their supporters, Iran and Russia. Let us hope a wider conflict can be prevented. The eyes of the world have been averted from the many other ongoing crises, including Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Taiwan and above all Ukraine. Already in the last week of 2023 we can see Putin looking more confident and launching new large scale assaults, while Zelenskyy is struggling to maintain his funding streams from the US and Europe. Biden, whatever position he takes, will alienate one or other part of his base and concede ground to Trump.

Closer to home there are divisions on the Middle East in all parties, but above all in Labour. It might be argued that Starmer – given Labour’s past history – had no choice but to pledge unqualified support for the Israeli government, even though he knew what they were capable of. However it has cost the party dearly, with multiple resignations, starting, strikingly enough, in Oxford City Council, and a blow to party morale. The difficulties are not irreconcilable, but it would be ironic if events outside the country, and outside the control of UK politicians, led to Labour’s previously secure poll lead collapsing.

Who knows whether and when the stricken residents of Gaza will be joining the many fleeing conflict and oppression in Syria, North Africa and elsewhere and making their way to Europe?

Hotting up

But it is not only figuratively but also literally that the planet is hotting up. 2023 is being touted as a tipping point in the climate change story. The hottest year on record, and possibly the hottest for thousands of years, this is the point at which we are seeing with our own eyes what climate change can do. Fires, floods, storms, and massive losses of fertile land all around the world should concentrate the mind. COP28 was supposed to point a way forward but in reality what we have learned is the power of the fossil fuel lobby to hijack the green agenda.

And when denialists like Lord Frost tell us it is inconsequential because “the cold kills more people than the heat” you cannot help thinking that this is coming from the same stable as the ”benefits of Brexit”.

Forced migration

What links these two issues of global conflict and climate change is that they are leading to involuntary movement of people. Worldwide there are now only 100 million displaced people, and only a tiny fraction of these will ever attempt the hazardous crossing of the English Channel in rubber boats. Yes, the numbers arriving have been increasing, at least up to 2022, but they still account for well under 10% of total net migration to the UK. How many of the people who try to stigmatise asylum seekers as ‘illegal’, and to create a ‘hostile environment’ for them, actually give any thought to the conditions they have been escaping?

Surely nobody with any humanity would concoct such a thing as the Rwanda plan? It is not only inhumane but totally impractical. James Cleverly was not wrong when he described it as ‘batshit’ (something he has never denied), yet he is the man now having to implement it and tell us that it is the only way. I suppose we should not be surprised by hypocrisy and bad judgment among our senior politicians. And of course Sunak is fishing from a very shallow talent pool in making his ministerial appointments – why else would he have to look right outside the parliamentary party in appointing David Cameron as foreign secretary?

I would be astonished if any asylum seekers get sent to Rwanda in 2024, even if HMG can find an airline willing to take them – a big if. The Supreme Court gave many reasons for saying that Rwanda was an unsafe country, few of which have been dealt with. The Safety of Rwanda Bill made it through second reading, but it is difficult to see that it will become law before the next election – otherwise what are the Lords for?

Magical thinking

Very few thinking people will mourn Suella Braverman’s departure from government. She almost deliberately made Sunak sack her. However she was right about one thing: she accused the PM of “magical thinking”. What other word is there for the belief that the UK parliament has the power, simply by saying so, to turn an unsafe country over 7,000 km away into a safe one?

And yet here is a paradox: the same parliament, which seems to have such exceptional powers, is not to be trusted with deciding which former ‘EU Laws’ can stay on the stature book. This is the year on which the REUL (Retained EU Laws) Bill became law. This is the Act which gives ministers the power, without reference to Parliament, to repeal established laws simply on the basis that the were passed as a result of the UK’s EU membership. Tomorrow (Jan 1^st) is the day that the bill would, in its original form, have killed off 4,000 laws, and we should be grateful for small mercies – Sunak, bowing to the inevitable, has cut that number down to 600. But the attrition will continue, solely in pursuit of ‘divergence’ and ‘reaping the benefits of Brexit’ to placate Tory extremists.

Leaving the stage

This was the year in which Boris Johnson appears finally to have left a political stage, and I hope that his former boss, Max Hastings, was wrong when he said: “I don’t think you can write off Boris Johnson until he is buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart”. Following on from revelations of the Covid Inquiry, I think we can say with confidence that he should have left much earlier, and indeed should never ever have become Prime Minister. Despite this, like Trump, he still has political friends, who think that all the malaise of the Tory party is down to his longer being in charge and that he should be brought back. That indeed speaks volumes about his party.

A flagship without a paddle

Johnston’s flagship policy, Brexit, has not had a good year. Perhaps people should feel glad that the public has woken up to its harms. Poll after poll is showing huge majorities agreeing that Bexit has hurt the country, and even increasing majorities wishing to rejoin. Even ideologues like Julian Jessop are forced to admit economic harms. And this year even Farage said “Brexit has failed, We’ve not delivered on Brexit and the Tories have let us down very, very badly”. He is articulating the classical Dolchstoßlegende, in other words Brexit would have worked if only it had not been handled badly by the government and if that not been the backstabbing by us ‘Remoaners’. I am forced to remind Farage that the Tories have had a massive majority since 2019 with very little open dissension on the Brexit issue. More to the point, any plan whose success depends upon the probity and competence of the incumbent Tory government is deeply flawed and is doomed to failure.

The growing realisation of the folly of Brexit is not going to go into reverse. It is only partly due to people having changed their minds, but an equally significant factor is demographic change, with young people joining the electorate every year who have pro-European aspirations, feel cheated by Brexit, and are not persuaded by the little England mentality. In other words, what we in Oxford for Europe and in the European Movement are promoting is emphatically and irreversibly “the will of the people”, to coin a phrase. We took an active part in the second March For Rejoin in September, and I think I can say that there was a spring in our step and a feeling that we are moving forward, even though we know it will be a long struggle. The government is regularly making decisions calculated solely to make rejoining more difficult, e.g. membership of the transpacific partnership, the insane but failed REUL Act, the now very grubby-looking UKCE Mark among others, but these will succeed only in showing up their weakness.

It is sad, however, that it has taken tangible evidence of hardship and loss of freedom of movement to provide the necessary wake-up call.

At a local level, Oxford for Europe continues to thrive. We have had some further virtual meetings (details here), with excellent invited speakers, and we are now looking to get back to face-to-face ones. We have resumed street stalls to help get our message out, and we are finding that now at least most people understand why we are doing it. Bleats of ‘suck it up, you lost’ are becoming rarer. This year the Oxford European Association was dissolved, having fulfilled its purpose, and many of its members have come across to us, including John Tanner, our new hon. Sec. He is ably filling the shoes vacated by Jo Steele, whom we will miss greatly.

What can we look forward to in 2024?

Will the economic and reputational decline of the UK continue? We would like to hope not, but the straws in the wind are not promising. Sunak promised integrity, professionalism and accountability at the outset, but, aside from the Windsor framework, he has given little evidence of delivering on that. He is turning into an embarrassment, what with his party conference performance, his deliberate insult to the Greek Prime Minister, and his performative palliness with that icon of libertarianism and ‘free speech absolutist Elon Musk. Have you seen that cringeworthy ‘interview‘? Think also of the Christmas video in which he unmasked his inner Mr Bean rather than, as no doubt he hoped, his Hugh Grant. Now today to cap it all we have the revelation that he pleaded in vain with Dominic Cummings, of all people, to help rescue his faltering election campaign. The only thing to be said in his defence is that if he stands down before the impending election he will be replaced by somebody even worse. And that somebody is likely to move the Tory party from being unelectable to being really really unelectable. No doubt many Tory MPs are spending the Christmas holidays weighing up those same considerations.

And just as Brexit Mark 1 is faltering, will we see continued pressure from the knuckle draggers on the right of the Conservative party to bring forward Brexit Mark 2? That is to say joining Belarus and Russia as the only European countries outside the European Convention on Human Rights. It seems unlikely. None of the incumbents of the top four Cabinet jobs want to do it. The ECHR is no longer central to the Rwanda debate. And even the prospect of an ECHR dispute with Ireland over the Northern Ireland Legacy Bill, which came out of the woodwork just this month, is unlikely to swing it.

It would be nice to think that this year’s conflicts around the world will come closer to resolution. Sadly, this may be a bit optimistic. We will be looking nervously East to the two Chinas, and can only hope that by this time last year Taiwan will still be independent and at peace.

It will definitely be a year of elections, with something like half the world’s adults going to the polls, though of course in some countries such as Russia they will be doing so in name only. In the UK there are many, and even some conservatives, who feel that a change of government is long overdue, while of course in the USA we must fervently hope for the opposite. It need hardly be said that another Trump victory would be disastrous for the world at many levels. In 2016 it was still possible to believe that Trump might confound expectations, seek out sound advisers and moderate his tone and behaviour in office. He did the opposite and would do the same again.

And it would be nice to think that in 2024 politicians around the world start to act on climate change instead of just talking about it. Hope strings eternal.

At all events there will be a great deal for us to look back on by this time next year. I will end by wishing all our members and supporters happy, peaceful and prosperous 2024.

Quote of the day:

For every complex problem, there is a answer that is clear, simple, and wrong

HL Mencken

A few 2023 book choices from friends of Oxford for Europe: