AFTER 47 WE’RE LEAVING EU TOMORROW YEARS...
And here a leading social historian — a Remainer — tells how the 1973 dream soured, and asks: why did we ever doubt ourselves?
Very few people, I imagine, get a great thrill from following proceedings in the european Parliament. But yesterday was different. In an extraordinary session complete with emotional speeches and even music, the 751 representatives voted to approve Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.
So after all the squabbling, the paralysis and the hysteria, after all the experts’ claims that it was too difficult and that we would change our minds, we really have done it.
We’ve packed our bags and bought our tickets, and on Friday evening we are off.
Whatever you think of the decision, there is no doubt this is a landmark in our modern history.
I was born in 1974 and have spent my life as a citizen of what became the EU, though at the time people called it the Common Market.
Like most people of my generation, I grew up with the vague assumption that EU membership was the default and that, much as we grumbled about it, we were in it for good.
even when, almost 20 years ago, I started writing about the history of postwar Britain, it never really occurred to me that our experiment with european confederation might prove a short-lived aberration.
Well, I was wrong. But in fairness, I wasn’t alone.
What strikes me now, in fact, is how consistently wrong our political and intellectual elites have been.
Shocked and outraged by the 2016 referendum result, many self- consciously liberal, highminded types insisted it must have been a fluke, even a freak.
Thevote was rigged, they said. It was a short-term reaction to austerity. It was a protest of those dubbed ‘the left-behinds’. It was a racist spasm, a terrifying lurch into xenophobia, a selfdeluding effort to recapture a vanished empire.
you probably don’t need me to tell you what rubbish this was. And now, looking back at the past 50 years, I wonder whether Brexit was inevitable all along.
When France and West Germany came together in the 1950s to set up the ancestor of today’s EU, Britain wanted no part of it. There was no significant pro- european lobby in this country, and the idea of plunging into a Continental federal union struck most people, Labour and Tories alike, as fundamentally un-British.
It was only after the shock of the Suez Crisis in 1956, and the rapid collapse of our empire in Africa and Asia, that political and business elites decided Britain needed to ‘find a role’.
Put simply, they panicked, convincing themselves that unless we joined our neighbours’ club, we would become a fading backwater, known only for making abysmal cars and going on strike.
But while they may have convinced themselves, they never convinced the public. Polls in the 1960s consistently found that most people either disliked the thought of european membership or were completely indifferent to it.
And when we did join under