ON SATURDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2016, THE DAY before Sutherland suffered his heart attack, he was at a British-Irish Association seminar in Oxford on Brexit. Also on the panel was Theresa Villiers, the former Northern Ireland Secretary and arch-Brexiteer. During the proceedings, Sutherland vented his views on Brexit with a robustness that shocked some members in the audience. It was almost three months after Britain had voted to leave the EU and much of the sloganeering that underpinned the Leave campaign had begun to unravel. There had moreover been very recent history between Sutherland and Villiers.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Northern Ireland programme on 12 June, two weeks before the referendum, Sutherland had said a UK exit from the EU would cause a ‘grave, serious and prolonged period of great uncertainty’. The agriculture industry and cross-border trade with the Republic of Ireland would suffer the consequences of a Leave vote, and foreign investors would overlook Northern Ireland and take their business to countries inside the EU, Sutherland told the programme.
‘Those who invest in Ireland, north or south, are doing so because it provides them with the manufacturing base to sell to the European Union. The uncertainty, the borders created by Britain leaving and the inevitable period of prolonged negotiation will lead to a drying up of investment.’ Of the Democratic Unionist Party’s campaigning for Brexit, Sutherland described it as ‘incredible’ that any political force in Northern Ireland could conceivably consider the UK’s departure from the EU to be good for the province. He also said the UK’s exit from the EU would ‘create a border control requirement that we had thought banished to history. If in some perverted way there is an ideological desire to recreate that border, it’s an act that would be incredibly foolish and very damaging.’
During the BBC programme, Villiers dismissed Sutherland’s views and those of ‘other so-called experts’, saying a withdrawal from the EU would be ‘great for Northern Ireland. It enables us to take back control of our own trade policies so that we can make deals not just with the European Union, but also with countries around the world where they have huge markets. Those could create jobs and opportunities for young people. There’s no reason why we can’t press ahead pretty rapidly with trade deals with the rest of the world. It is the EU that’s failing economically, not us.’
That exchange was a perfect distillation of the broader campaign. The Leave camp had very effectively, and cynically, tapped into an anti-establishment undercurrent that would eventually sweep it to victory. Sutherland, the man who had set up the World Trade Organisation, knew the rules better than anybody. If the UK left the single market and customs union, then one result would be a hard border on the island of Ireland. But then again, Ireland and the implications for the border hardly featured in the referendum campaign. This deeply irked Sutherland. According to people around him at the time, he thought the Leave campaign dishonest and opportunist.
As one close friend notes, Sutherland was particularly aggrieved at the role played by Boris Johnson, the journalist and Conservative MP. When Sutherland chaired a debate at the London School of Economics on the future of London and the UK on 10 December 2013, Johnson – who was then Mayor of London – treated the audience to his trademark bloviated rhetoric. Having taken a few gratuitous swipes at the EU during the course of the evening, Johnson told Sutherland at a private dinner afterwards, according to one of Sutherland’s close associates, that his Euroscepticism was a ‘bit of fun’ and he was really ‘a bit of a Europhile’. It was an interaction that would prey on Sutherland’s mind over the next few years, and one he recounted to a number of people. He found it hard to believe that a campaign of crucial importance for both the UK and the EU would be conducted in such a glib manner by some of the leading figures in the Leave camp.
Johnson in particular was guilty of making highly inflammatory comments. In one piece written for the Sunday Telegraph[1] before the referendum, he compared the EU to the Nazis. Interviewed by Newstalk radio, Sutherland described the comments as ‘bizarre and utterly uncalled for. I don’t understand what his real position is, nor do I know whether he knows what will happen to Britain if there is a Brexit. Making any comparison to the EU in the same breath as Hitler is so ludicrous as to be beyond parody.’ [2]
Britain has had an uneasy relationship with the EU since it first joined the bloc in 1973. But the campaign to leave began in earnest following Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech on 20 September 1988. In her address to the College of Europe in the Belgian city, she postulated her thoughts on Britain and the EU. Far from the fire-and-brimstone sermon that is often depicted, the speech is colourful and erudite, with none of the flinty prose that is often imagined. Thatcher spoke about Britain’s shared history with Europe and how it had been mutually beneficial. She firmly ruled out any moves towards federalism, but she was willing to embrace integration where it made sense – in areas such as trade and security. The fact that the speech was wide ranging and nuanced has been lost over the years. Instead a few lines in the middle energised a new generation of Eurosceptics:
Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country; for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.[3]
These words have assumed a bewitching quality for Eurosceptics. They would form the opening salvo in the Brexit campaign, although it is highly unlikely that was Thatcher’s intention at the time.
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From the early 1990s, and indeed for most of that decade, Europe caused internecine warfare in the Conservative Party. It was partly why the Tories were annihilated at the 1997 general election. In the same year that Sutherland moved full time to the UK, Tony Blair swept New Labour to victory with the biggest majority in UK election history. Even though Labour had traditionally been the Eurosceptic party, it had evolved under the leadership of Neil Kinnock to take a more outward-looking, progressive approach. Blair was possibly the most pro-EU leader Britain has ever had, and possibly will ever have. He set about putting the UK at the heart of the EU. He wanted to join the single currency, until he was blocked by Gordon Brown, his Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sutherland developed a good relationship with both Blair and Brown, and indeed with John Major.
Sutherland loved living in London. He had an enormous respect for Britain’s history, culture and society. He was very proud to have been appointed chairman of the LSE in 2006. He was also the master of St Dominic’s College in Oxford. And he was awarded an honorary knighthood in May 2004 for services to philanthropy, although he could have accepted a full knighthood as he was born in 1946, three years before Ireland became a republic.
Sutherland spoke to a number of people about his decision, including David O’Sullivan, then the secretary general of the European Commission. O’Sullivan remembered that moment: ‘He rang me and said he was going to be given this. And he said, “I do have the possibility because I was born before 1949.” But he said he didn’t think he should take it.’ He asked O’Sullivan, ‘What do you think?’ O’Sullivan agreed, adding, ‘I think that would kill you in Irish terms ever if you wanted to represent the country.’
‘I’m not very comfortable with it myself, I won’t do that.’
‘I don’t think he ever got the credit for being patriotic or for being Irish,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘But he was absolutely Irish. He could only have ever been Irish.’
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Not long after he had stood down as a European commissioner, in the early 1990s, Sutherland attended a party at Conrad Black’s house. The Canadian, who owned the Telegraph newspapers, was famous for throwing lavish soirees with the cream of the business and political worlds in attendance. Sutherland bumped into Margaret Thatcher at the party. Perhaps still sore from her bruising encounters with the former competition commissioner, she decided to launch a verbal attack on Ireland as a means of retaliation, taking aim in particular at the country’s war record. Sutherland took exception and politely but firmly informed her that on a pro rata basis, more Irish soldiers had been killed in the Great War than any other nationality. It was something of a conversation stopper, and the Iron Lady was quickly on her way. Sutherland subsequently admitted that he had no idea if his peroration had any factual basis, but that he was relieved to find that Thatcher had no idea either.
Sutherland lived under the reign of New Labour for his first thirteen years in London. He never publicly expressed a preference for either Labour or the Tories, but for such a committed Europhile, life under Labour must have been easier, at least from that perspective. As soon as Conservative David Cameron became prime minister in 2010, Sutherland saw the ominous portents for the UK’s relationship with the EU.
Sutherland gave the annual Cardinal Newman Lecture in St John’s College Oxford on 19 May 2010, a fortnight after the general election and a week after the Tories had formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. It was a most prescient speech. The following is an edited version (a more complete version can be found in Appendix 3):
The more that I have reflected on this lecture, the more I have been struck by how alien and even destructive it may sound in Britain. Religion and values have not formed part of the narrative here of the troubled relationship between Britain and the process of European integration. But if the EU is no more than a Common Market, as many here believe, why should they be part of the story? In fact these subjects may be seen rather as added complications to a debate by those who seek a more constructive dialogue on European issues. The result of this is they are not much spoken of, particularly within and by the Churches. While this lecture is not intended to be exclusively focused on Britain in the European Union (which is not in any sense ‘Europe’), I will initially look at this issue.
Perhaps there is an unspoken suspicion that the whole business of European integration is a little too Catholic for British tastes. Even though the religious influence of the Reformed Churches, particularly in Germany, was profound in its creation and development, this would not be at all visible here, whereas the Founding Fathers, as they are perhaps annoyingly described by Europhiles like me, were to a man Catholic. Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi and Adenauer were all Christian Democrats too, and only Paul Henri Spaak in the early European pantheon was a socialist. But others from the reformed tradition, such as the Danes, Swedes and Finns, however reluctant initially, have begun to put suspicions of this kind behind them. Increasingly they demonstrate a real belief in the integration process. This is particularly true of Finland.
It is indisputable that the United Kingdom has a fundamental problem with European integration. The evidence of polls suggests that the negativism here is qualitatively different from all other cases not merely in its consistency but in its depth. Thus it remains at the lowest position in Eurobarometer polls in its positivism towards the European Union. Indeed it is far from clear what the result of a referendum on membership would be today.
This ambivalence has been evident from the earliest days. In the lead-up to the Treaty of Paris that created the Coal and Steel Community and started the whole process, Dean Acheson counselled the French not to inform London because he foresaw its potential for destructive opposition.
The reasons for this antipathy are many, varied and in part understandable. It is apparent that history plays a substantial part in this, not merely through the memory of terrible continental wars but also in the sense of distinctiveness born out of the inviolability of Britain itself, an island that has not been invaded for a thousand years. Britain had pragmatic economic grounds, too, for its initial opposition to European integration. Its loyalty to and connection with an empire, already disintegrating but still connected in the 40s and 50s, and ‘the English speaking peoples’, was an essential element in such limited profound political debate as took place during the 1950s on the whole subject of Europe.[4]
Sutherland’s fears were well founded. In January 2013, Cameron sought to lance the euro boil that had plagued his party for decades. He pledged a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU if the Conservatives won an overall majority in the 2015 general election. In May 2015, after the Tories upset the odds and won such a majority, Cameron found himself under pressure to follow through on his commitment. On 20 February 2016, the British Prime Minister called a referendum for 23 June.
At the EU Council meeting in March, Cameron was given a cool reception by the heads of other member states when he entered the chamber. He made an immediate beeline for Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, and assured the Fine Gael leader that the referendum would confirm Britain’s membership. The Irish delegation was not so sure. Ireland has had a chequered history with referendums. The old maxim – you get an answer you didn’t want to a question you didn’t ask – immediately sprang to mind.
The backdrop could not have been less favourable. From 2010 onwards, there were legitimate questions about the feasibility of the euro and the future of the EU. The 2008 financial crisis had exposed the flawed architecture of monetary union. From the early 2000s onwards, capital had been flowing from core countries to those on the periphery. When the resulting Irish property bubble collapsed in 2008 and the debts of the country’s banks were no longer sustainable, there was no mechanism for burden sharing; the financial backstop put in place by the government raised question marks over the solvency of the Irish state. Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus faced similar problems. The commission’s response was a programme of chastening austerity. The inevitable societal backlash seemed at one stage as if it would sunder the euro and unravel European integration.
As if financial disintegration wasn’t enough to test the cohesion of the EU28, there was a migration crisis on its southern border. Brexiteers had a field day. Sutherland had opened a Twitter account on 22 September 2015, using the handle @PDSutherlandUN, primarily as a forum to express his views on migration, but in 2016 he also used it to talk about Brexit. The responses to his posts are illuminating. Overwhelmingly negative, they mostly depict Sutherland as a Jewish banker intent on undermining British sovereignty.
British Euroscepticism is an amorphous force, which made it more challenging to put together an effective argument to remain in the EU. The bedrock of British anti-EU sentiment is the alleged irreconcilability of two different cultures. According to this narrative, there can be no dilution of British sovereignty and the values that flow from it. These include an unconditional commitment to democracy, freedom and the rule of law. For this worldview to hold water, the EU is portrayed in equal and opposite terms.
Catherine Day believes the UK has always had a problem with the European Commission. ‘They have made a bogeyman about it, but a lot of it just wasn’t true.’ She says the commission had the power of ideas and persuasion, and that what the British hated was that, once a commission proposal was on the table, it generally had a lot of support from other member states and that made it harder for the British to derail it.
But esoteric arguments about the alleged democratic deficit of the EU, while effective, would not be enough to swing a vote in favour of Leave. Instead, the campaign coalesced around the slogan ‘Take back control’, with its numinous undertones. Migration became the lodestone of the movement. Louise Mensch, a former Conservative MP and prominent Brexiteer, told one of Sutherland’s associates that the Leave camp was delighted he had joined the fray on the Remain side. His close association with migration meant that he would himself be a useful bogeyman for a campaign that was about taking back control.
Sutherland became quite active in the Remain campaign. He appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight on two occasions, as well as on Channel 4 News and a raft of other programmes, and penned a number of opinion pieces. It can be said with some certainty that his contributions hardened the resolve of Leave voters. It wasn’t just his association with migration: even worse, he was dismissed as an expert. The Leave side carried the day on 23 June 2016, winning by a narrow margin with just under 52 per cent of the vote.
Basil Geoghegan discussed Brexit with Sutherland on a number of occasions. ‘If Peter was around now I think the real question would be how would he react to Brexit and how would he have reacted to the reform that is probably needed in the EU. For a committed Europhile, that is the real question. He was never going to be shy and retiring about putting his views forward. He spent a lot of time in the world of politics but he was never a politician. He spoke his mind. He never worried about winning approval.’
On 19 May 2016, Sutherland had given a speech on Brexit at the IIEA in Dublin. According to Brendan Halligan it was the sort of speech that had been missing from the debate in the UK – passionate, but most importantly well informed.
Sutherland opened with a warning that Brexit had unleashed uncomfortable echoes of the country’s past. ‘Anybody who is unfortunate enough to read British tabloids will see this virulent strain of nationalism and xenophobia.’ He said he didn’t know which way the referendum would go. ‘The bookies say one thing. The taxi drivers will tell you another.’ He took aim at Boris Johnson: ‘How anybody could be persuaded by these meanderings I do not know.’ Ireland and the EU, he said, would be faced with a very long period of negotiation.
Then he reached the substantive part of the speech, which concerned what would happen if Britain voted to leave. ‘We move into a period of uncertainty that will be profound. The Council will agree guidelines for the Commission to negotiate with Britain. That will be for a period of two years. This puts the UK in an extreme position of vulnerability. There will be highly complicated talks about how the relationship will exist after Brexit.’ To go by previous experience, the process might take five years or more, and the prospects for the UK economy and for inward investment would change.
He cited warnings by the IMF, the OECD and Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England:
They all say this will be a disastrous position. On the other side you have Boris Johnson, Norman Lamont and Lord Lawson saying it won’t. I know which way I would vote.
It will have very serious implications for Ireland. There will be concern about access to British markets at the end of all of this. A drawbridge won’t be erected but the conditions will be very different. The UK will be scrambling to negotiate sixty free trade agreements. This is a formidable challenge. Even though the British civil service has a very good reputation, there will be very grave concerns about its capacity to deal with the challenge it presents.
Before the referendum many Brexiteers had cited the Norwegian model as the template to follow in the event of a no vote. Sutherland warned that the Norwegian model would require Britain to accept free movement, budget contributions and be a rule taker.
If that deal is brought back to Westminster, the political reaction might be, what was this all about. What will Parliament do? There is a majority in Parliament who don’t want Brexit. One can foresee chaos and severe trauma in the British political system.
The argument that Britain is a net importer and therefore Germany will have an overwhelming interest in retaining an open free market is also flawed. Undoubtedly every country wants an open and free market. But the other side of that is never referred to in these comments, and that is that Britain exports substantially greater services than it takes from others. It is a services-based economy. These will be excluded on the models we are talking about. The WTO does not work to cover services, and services will be key in this negotiation. What will happen to commerce and investment? It will be positive for Ireland in terms of greater flows of FDI (foreign direct investment).
Sutherland insisted it would be impossible for Britain to retain the benefits of the single market, which is what many prominent Brexiteers had pledged, while at the same time ditching the free movement of people and EU legislation:
There will be a great deal of support to find a new relationship that works for everybody, including from Ireland. But to do so destroys the essence of membership and creates a Europe ˆ la carte and one in which the EU is disintegrating – that is inconceivable. That won’t happen. The fear factor of a country leaving the union at a time of such turbulence may well ensure negotiations are not going to be easy. Nobody will wave goodbye at no price. I don’t believe negotiations will be so terrible that a border will be erected. It could happen, but I think a way will be found. The consequences for Ireland north and south will be very destabilising. Indeed I am taken aback that there is one party in Northern Ireland so imbued with exceptionalism that it is in favour of Brexit.
Huge uncertainty and damage will be caused. The outlook is deeply worrying. We [Ireland] have a huge interest in Great Britain staying. They have a very similar outlook in terms of free trade. They were the most supportive government when I was at the WTO. They are responsible for us not being in Schengen. I don’t agree with that but it was because of the common travel area. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of staying in the union. The case has not been explored or articulated in any way in the UK. I know trade policy can be opaque but how could anybody say it will be fine? Britain will have to recreate negotiating positions with the rest of the world. Foreign direct investment into the UK is on the basis of access to the EU.[5]
Sutherland pointed to the slump in sterling when Boris Johnson announced he was running on the Leave side; the impact if the UK left would be unimaginable:
I have nothing remotely constructive to say about Brexit. I can’t believe that if they do leave then anybody would think it would be a good idea for Ireland to leave. We should do the opposite and bind ourselves to Europe. The days of being dependent on one country are over. We need Britain in. We have to stand firm and not be afraid to say it. We need to stand firm on European principles and not be afraid to say it in front of our friends. We cannot let Brexit in any way affect our relationship with the EU. If it does we have to stand firm.[6]
Clearly, Sutherland was more or less right, in almost every warning he issued. Yet at the time he was dismissed as being a mere expert. The following September Sutherland became ill, although it wasn’t publicly disclosed, while at the same time Bertie Ahern proposed that he should have been made a representative for Ireland in Brexit talks. ‘He would have been brilliant. He would have been a huge asset for the country. When I proposed him I had no idea he was ill. It was very unfortunate for everybody.’