If it is true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, then that may explain why I’m missing the rest of Europe so much. This is not the confession of a recanting Brexiteer who has suddenly decided he wants to rejoin the EU because he can’t go on holiday to Florence. That won’t be happening: I am not pledging allegiance to the European Commission in Brussels, and I’ve given up on getting a trip to the Uffizi this year, too.
Faced with ever-changing rules and the costs of Covid testing, millions of us have decided not to bother with holidaying abroad and will stay in Britain for the second year in a row.
This has obvious advantages. We’re blessed in terms of scenery and British hospitality has come a long way since the dark 1970s. Even so, there’s something missing — exposure to the sights and sounds of mainland Europe and the evidence of our shared cultural heritage and interlocking histories.
This is a concept distinct from the European Union. Europe, the ancient civilisation, existed long before the EU and it will outlast whatever experiments and schemes are devised by transient politicians in Brussels or Britain.
Brexiteers do owe at least one mea culpa, however. Having willed Britain’s departure from the EU, and not had a plan for how it should be done, some on the anti-EU side talk too often amid the acrimony as though Europe holds no interest for us any more; as though all the action is going to be in theoretically more exciting far-flung territories.
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That’s daft. Although Britain has left the European Union, geographically and culturally it remains in Europe. After the punch-ups of the last decade and the trauma of botched negotiations, a new effort is needed to get on better with our close European neighbours and allies in the decades that lie ahead.
You won’t hear much of this from Nigel Farage, crying into his pint on GB News about illegal migrants, or from those of his supporters who see Brexit in terms of British exceptionalism. But other Brexiteers, in government and beyond, will acknowledge it privately. There is life beyond leaving. Britain is part of the European neighbourhood. How can we improve bilateral relations?
Achieving this may be beyond the current crop of leaders, if the row between the prime minister and President Macron is anything to go by. Anglo-French relations are in a pitiful condition post-Brexit and after the vaccine spat. But neither Boris Johnson nor Macron will be around for ever.
Beyond government there needs to be a push. That means not only applying more pressure to get the government to do deals to help artists, musicians and others who need to travel. It means looking for ways in which, independent of government, existing cultural co-operation — say, between galleries and music venues in Britain and EU countries — can be increased, to demonstrate that we like Europe and care for art for its own sake.
Here there is an obvious role for the British Council, the organisation established in the 1930s to promote Britain and cultural understanding. Like most organisations it has been buffeted by Covid. The government, which funds 15 per cent of the British Council’s spending, wants it to shift focus, in line with its “geopolitical priorities”. It should instead look at boosting the council’s spending and making Europe a much bigger focus of its work.
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There is also an opportunity for the next generation of politicians at Westminster, and for more experienced figures outside government, to build closer connections in European capitals. Not everything must go through Brussels. For 60 years since 1961, when Harold Macmillan sent Ted Heath to begin working on an application to join the EEC, British elites have seen our relations with Europe primarily through the prism of the EU, or before that Nato.
Post-Brexit, we are in a new, unfamiliar situation, where we will have to think bilaterally. It is closer in spirit to the late 19th century when Anglo-German links were so strong. Classical music co-operation in that period, and between the wars and after, offers numerous lessons on what can be achieved.
Diehard Remainers may spit out their morning double espresso on hearing all this. Brexiteers have some cheek after all the upheaval, they will say, and it is hopeless to imagine any improvement in relations. But isn’t that an impossibly bleak and overblown analysis of future prospects?
In May 1950, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs were premiered in London at the Royal Albert Hall by the Philharmonia Orchestra at the instigation of British music producer Walter Legge. Just before his death eight months earlier, the German composer had chosen the Norwegian star Kirsten Flagstad to sing. Both of them had been accused of collaboration with the Nazis. The conductor that evening was Wilhelm Furtwängler who, despite his opposition to the regime, had conducted the Berlin Philharmonic under the Third Reich.
If European cultural obsessives could co-operate in such a way on that evening in London, only five years after the end of perhaps the worst conflict in global history, to find hope, reconnection and redemption through music, then the grumbling arguments about the Northern Ireland protocol look pathetically small in comparison.
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Such a process may take many years or decades. But we must look beyond here today, gone tomorrow political leaders. Across our national institutions — music, art, media, universities — we need a concerted effort to reconnect.