Let this be Remoan’s last whimper

A self-flagellatory (and inaccurate) account of Britain’s travails since 1945 is just one long pro-EU whine

BRITAIN ALONE by Philip Stephens

480pp, Faber, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £14.99

Since the Victim’s Charter of 1996, those harmed by crime have been entitled to make a statement to the court about the effect on them of the criminal’s offence. This book resembles such a statement. The Financial Times journalist Philip Stephens is aggrieved by Britain’s departure from the European Union, and unleashes his misery about it – outlining, in the process, the failures of government in this country ever since 1945. He might have been better advised (like most who go into court) to hire a barrister to do it for him.

Much of what he says about British underperformance since 1945 is true: the loss of empire; the Suez debacle; the economic quagmire of the 1970s; the humiliation of the Exchange Rate Mechanism; the long civil war over Europe in the Conservative Party; the Iraq war; David Cameron’s casual approach to profoundly important matters of statesmanship; Theresa May’s inability to make a decision; and Boris Johnson’s struggle to tell the truth.

However, this book, not for want of length, is almost devoid of insight, originality or acuity. It has all been said before, and said better, and much of it was no more true or interesting when said the first time. The claim on the book’s dust wrapper that it is “magisterial and profoundly perceptive” invites scrutiny under the Trade Descriptions Act: it is a chronic whinge and a book such as one gives for Christmas to someone one deeply dislikes.

When, in June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union, those who would spend the next four years trying to overturn a democratic decision began by asking: why? They simply could not believe it; or rather they simply could not believe that the British people (whom they regarded as mostly uneducated and their intellectual inferiors) could have been so disobedient and insolent.

In the roots of that disbelief lay the answer to their question. Millions had had enough of being patronised by politicians, and indeed journalists such as Stephens, who were happy with a status quo that offered very little to the average Briton. There was no inkling of that discontent among Remainers because they had gone through their lives either avoiding contact with such people or, on the rare occasions they met them, failing to treat them as equals or engage in discourse with them.

And that is one of the fundamental problems with Stephens’s book: such people barely exist in it. When they do, it is to be blasted for “nostalgia” and an obviously idiotic belief in “British exceptionalism”. The book focuses on ministers, diplomats and others in the cosy circuit of Whitehall and Westminster, with the odd excursion into European summitry. It is as if – as in the days of the Congress of Vienna or the Congress of Berlin – that is all that matters. But every adult in Britain has, since 1928, had the vote; we are a democracy; and if you choose to be a democracy, then you accept that the opinion of one man or woman has the same value as that of the next.

This has, sadly, never been the view of supporters of the European Union, or indeed of the European Union itself. It is a profoundly antidemocratic organisation, as it has shown several times in its history by ordering reruns of referendums on constitutional questions when the first plebiscite has failed to deliver the approved result, and

avoiding such votes wherever possible. It was no wonder the defeated of 2016 did all they could to thwart the democratic process, until forced to crawl, badly wounded, off the battlefield of the 2019 general election: the despised British people treated this as an affirmation of the referendum, voted accordingly, and in doing so underlined their contempt for those whose belief in democracy was merely superficial.

Before launching us on this sea of unoriginality, essentially “His Island Story Since 1945” (a story so bleak one is amazed Stephens has not emigrated), the author tells us we came out of the war as victors but not as a great power, something most of us had worked out for ourselves. Most people were happy just to have won: the governing class, as they watched the Empire evaporate and the Americans cut off the money, are depicted as worrying enormously about our place in the world. Some inevitably did; others did not, and most of the public didn’t. Empire was, after all, a short chapter in our island story, and it is unhistorical to say it was part of the English psyche. Our American allies (though Stephens correctly raises questions about just how allied we were) liked to tease us about our declining virility; but most Britons, warming up in the 1950s and 1960s to their cheap Spanish holidays, Ford Cortinas, televisions and fridges, couldn’t have cared less – which may explain why they and their views are largely ignored in Stephens’s narrative.

Stephens asserts that we made a huge mistake in not signing up to the Schuman Plan in 1950, causing us in 1962-63 to beg the Six for entry, which De Gaulle took enormous delight in vetoing. He says rejecting Schuman meant that Britain “lost control of its own future”. Oh really? That we are, of our own volition, out of the EU now is but one proof of the ludicrousness of that assertion. The author is remarkably uncritical about the terms for entry that Ted Heath secured in 1971 – terms so extreme that we lost a fishing industry and caused Margaret Thatcher to demand a rebate – and seems not to understand that a lack of what he calls elsewhere “fiscal fundamentalism” – limitation of the money supply – is what caused the massive inflation of 1974-75 that cut the Heath administration off at the knees. It also created such problems for the ensuing Labour government that the IMF had to intervene to run Britain’s economy in 1976. If entering the EEC in 1973 was supposed to be the magic solution to Britain’s problems, it manifestly didn’t work.

If many of Stephens’s attitudes are second-hand – milked from the writings of the conceited and overrated Hugo Young, who made a career in journalism talking mainly to people who thought like him – some of his pronouncements lack a grasp of historical detail. For a start, he footnotes Young in saying that Dora Gaitskell told her husband, Hugh, after his magnificent 1962 conference speech about the end of “a thousand years of history”, and wishing for a better debate on the Common Market, that “all the wrong people are cheering”. She in fact said this, bewildered, to Roy Jenkins.

Enoch Powell, as the godfather of British souverainisme (to use a word for which Stephens looks, but cannot find), is naturally a hate figure; but that is no reason to lie about him. He says that “In 1962… Enoch Powell began to rehearse the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that six years later would see him thrown out of the Tory party for outright racist incitement.” In fact, Powell made no such rehearsals, for he would not have lasted on his party’s front bench until the Birmingham speech if he had; he was not thrown out of the party but, in 1974, chose to leave it – over Europe, not immigration; and under the 1965 Race Relations Act he could have been prosecuted for “outright racist incitement” – had there been any. If Stephens wishes to write further on these matters, he might like to spend some time with the sources.

Let us hope this is the last whine, the last extensive act of self-flagellation, of the old pro-EU governing elite and their media lackeys, and we can get on with making a future for Britain better than the past that Stephens chronicles. We might instead turn our attention to something he avoids examining, in a book that takes the righteousness and superiority of the EU for granted – the economic morass in which some of its greatest economies, notably Italy and France, find themselves; the utter failure of the bloc to unify in its response to the massive crisis of the pandemic over the last year; and the growing problems of a diverse political culture within the bloc, notably concerning the sub-bloc of the four Visegrad countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. But then that wouldn’t fit the smug Remainer narrative, would it?

Stephens paints such a bleak picture of Britain that one is amazed he has not emigrated