https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3796307.html

I have known Andrew Duff since I was a Cambridge undergraduate, and indeed he was my local councillor from my second year until he stood down in 1990, an election in which I myself stood in a neighbouring district and got badly pasted by the voters; he was kind enough to send me a note commiserating on my result but encouraging me to have high ambition for the future. When I started to consider how I might find a job in Brussels in 1998, he was one of the first people I turned to for advice. Ten years later, a casual remark that he made to me over dinner about the inevitability of Brexit was one of the crucial triggers for us as a family to go for Belgian citizenship in 2008.

In the meantime he had been elected to the first two of his three terms in the European Parliament. As a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, he had got a clause inserted into the EU Treaties allowing the European Parliament to refer a prospective treaty with a third country to the European Court of Justice, and together we tried to get MEPs to activate this in the case of the EU-Morocco Fisheries Agreement in 2011. (We lost that vote, but won a later round.)

We do have our disagreements, but usually on topics where I am conscious that he has given the matter a lot more thought than I have. More on a couple of these below.

As noted above, Andrew saw Brexit coming from a long way off, and prepared accordingly. This short (158-page) book is a summary of his learnings and recommendations. The first two thirds are a very lucid summary of the history of the European Union and of the UK's involvement with it, starting immediately after the Second World War, when neither Labour nor Conservative governments could decide if they wanted to be partners in the new European integration until it was too late to make much difference, and ending with the December 2020 Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He makes a couple of important points about the effect of meeting formats on the results (most notoriously the 2000 Nice summit). The book was finished before the most recent kerfuffle on the Northern Ireland Protocol, but again Andrew saw it coming. For us working on EU affairs, it's a familiar story, but it's helpful to have it in this handy format; for those less familiar, I think it's one of the best short guides out there.

Andrew was a Remainer but is not a Rejoiner, in that he doesn't see much point in investing emotional or political energy in pursuing a revived British EU membership that isn't going to happen. (I agree with him.) He also doubts that EU membership is realistic for the Western Balkans, Turkey or Ukraine, and calls for an entrenched associate membership status for those countries that want to join but will not qualify in a meaningful time horizon. I dunno, myself. When I first came to Brussels I was involved with advocating for a similar set of ideas, and a critical problem was that the countries themselves were not very much in favour - and these included Croatia, which has since successfully joined. It's not at all a bad idea, but the core market will need to be convinced.

On the UK, he is with the liberal mainstream (such as it is) in calling for proportional representation at elections, full federalisation, and preparation for the potential departures of Northern Ireland and Scotland, all of which I have sympathy with; and an elected upper chamber, where I differ. It seems to me that if (if!) you want a revising chamber with largely advisory powers, elections are not a good way of getting the experts who should constitute such a chamber, and it would be better to abolish the seats of the hereditary peers and bishops, slim down the remaining number by 40% (at random if there is no other method) and move firmly to lifetime appointments made by the independent panel which already exists.

And finally, he calls for more European federalism, as he has been doing for most of his career, and for a new understanding between the EU and UK to be found with a strong element of security co-operation, including also the associated status mentioned above. Under current circumstances it's difficult to see the petulant Lord Frost and vacuous Johnson moving very far on the latter, but they won't be in power for ever.

Anyway, a good and quick read. ( )