What the UK could learn from Cockfield on Europe

Once upon a time there was a Conservative politician from the UK with an ambitious but realistic plan for what is now the European Union.

The politician was Lord (Arthur) Cockfield, in my view the second most significant Tory politician of the 1980s. His proposal was for providing a framework for a single European market by 1992, and it was pretty much achieved within the target period of eight years.

As a member of the European Commission, Cockfield — who died a decade ago this month — produced a white paper in 1985 that put forward a practical and sensible way of achieving a complex task within a set period. That was the sort of thing Tory politicians could once do.

The current Tory government is now concerned with leaving the EU. It does not have either a plan or objectives. This week it even lost the man who would have been its chief negotiator. Unlike Cockfield’s eight years to put in place the basis for the single market, the government is insisting it can achieve a similarly complex (if negative) task in just two.

In 1985, Cockfield (with the full support of the then commission president Jacques Delors) produced his famous white paper in a matter of weeks, and so sound and thought-through was its content that it was used as a blueprint thereafter. In 2016-17, the entire government has produced nothing other than platitudes and unconvincing excuses for secrecy.

The UK may have had a Cockfield to put the single market in place, but it certainly does not have one to take the UK out of the EU.

How he went about his task is instructive in two things. The first is how to achieve anything worthwhile in respect of the EU. The second is the nature of the single market, an entity and a concept that is proving problematic in the push towards Brexit.

Cockfield’s genius was to be open and pragmatic. The white paper was an exercise in transparency. What he and the commission were seeking to achieve was in plain sight. Any distrust within member states was dispelled: the point of each proposal and how it cohered with others and with the ultimate objective was set out.

The white paper also emphasised the need for co-operation and, building on the case law of the European Court of Justice, the crucial ingredient of “mutual recognition” of standards and requirements. The commission would avoid grand over-arching legislation in favour of finding out what worked in one member state and seeing if that would be accepted by another state.

Cockfield and the commission did not keep people in the dark and did not seek to achieve the impossible within an unrealistic timetable. In a way, the implementation of the single market was an exercise in confident Anglo-Saxon empiricism.