Brexit: EU has 'completely unreasonable demands' of Britain, says Mark Higgie
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A former Australian ambassador to the EU has accused Brussels of making “completely unreasonable demands of Britain” and warns the UK to exercise “extreme caution” in any future trading relationship with China because the country was “a thug and a shocking bully” which had decided to make an example of Australia after the country called for a global inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 virus.
Mark Higgie, a senior political adviser to Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister, served as ambassador in Brussels between 2014 and 2017. In a wide-ranging and, at times, scathing interview with the Planet Normal podcast (listen on the audio player above), Higgie says he believes there will be a last-minute trade deal between the UK and the EU, but he warns Britain not to compromise on the question of sovereignty. “I think that would really be a big mistake”. According to Higgie, now a senior fellow at the Danube Institute conservative think-tank, the EU is making unacceptable demands to punish Britain for leaving their “club”.
“Basically, [the EU position is] remain in its orbit and, by the way, give us 80% of your fish,” says Higgie. “This saga has gone on for so many year and you’d think that the Brussels establishment would understand Britain’s desire to re-establish sovereignty, but they just don’t get it. They really are obtuse.”
Higgie says that, for the EU, the UK leaving is “the biggest setback in its 62-year history” and “fairly inevitably there’s a lot of anger around. And I think that element of punishing Britain both for what it has done and also as an example to other countries is a real factor in the background.”
Higgie praises the British negotiators, led by Lord Frost, for having “kept up their spirits with all of this”. Recalling, in particular, Donald Tusk’s treatment of Theresa May, he says the EU side “ has constantly been gratuitously rude to British representatives”.
Nigel Farage was correct, Higgie says, when he claimed that the EU was “a scrapyard for failed politicians”. The current President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was such a poor defence minister that “Germany wouldn’t have been able to launch a war in 1939 if von der Leyen had been in charge of its armed forces”.
Higgie predicts that the new fault line within the European Union will be divergent “values on a range of issues of importance. Migration is the big one.” He contrasts the increasingly “woke” attitudes of the EU leadership with the belief in countries like Hungary and Poland that “the European Union should be about genuinely defending its external borders.”
Asked about the UK’s future outside the EU, Higgie says “Britain is going to be absolutely fine. These things take time, you know.” Although he cites Australia’s free trade deal with China as an achievement, the former ambassador cautions the UK against a similar over-reliance on that country. “I mean we’ve got ourselves in a situation now where China is our most important export market and China is behaving like a shocking bully and has decided, I think, to make an example of Australia because we had the temerity to call for a global inquiry into the origins of the Covid pandemic. And they were furious with that. Now, sector by sector, they’re finding reasons not to import our stuff.”
Britain, Higgie says, will try for a free trade deal with China “but for God’s sake, don’t put too many of your eggs in the China basket.”
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