German business guru: "By failing to procure vaccines, the EU has validated Brexit"

“It is dawning on the German and European population that the political class has failed across the board in meeting the enormous economic and social challenges of the Corona crisis. It marks the accelerating decline of the EU.

"...Everybody in the economic sphere now knows that whenever there is a problem at a production site in the EU, there is a risk of being hit with an export ban: vaccines today, biotech tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow what?

“This destruction of trust in the EU as a place of business (Standort EU) is all of a piece with its tendency towards over-regulation and planned-economy control. The gap between wish and reality in the EU is greater than ever. By failing to procure vaccines, the EU has validated Brexit and given all EU citizens an objective reason for euroscepticism.

Daniel Stelter, a widely respected German business writer, in Manager Magazin, quoted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph’s Economic Intelligence newsletter.

An anonymous highly placed source in Brussels told a British journalist, Simon Kuper, in 2018 that Europe’s ruling political class no longer identified with Britain’s Conservatives because they had embraced a nineteenth-century nationalism unparalleled among Western European governments. The British conservative politicians are not nationalists but they and the British have rediscovered belief in the nation. I think everyone in Europe has, thanks to the pandemic and especially thanks to Ursula von der Leyen.

British Secretary of Health Matt Hancock says he overruled advice and ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine rather than 30 million because the film Contagion had taught him there would be a global scramble for vaccine. He says every Brit needed to be jabbed “and I wasn’t going to settle for less”.

I can't see any reason why healthy people under 50 need a vaccine but the important point is that he on his tod made the decision and had he got it badly wrong it would have probably cost him his job.

How differently things work in the European Commission where Mrs von der Leyen accepts no responsibility whatsoever for the AstraZeneca mess, even though she handled procurement of vaccines personally, says the European Union should be proud of its vaccination strategy. 

She asks with astonishing brass neck that she should be judged when her term of office ends in 2024.

Simon Kuper said back in 2018 that wanting to punish Britain isn't personal with most Eurocrats, just business.

"Europe’s ruling classes do want Brexit to hurt Britain – but chiefly so as to shut up the continent’s anti-European populists."

That is still their strategy. With Ursula von der Leyen reportedly it is Brexit that motivated her to try to stop AZ sending vaccines to the UK. 

That strategy is in big trouble now. 

We shall see what the rest of the year brings but January 2021 feels like an historical turning point.