Like Brexit, Covid has turned both the EU and the UK into losers

When the time comes for the two sides to return to unfinished Brexit business, the talks are likely to be even more acrimonious as a result of the recent tensions, writes Sean O’Grady

Great divide: Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels last year (Getty)

The new post-Covid geopolitical normal will feature a much weaker European Union than could ever have been foreseen before the crisis. Brexit, damaging to all concerned as it has undoubtedly proved, looks a mere distraction set against the impact of the coronavirus. The public health test-and-trace response, and death rates, in some EU member states, notably Germany, have been enviable, and many others have scored successes of their own, not least Belgium and the Netherlands, such important centres for vaccine production.

Yet throughout the year of turmoil, the European Union’s efforts to coordinate national responses have been either ineffective or downright disastrous. From the get go, when individual countries rushed to close borders and ban exports of protective equipment, ventilators and treatments, the authorities in Brussels have been bystanders. When hard-pressed nations such as Italy sought financial assistance, they were scorned by Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. She was chosen to run the EU, it is rumoured, because Paris and Berlin favoured a weaker style of leadership in Brussels. They should be more careful what they wish for. Friends of the EU should take no pleasure in its travails, because Britain is no unconquerable island so far as the virus is concerned, but equally should send any illusions about the recent performance of the EU and its agencies. The answer may be “more Europe”, as President Macron used to say, or an end to integration, but the problem of EU competence (in both senses) over public health is plain.

Right now, the European Union finds itself in the embarrassing position of watching the British speed way ahead in the vaccination race (by fair means or foul), and in the more humiliating position of having to turn to Russia, of all places, for help. A third Covid wave is hitting parts of Europe hard. France is the latest to fall back into lockdown, even if Macron has tried to rebadge it as a “third way”. Hence the urgent need for vaccines in what the president calls “a race against time” for his country.

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However, even in such an emergency, the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab is periodically “paused” for some scare or other, though inconsistently across the 27 member states. The Oxford vaccine is sometimes partly or entirely banned in the EU, but then exports of this apparently unwanted commodity to the UK are imposed, illogically. The export ban, which would have invited British retaliation and supply chains and all production seizing up was narrowly averted. The panic and the threat of a cross-channel vaccine war is not over, though, and it has pushed a desperate EU into the arms of Russia.

Tellingly, this tilt to the Kremlin is being orchestrated by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, rather than the European Commission, which once again finds itself turfed out of the driving seat. The Franco-German engine is once again running the machine, and there are few qualms about turning to Vladimir Putin and his Sputnik vaccine. Hungary and Slovakia have already enthusiastically adopted the Russian inoculation, and the European Medicines Agency has been told to get on with making sure it goes, and remains on, the approved list. Mischievously, given Russia’s destructive involvement in the Brexit referendum, the Sputnik team tweeted “Together we are stronger!”

No doubt about that, but the residue of resentment against Britain seems likely to poison already poor relations for years ahead. Whether or not the British cheated in getting the Oxford jab earlier than the Europeans, the perception that they did precisely that is what matters. In a blame culture, fingers are pointed and shots fired first. Across Europe fingers are being aimed at the European Commission and Von der Leyen, and also at the perfidious British, their untrustworthy prime minister, and the AstraZeneca company (in fact British-Swedish) is seen, fairly or not, as a malign arm of the state. When the time comes for the UK and EU to cooperate on fisheries, border checks, financial services, the Northern Ireland economic border, the withdrawal agreement court case and the many other bits of unfinished Brexit business, the talks are likely to be even more acrimonious as a result of the recent tensions. The supply of vaccines, after all, unlike cod or share dealing, is a matter of life or death, and the bad feeling will endure. Like Brexit itself, Covid has turned the EU and the UK both into losers.