Shane Te Pou: No appetite to help Britain on baffling Brexit track to irrelevance

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, center, reacts following the results of voting on Amendments put forward by Members of Parliament over the Government's Brexit deal. Photo / AP

Opinion

COMMENT

"Give them nothing - zero, zilch, nada" was the refrain as I travelled around Spain, striking up conversations about Brexit and the future of Europe.

While I was there, the governments of Spain and the UK signed a deal to protect voting rights of British residents in Spain and Spanish residents in the UK after Brexit. Beyond that, it was hard to find any appetite for easing the path for what they see as UK's baffling track to irrelevance.

One Madrid-based lawyer who travels widely across the continent for work believes British voters made the wrong call, grasping at some fictitious past and failing to grasp the reality and possibilities of modern Europe. "Now," she tells me, " they want concessions out of the rest of us to compensate for their mistake. There's no patience for that".

Others I spoke to pointed to the ongoing dispute over Gibraltar as a reason for their lack of sympathy for Britain's self-inflicted plight. The irony of the insular UK clinging on to the last vestiges of colonialism isn't lost on anyone, nor is the country's double standards when it comes to the free movement of labour.

At one tapas place, a young man told me about his last trip across the English Channel: "Their entire hospitality sector is made up of eastern Europeans. Every hotel and bar is staffed by Eastern European migrants filling jobs Brits themselves won't do. I can't see that changing".

The impact of a so-called hard Brexit on Spanish businesses cropped up, too, especially the national airliner, Iberia, which faces the possibility of banishment from British skies. While few Spaniards I encountered expressed much affection for British holidaymakers (next to whom the unruly family that captivated New Zealand over New Years seem placid and well behaved), nobody doubts the critical importance of tourism to the national economy.

One of every four tourists in Spain is British, and they contribute about NZ$25 billion annually. Any hardening of the border between the two countries is a grave threat to the Spanish economy.

The interdependent nature of the European economy is well understood in Spain, which explains why Pew found last year only 13 per cent of voters would follow Britain out of the EU.

Nobody loves Brussels — you hear the same gripes everywhere over dumb regulation and a lack of accountability — but nobody even entertains the notion that going it alone would improve matters for Spain.

"We don't love the EU, but we are fully integrated now and it would be crazy to mess with that," a young Spanish traveller told me.

I couldn't even find anyone in favour of leaving the EU among Catalan separatists. They want out of Spain, but fully grasp the benefits of staying part of European community.

There's no doubt that the rolling disaster of Brexit has contributed to this sentiment, Intransigence on the part of EU officials when it comes to refusing a soft landing for the UK has, in northern Europe at least, done wonders for taming isolationist impulses.

A young IT worker expressed consternation that Leave voters feared some loss of cultural identity from membership of the EU. "I am no less Spanish today than my grandparents were, or my children will be, he said. "We are European as well. We do not have to choose".

Shane Te Pou is a former Labour Party activist in New Zealand.