No country has been more dismissive of the UK’s decision to leave the EU than France. If the French government is speaking for all of France, then
But of course it doesn’t — any more than Boris Johnson’s political postures are embraced by the British as a whole.
A poll from last year found that President Macron was more popular in France than his British counterpart, which is quite surprising.
A survey from last year shows that Emmanuel Macron (pictured) is less popular in France then Boris Johnson.
It could be because the French are more attracted to the idea of breaking free of the EU restrictions than their political establishment is willing to admit.
To be fair to Macron, when interviewed by Andrew Marr in 2018 and asked if the French would vote to leave the EU if offered the chance in a referendum, he replied: ‘Yes, probably.’
Damaging
That makes it all the clearer why, in a letter to the President of the European Commission demanding that Brussels condemn and penalise the UK for withholding fishing licences in British waters from a number of small French boats, the French PM Jean Castex told Ursula von der Leyen: ‘It is indispensable to demonstrate that it is more damaging to leave the EU than to stay in it.’
Full translation: if you don’t do as we ask, even more French voters will think Britain did the right thing by quitting the EU and (among other things) regaining control of its waters.
Alas for Macron and Castex, the other EU countries did not care for the French approach, and so Brussels refused even to issue a statement criticising the British Government’s interpretation of the Brexit trade rules as they applied to the fishing dispute.
Marine Le Pen’s praise for Brexit may make Macron the biggest opponent in France’s next presidential elections
This is especially damaging to Macron because he may well face his biggest challenge in the country’s next presidential elections from one of two possible candidates who have praised Brexit: Marine Le Pen (who lost to Emmanuel Macron in the last presidential face-off) and Eric Zemmour, a television pundit.
Zemmour has not yet declared he will run in 2022, but even so, he seems to be more popular than Le Pen — perhaps because his rhetoric, particularly on the question of immigration, is even more hardline than hers has ever been.
While neither of these two advocates ‘Frexit’, Le Pen still describes the EU as ‘a prison’ and Zemmour last week declared: ‘I don’t like the mindset of wanting to constantly make the English pay so as to show the other EU states that they should not leave the EU. That is pathetic.’
Michel Barnier recently said he would call for a ‘referendum on the question of immigration’ if elected president
It is precisely because Macron is worried that these opponents might have more appeal to France’s sense of injured national pride that he seems to feel obliged to turn a minor dispute over fishing licences into some sort of Napoleonic mission against les rosbifs.
It would be reasonable to expect Le Pen and Zemmour, nationalist candidates, to speak the same way about EU membership’s constraints.
The astonishing intervention by Michel Barnier, who had earlier declared his intention to stand for president in the summer of 2013, is what truly shows just how frustrated the French have become with the inevitable infringements of their national sovereignty.
Recently, Barnier — the very man who led the EU’s Brexit negotiations, and who for the past decade has been attached to the European Commission in one senior role after another — declared that if elected president, he would call for a ‘referendum on the question of immigration’.
The French PM Jean Castex told Ursula von der Leyen that it was ‘indispensable’ to show that leaving the EU is worse than staying in it.
He went on to say that he would ensure that France regained ‘its legal sovereignty, in order to no longer be subject to the judgments’ of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Amazing: those were the two main elements of the Brexiteers’ campaign to get the UK out of the EU.
Barnier in effect acknowledged this in an interview with The Times last week, when he remarked: ‘We must take account of the lessons of Brexit and the sentiment of the people which expressed itself in the UK on many subjects, and which we find here, too.’
He’s right about that. It’s something I became aware of at the time of the Brexit campaign, in which my father, Nigel Lawson, was an active member even though he was then resident in France.
Regret
He observed that while he was, as a result, being shunned by some of his British neighbours (there were quite a few fiercely pro-Remain expats in the vicinity), French locals were almost all in sympathy with his views — and would tell him so, volubly.
That is the background to the French PM’s embarrassingly leaked letter to the EU Commission President, in effect asking her to make sure that in the fishing dispute, the British will be made to regret their secession.
I am not arguing that France will follow the UK’s example and vote for Frexit, not least because they will never be given the opportunity.
But it is fascinating to see how there is perhaps a sense of jealousy on the other side of the Channel that Britain is no longer subject to the EU’s legal order — and how much that will play a part in their own electoral decisions.
Prince Philip was a climate change sceptic
Even Her Majesty the Queen was co-opted by the Johnson administration into pleading with the delegates at the Cop26 gathering in Glasgow to do the ‘right thing’ (though not specifying exactly what that would involve).
The Monarch cited her late husband as a long-standing campaigner against ‘the world pollution situation’.
It is true that Prince Philip was deeply concerned with mankind’s threats to the natural world and wildlife: but it is equally true that he had no time whatever for those who thought that man-made CO2 emissions were the problem here.
Prince Philip was concerned with mankind’s threats to the natural world but also campaigned against ‘the world pollution situation’
He was, in fact, what is now termed a ‘climate-change sceptic’. So much so that he abandoned his work for the World Wildlife Fund, specifically — as he wrote to the late Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster — because ‘it switched from its original focus on saving endangered species to relentless campaigning against global warming’.
And in 2010, the Duke of Edinburgh tried to invite Professor Ian Plimer — whose book The Climate Change Delusion he greatly admired — to give the Prince Philip Lecture at the Royal Society of Arts.
I say ‘tried’, because the RSA’s chief executive then wrote a letter to Professor Plimer saying that ‘with great regret’ it was withdrawing the invitation because ‘members of the Royal Family need to be scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of advocating or supporting a particular political stance’.
Professor Ian Plimer, pictured, whose book The Climate Change Delusion was greatly admired by the Duke of Edinburgh
The letter added that ‘the Duke is personally disappointed’. I’ll bet he was bloody furious to have been nobbled by the politicians (and, indeed, Buckingham Palace officials).
Interesting that Prince Charles, despite his endless speechifying on the necessity for the world abandoning industrialization, particularly in agriculture, has not been subject to the same scrutiny. He is merely recommending that the natural order of things be restored, which could lead to mass starvation. That, apparently, is not a ‘political stance’.
Or as the author of a letter to The Times last week wrote: ‘India and China can appeal to the first and second UN sustainable development goals, namely the elimination of world poverty and hunger, to justify their continued use of coal.
Climate action is the 13th sustainable development goal and should not be placed above the first two on basic humanitarian grounds.’
The writer’s identity?
Michael J. Kelly, Cambridge University’s Emeritus Prince Philip professor of technology. His master’s voice.