This Euro-drama has been running for 25 years – but how will it end?
Parliament is once again debating Britain’s future in Europe and it is impossible to predict the outcome
Why do I have this overpowering sense of déjà vu? MPS are about to embark on a key debate and hold a crucial vote on Europe. Potential Tory rebels are mulling over their options, while the whips mutter dark threats. The Labour opposition has reneged on a previously declared position in order to expose the weakness of a Tory government. And Northern Ireland’s Unionists have done a deal to support an embattled Conservative prime minister.
If it all sounds familiar it is because we have been here before, in 1993, when John Major pushed the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament. While most of those about to plunge into the legislative fray are newcomers many veterans of that first campaign are still active, even if their roles are reversed.
Star billing must surely go to Bill Cash and Ken Clarke, the former a Eurosceptic thorn in the government’s side in 1993, now an unlikely victor; the latter, formerly Chancellor of the Exchequer, now cast as a rebel. Both are still in the Commons and were in action yesterday, as was David Davis who in 1993 was a government whip putting the thumbscrews on the Eurosceptics. That angered them because before that he was seen as anti-eu, as he is once again.
Then there is Boris Johnson. As this newspaper’s Brussels correspondent, he did more than anyone to articulate antipathy to the overweening bureaucracy that Europe was becoming. He made Euroscepticism, hitherto very much a Left-wing creed, an attractive cause for the Right. For all that there is a concerted effort to undermine him, not even Nigel Farage is more responsible for Brexit.
Without Mr Johnson’s support, the referendum would in all likelihood have been lost by the Leavers. Jeremy Corbyn was around in 1993, one of 66 Labour rebels (along with Diane Abbott) who voted against the Second Reading of the innocuously titled European Communities (Amendment) Bill to take account of the agreement at Maastricht. It was just two clauses long, in contrast to the monster EU (Withdrawal) Bill now before Parliament. Rarely had so short a law caused so much trouble. There was even a Rees-mogg in the shape of William, the former Times editor and father of Jacob, who went to court to try to stop the treaty.
Mr Major wrote in his memoirs: “The rebels’ strategy was guerrilla warfare – ambush and retreat. They sought to delay the passage of the bill in the hope that some event beyond our shores might cause the Maastricht Treaty to collapse.” Nearly a quarter of a century later and we are playing out the final scenes of this extraordinary drama, with many key players still on the stage. What we didn’t know then, and don’t know now, is how it will end.
In 1993 there was enough of a prospect that Maastricht could be derailed to encourage the Eurosceptics to keep pushing. With that end in mind, they organised and plotted, even siding with Labour on a vote on the Social Chapter to defeat Mr Major, whose administration had a working majority of only 21.
Though he was in a stronger position than Theresa May is today, Mr Major survived only by making the passage of the treaty a vote of confidence. Had he lost, there would have been an election.
Is history about to repeat itself? It all depends on how far the Tory Remainers are prepared to go. Are they as implacable as the Eurosceptics who made Mr Major’s life so difficult and who resisted all the threats and blandishments levelled at them by the whips? One outspoken Remainer, Anna Soubry, took umbrage earlier this week over heavy-handed briefings by unnamed party bosses against a handful of possible Conservative rebels. This was totally uncalled for, she said, because there was no likelihood that any of them would vote against the Second Reading of the EU Withdrawal Bill, which is being debated tomorrow and next Monday.
The danger to the Government does not lie at Second Reading, however. In 1993, the Eurosceptics waylaid the Major government over such apparently mundane matters as timetabling. The Remainers this time will pick their fights carefully, for instance over the so-called Henry VIII powers in the Bill, giving Ministers the authority to strike down primary legislation.
But the big clash will come over the shape of the final deal, if there is one. Do the Remainers still hold out the hope, as Martin Selmayr, the top EU official, suggested this week, that Brexit can be reversed? Are they driven in the same way that the Eurosceptics were back in the 1990s? The organisers of this Saturday’s so-called People’s March for Europe in London clearly think so, though it will be interesting to see how many turn up.
The conventional wisdom is that most Remainers have reconciled themselves to leaving and the debate now is over how it should happen. But the election result and the loss of the Government’s majority changed everything, even if Mrs May is stoically trying to give the impression that nothing much has happened. Above all, it has made it impossible to predict how the politics will play out in Parliament, especially if the Remainers organise themselves the way the Eurosceptics did over Maastricht. What happens, for instance, if the EU turns down a bespoke transitional arrangement and Labour pushes for a vote to stay in the single market and the customs union?
There are plenty of Remainers, including many Maastricht veterans, in the House of Lords, where this battle also has to be fought out. The big difference, of course, between now and then is that we have had a referendum in which the Remain side lost.
Reading the debates in the Commons over Maastricht, I was struck by this exchange between the late Tony Benn, who opposed the treaty, and the Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, now in the Lords. Benn said: “The crucial question is democracy and whether the people of this country will be able to remove, through the ballot box, those who make the laws under which they are governed.” Lord Ashdown replied: “I do not believe in the sovereignty of this place – I believe in the sovereignty of the people.” That says it all, really.