Ian Dunt is editor of Politics.co.uk, author of Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now? and a host on the Remainiacs podcast. His new book, How To Be A Liberal, is out later this year.

Ruth Woodhouse :Do you feel that the current coronavirus situation is bringing countries together or, especially in the case of the UK, driving them further apart?

This is a fascinating question. The reality is it does both. Taking the downside first: borders are closed, all over the world. It’s hard to get a more obvious example of national distancing than that. And on a less obvious level, some of the squabbles seen in Europe this month over the financial response, for instance on mutualised debt, have brought back the euro zone crisis demons and revealed that deep split between fiscally conservative countries and the rest. That has the capacity to do much more damage to Europe than Brexit has.

But there are reasons to be positive too. All countries face the same threat and share the same purpose under Covid-19. It is only by seeing what works in other countries and emulating them that we can succeed. So there is a chance here, if we take it, to make the case for internationalism – for countries working together to share expertise, equipment, and evidence.

Roy Stonebridge: It seems almost inevitable that we will arrive at the end of 2020, in the midst of a virus led global recession. How could UK possibly contemplate any changes to the trading arrangements with the EU in such circumstances?

Well if the government was half-way sane it would not consider this. But then, if it was halfway sane, it wouldn’t have got us in this position in the first place. People often assume that No.10 will be sensible if the crunch comes, but pretty much all the evidence of the last few years suggests that’s unlikely.

However, there are a few differences this time. Some leading Brexiters have expressed support for extension. To be honest, probably the best way of achieving an extension is for Remainers to not demand it. If it gets folded into the culture war, it’ll be lost.

One thing is true though: you can judge the government’s Covid-19 response by the Brexit extension. If they do not request an extension, they are doing Covid-19 wrong. This disease should be demanding all their time. If they have any capacity for anything else, they have not understood the magnitude of it.

I used to write about other liberal issues: Drug policy reform, free speech, immigration, civil liberties, prison policy. I miss that. Not enough journalists cover it, so when you drift off, you feel you’re letting the side down. But unfortunately, there’s no chance of getting back to it any time soon. The nationalist wave is not receding. And anyone who believes in liberalism, reason and internationalism owes it to themselves to stand up against it. To be honest, as long as we can hold our head up high in a few years’ time and say that we played our part in trying to stop this thing, we’ll be able to consider it time well spent.

Tracy Rolfe: What impact do you think Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader will have on our medium- to long-term chances of rejoining the EU?

Potentially significant. He is electable. That’s not to say he will be elected, but at least he can be, which is more than we can say about the last Labour leader. He is also a Remainer. He has done enough, over the last few years, to earn our trust on that. If he sees an opportunity to rejoin, he will take it.

But the best thing we can do to make that happen is to lay off him. There should be no pressure for any attempt to rejoin in the short term. We should be aiming to make sure rejoin is a manifesto commitment in the election after next. And that can be done.

As my colleague on Remainiacs, Naomi Smith, says: ‘The first rule of Rejoin club is you do not talk about Rejoin club.’

Lisa Ryan Burton: Do you think Keir Starmer will face the same level of criticism from the British media that Jeremy Corbyn faced, or will his background and character make it much more difficult for the press to paint him in such a negative way?

He will face much less. There are very simple reasons for this. He does not seem to actively dislike Britain. He has basic competence. This seems obvious, but the previous leader was seemingly incapable of it.

However, he will still be attacked. The press are largely – outside of the Guardian, the Times and the FT – cheerleaders for Boris Johnson. That won’t change. They’ll look to undermine Starmer. If he’s clever though, he can sidestep this. And the way to do it is to speak over their heads, utilise the opportunities offered by impartiality rules on broadcasters, not treat the media as a tribal enemy, and triangulate the government position – try to turn the debate on issues in which you appeal to their base in order to expand the opportunities you have in your own territory.

Stewart Luscott-Evans: Has the coronavirus pandemic changed your views about Brexit in any way, or has it reinforced your beliefs?

Neither really. Brexit still seems a bloody silly idea. But it’s not like the EU response has been so magnificent that it particularly helps in the other direction either.

If anything it makes me worry about how the EU handles its own Covid-19 crisis. It must do better this time than it did in the bond crisis. It must demonstrate solidarity, the basic principle on which it is based. There’ve been a few examples of that – Macron’s rhetoric, Merkel’s use of equipment provision. But the efforts by Germany and the Netherlands to kill off attempts at really broad-ranging mutualisation of debt measures doesn’t bode well. It’s not enough to smuggle compromises into haphazard initiatives which go under the radar. It needs big visible measures that don’t just work, but are seen to work.

For decades now, national leaders have been able to claim credit for the good things the EU does, and blame it for whatever they don’t like. The EU facilitates this by stuffing big projects into boringly titled stability mechanisms and the like. That has to stop. They need to fix the policy. And they need to fix the way the policy is presented. The severity of the crisis provides a moment in which to achieve that, in a really eye-opening and effective way. I hope they take it. Although I must say that the early indications are not good.

Many thanks to Ian for taking part. Next month we talk to Jessica Simor QC. 

With the changing political landscape, Bremain invited former contributors to our Bremainers Ask feature for their thoughts on the subject. Before the current coronavirus crisis, we asked them to comment on where we are now, how they see things moving forward and what we pro-Europeans should be focusing on in the future.

Last month, we brought you the thoughts of Harry Shindler, MBE, Kyle Taylor & Steve Bray. Here is the final instalment, & grateful thanks to all our contributors.

On paper, Boris Johnson may have “got Brexit done”: the UK is no longer a Member State of the European Union.  But in practice, many of the real questions about future relations between the UK and the EU remain to be settled.

On the one hand, the UK Government under Boris Johnson has at least pulled free of the excruciating period when leading Leave campaigners, and then the administration of Theresa May, promised all things to all people and either believed or pretended that that could ever possibly happen in reality.  The current UK position on future relations with the EU is at least possessed of greater internal coherence and demonstrates a higher level of political realism.

On the other hand, the cost of such clarity is that the UK Government is driving headlong towards a serious rupture in relations with the EU – a far cry from many of the Leave fantasies made back in 2016 and repeated consistently thereafter – and crucially, that will be true regardless of whether there is a deal or whether there is none.  The British decision to rule out any transitional extension only exacerbates the situation by making “two regulatory changes” more likely in due course.  And of course, there remains a shocking contradiction between Johnson’s propaganda about “Global Britain” as the champion of free trade versus the reality of a Government poised to commit the single gravest act of economic segregation in modern history.

Besides the damage which will inevitably flow from the UK’s decision deliberately to dislocate and distance itself from the Union, that choice also has various important internal consequences for the UK itself: for example, the customs tensions affecting Northern Ireland will only grow in proportion to the degree of Great Britain’s divergence from Union law; and the same is true as regards the management of internal trade between England, Scotland and Wales.  But most of all: why is the Johnson Government so obsessed with the power to diverge from Union regulatory standards, many of which are only minimum in nature and do not prevent the UK from pursuing higher levels of protection?  Perhaps “taking back control” is just an exercise in nationalist political rhetoric.  But it seems more likely that the Tories do indeed harbour a dream of dismantling the UK’s adherence to Europe’s distinctive socio-economic model.

Moreover, the UK’s increasingly abrasive approach to the future relationship also poses serious challenges for the EU itself.  Above all: the risk of an aggressive competitor on its very doorstep, actively undertaking market deregulation and encouraging social dumping as an alternative economic model; as well as constantly engaging in attempts to undermine the political unity and solidarity of the Member States – with the UK’s post-withdrawal but still essentially Leave-driven leadership potentially motivated by the belief that the relative success of their precious Brexit can best or indeed only be demonstrated by the relative failure of the equally hated EU.  Even looking beyond the current generation of Tory politicians in office: the further and harder the UK does drift away from the European fold, the more difficult life will eventually be, even for a new administration more sympathetic to close relations with or indeed renewed membership of the Union.

For readers of this newsletter, it is also bitterly disappointing to see that the question of onward movement rights across the EU27 even for those UK nationals protected under the Withdrawal Agreement are not explicitly on the negotiating agenda – despite the two parties having repeatedly claimed that the issue would indeed be addressed in their “future partnership” talks.  It may take some noisy lobbying to make sure the issue doesn’t just drop off the agenda (again).

Seb Dance

Labour politician, former MEP

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So here we are. And we thought Brexit was bad enough. In fact, it was so bad that, having had quite enough of the dramatic highs and lows of the past three years my husband and I booked a trip as soon as I left the European Parliament to get away from it all. It was great! We had a fantastic time at the beach, the pool and an overland trip down the Malay Peninsula. I briefly forgot about the pain of losing the fight against Brexit and the sheer stress of it all. I remember joking one evening that whatever came next couldn’t be as bad as all that!

Fast-forward a few weeks and I am writing this on the eve of what is a likely announcement from the Prime Minister that we will have to stay indoors for the foreseeable future, an order that I know has already been in place in Spain for some time. We are afraid to go out, we give every passer-by a very wide berth. On the few occasions we do venture out we put on disposable latex gloves and a facemask – as much to protect anyone we come into contact with as ourselves.

We are living through something that is not just extraordinary, but which has profound consequences for our future. It is a global crisis, which will be far worse than 2008 in its impact. We must not let the UK government off the hook by letting them absorb the impact of Brexit into that of COVID-19, hoping no-one will notice. It would be reckless in the extreme to strangle a nascent recovery by pursuing an ideological agenda at a time when we need consensus and clear thinking to prepare us for the future.

Right now, we need to look after ourselves and our loved ones. We will get through this. And when we do, we must never give up on our fight: to create a world where we don’t divide each other on the basis of nationality but one where we are free to live our lives where we want, the way we want.

Many thanks to all of our Bremainers Ask contributors who have taken part in our Revisited series. Bremainers Ask will be back next month with Ian Dunt, Editor of Politics.co.uk and host of Remainiacs.