BOURNEMOUTH, England — The European Union is making a “car crash” hard Brexit more likely by failing to understand the British position and talking up the chances of a “European superstate,” according to one of the most pro-EU figures in British politics.
Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrat party, which backs a second vote on the Brexit deal, said that while he had criticisms of Prime Minister Theresa May, some of her European counterparts were making her position more difficult.
Speaking to POLITICO after his keynote speech to the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth on Tuesday, Cable singled out European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, saying his State of the Union address had been “dreadful” and had fed the narrative of “extreme Brexiteers.”
“The lack of understanding on the European side is actually making it worse,” he said. “That Juncker speech was dreadful. I know that he has a European audience, but Remainers in the U.K. are in despair when they hear that kind of stuff because it directly feeds the narrative of the extreme Brexiteers, who will say: ‘If we stay in, we lose our sovereignty, we’re part of a federal European superstate.’”
“Theresa May is trying to bridge the Brexiteer-Remainer gap. She’s not doing a very good job of it. She’s rather a hostage of the Brexiteers” — Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable
He added that the EU could have averted Brexit altogether if it had made concessions on freedom of movement to David Cameron prior to the referendum and urged Brexit negotiators not to repeat the same mistakes.
“The lack of flexibility in dealing with Cameron over migration was the main reason we’re in this mess,” he said. “There are all kinds of de facto rather than de jure limitations on freedom of movement. Pragmatism on all sides would have helped avoid this crash. And it is going to be an awful car crash.”
A former business secretary who served alongside May in the coalition government of 2010 to 2015, Cable became leader of the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-EU British party, after June’s general election, in which the party earned a disappointing 7.4 percent of the vote, taking its parliamentary seat-count to just 12.
At the June 2017 election, he won back his seat in Twickenham, west London — which he lost in 2015 after 18 years as an MP — by standing on a staunchly pro-EU ticket, and he has been a vociferous critic of the government’s Brexit stance.
But he said that Brussels risked strengthening the hand of hard-liners in May’s team with its approach, and warned Britain’s divorce from the EU would be much more difficult if one of May’s Brexit-supporting leadership rivals, such as Brexit Secretary David Davis or Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, were elevated to Downing Street.
“Theresa May is trying to bridge the Brexiteer-Remainer gap. She’s not doing a very good job of it. She’s rather a hostage of the Brexiteers,” he said. “But if you’ve got David Davis, and even more some of the others, the confrontation with the European Union would be much starker.”
On his own party’s record on the EU, he said that Brexit would not have happened if the Liberal Democrats had remained in coalition government with Cameron’s Conservatives in 2015, because they acted as a counterbalance to the Tory right-wing. Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne were “quite open” that they were “betting on” such a scenario when they promised an in-out referendum on EU membership in 2013, he said.
“Cameron was captured,” Cable said. “I recently talked to a leading Tory, a Europhile, who said: ‘the problem is my party is now comfortable in its Brexit skin.’ That’s where they are and people like Cameron and Osborne were holding out against a party that was fundamentally in a different position.”
In a brutal assessment of Cameron’s legacy, he added: “Unfortunately, because he’s got many positive qualities, [he] will now go down in history as the man who lost Europe. He’ll be rubbished by historians for generations to come.”
Despite the Lib Dems’ lowly poll rating and seat count, Cable said in his conference speech that his goal was to become prime minister.
The Liberal Democrats’ then-leader Tim Farron visits the party headquarters in Bath, England during the general election campaign on June 7, 2017. Current leader Vince Cable attributes the party’s poor showing in June’s election to the rival Labour Party’s ambiguous Brexit messaging | Geoff Caddick/AFP via Getty Images
He blamed the party’s poor election showing on Labour’s ambiguous position on Brexit, which allowed them to pick up support among the 48 percent who backed Remain, and said that voters were yet to see the impact of Brexit, weakening the appeal of his party’s promise to hold a second referendum.
He said his party could now emulate the success of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in Canada, who went from third to first place in the 2015 election.
“In a very volatile political environment, strange things can happen. At the moment, it doesn’t look like it; nothing much has changed since the election. But if things get very tough [as a result of Brexit] — and they could do — all kinds of things are possible,” he said.