The Observer view on the standoff over the Galileo project

The row between the UK and the EU over the €10bn Galileo satellite navigation project is turning nasty. For once, this unnecessary spat is not Britain’s fault. It is, of course, true that the argument over who can access this spanking new system, who builds it and who pays for it would not be happening if the UK intended to remain a member of the EU. But it is equally true that senior commission officials in Brussels, including the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, continue to exhibit difficulty in accepting post-referendum political realities. That’s a polite way of saying the EU needs to get over itself.

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The British vote to leave, which we continue, with growing conviction, to regard as a historic mistake, has changed almost everything. It’s deeply regrettable, but this is where we are. In the context of the continuing negotiations, this transformation should be recognised and its practical implications embraced, not resisted. The commission must climb down off the high horse on to which it unwisely clambers at times like this. The arrogance and fetishistic inflexibility displayed over Galileo are exactly what alienated many British voters in the first place.

When EU officials claim, as they did last week, that allowing a non-member country (namely the UK) access to sensitive security-related information would “breach the sovereignty of the EU”, they seriously overreach. The EU, in and of itself, has no “sovereignty”. That is the preserve of the 28 individually sovereign nation states, which have agreed in some respects to pool it.

What is an affront to sovereignty is the commission’s refusal to contemplate reimbursing the €1bn the UK has invested in the project. The claim that to do so would be “against the rules” illustrates Brussels’ inability to accept that, like it or not, a democratic vote has torn up the rulebook.

When officials suggest that the continued, post-Brexit participation of British companies in manufacturing Galileo systems, including those with military applications, represents a potential security risk, they part company with common sense. The UK is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a threat to Europe’s security. On the contrary, it has spent a good part of its modern history, and its national budget, guaranteeing it – while other European countries duck their Nato obligations. Who knows, as predators stalk Europe’s borders, when British help may again be needed? Naturally, it is considered bad taste to mention such things.

Unable to secure a sensible agreement on turning Galileo into a joint EU-UK project (which would also save the EU money), the chancellor, Philip Hammond, warned last week that Britain might be forced to go it alone – at a whopping cost of perhaps £5bn. The widely reported response from an unidentified “senior EU official” was instructive: “I have the impression the UK thinks everything has to change on the EU side, so that everything remains the same on the UK side,” the official said. The EU would not succumb to “threats”.

Here, in a nutshell, lies the problem at the heart of the Brexit negotiations. Despite numerous, humiliating concessions on budget payments, citizens’ rights, financial passporting, a transition period and, prospectively, on customs arrangements, Brussels officialdom, with Barnier at its helm, still believes, deep down, that the UK wants something for nothing. This is undoubtedly true of hard Tory Brexiters, who have always underplayed the difficulties and costs of leaving. It may also be true of leading Leavers such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, although both have trouble distinguishing between public policy and personal ambition.

But it is certainly not true of many people in the UK. They already know, because the evidence is incontrovertible, and growing by the day, that the price to be paid for Brexit will be very high indeed. They do not need the commission’s gratuitous, self-defeating and deliberately punitive strictures to remind them of that chastening fact.