Glyn Ford on postwar Britain and Europe
Between the Waves:The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 by Tom McTague published by Picador
McTague provides a forensic mapping of the Eurosceptic face of Britain’s engagement with Europe, ranging from the middle of WWII until the early backwash after the Brexit Referendum. All the intricate manoeuvrings of that right-wing open conspiracy to rip Britain out of the EU are on display. At the close of Europe’s opening civil war, there were to all appearances three great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire. The last had been transformed by the passage of war from reality to fantasy. There are none so blind as those who cannot see. Washington’s Delilah had cut Samson’s hair. It was this delusion of history that saw Britain refuse to join the European boat when its own ship was sinking. Many longingly hoped the whole enterprise could be scuttled, as they ineffectually sat on the fence, too weak to stop, too powerful to join.
From then until 1973, when we were finally admitted, London was playing catch-up as we repeatedly used long-lost strengths as the basis for successive supplications – gliding in the slipstream of former glories. The actuality of late capitalism knocked on the doors of both Tory and Labour. Size matters, industry, sector by sector, continued to burst the borders of any but a scant few nation-states. If retaining and building economic power demanded large single markets, political and military sway followed behind in close company. Even when the UK joined, we misread the rubric. Europe wasn’t just the antidote to the Soviet Union; it was intended as the cure for Washington. America was a foreign country. Geographically, we could see Calais, and politically, we played closer to Boston. “With Europe, but not of it”, as Churchill boasted.
Even this semi-detached engagement was too much for many. Between the Waves takes us through the kaleidoscope of dining clubs, groups and organisations that machinated the road to the referendum. These were not organised by the many, but by the money; as Britain’s billionaires cheerfully chipped in their widow’s mite and gambled on the voters’ willingness to self-harm. For most, it wasn’t about sovereignty; it was about escaping the EU’s controls over their enterprise. The Tory MEP, Roger Helmer, was not opposed to the notion of a single currency; he just preferred the dollar. Demands for taking back control were partial – if serious, NATO should have been indicted and alongside in the dock.
McTague does a comprehensive and exhausting (546 pages) analysis of the proximate causes that took us to 23 June 2016 that is unlikely to be bettered, but elides the bigger long-term ones. Political weather, not political climate. The global financial crisis of 2008 is barely mentioned, yet without it, none of these mountebanks, whose clever machinations he records, would have been able to whittle away our future. I remember asking Stewart Wood, now Lord Wood of Anfield, Gordon Brown’s economic advisor, in 2009 at a meeting in Strasbourg, “How many bankers would go to jail?” He sat looking bemused. Nevertheless, where the West is today is contingent on the answers given to that crisis.
Brown may have led the cavalry to rescue the world of finance, but the means chosen of punishing the poor and pardoning the bankers had consequences. As inequalities obscenely soared, the first world’s alienated left behind, in places reduced to third world conditions, absconded from the buildings of the post-war political edifice. The very nature of the political game changed as traditional parties lost (sometimes deliberately), like Labour, abandoning their connection with civil society. The resulting symptoms varied. Mainland Europe, and now Japan, saw a heavily right-wing leaning populism; sometimes the old dressing towards the black or brown, and often the new in shades of those colours from the thirties. In the US, it manifested itself in the flesh as Trump, and in Britain in the self-harming and self-indulgent act of Brexit.
Between the Waves other omission is Labour. During the 47 years of membership, Labour was in power for a third of them. It was Labour’s failure to see Europe as a political project rather than a transactional deal that lay like a shadow across Brexit. The only Labour leader who saw himself as European and no passing visitor was Neil Kinnock. None of the others ever tried to teach the EU to the electorate as a field of conflict between the left and right rather than between Member States.
The anti’s, nevertheless, were fortuitous in the inept champions they faced in the final engagement. David Cameron’s negotiation tactics were inept; a man holding a gun to his own head and threatening to shoot. The anti-Europeans, possibly as much by good luck as good judgement, cleverly had two campaigns, the eurosceptic-lite of Vote Leave and the practised xenophobia of Leave UK. They could appeal in their own ways to different segments of the electorate. Whereas Britain Stronger in Europe was the establishment’s great and good, with the politics surgically removed. An independent Labour campaign would have offered to protect workers by promising to tear up Cameron’s deal on deregulation immediately it was back in power, rather than collaborate in the fable that it was a good job well done. It was a very British cock-up.
As Hugo Young wrote in This Blessed Plot, “High political misjudgement is the thread running through this history”. The only thing to add might be Gramsci, “History teaches, but has no pupils”.