Vernon BOGDANOR
The Tories are the party of the nation, and this nation is not compatible with a European superstate
Theresa May is but the latest victim of Britain’s ill-fated engagement with the Continent. Europe has proved toxic for the Conservatives, ruining six of their last seven Prime Ministers.
Harold Macmillan was the first, when, in 1963, President de Gaulle vetoed his application to join the European Community, as the EU then was. “All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins,” Macmillan wailed. De Gaulle correctly predicted that Labour would win the next election. His information minister, Alain Peyrefitte, records him as slicing the air with the back of his hand, “as pitiless as a Roman emperor turning down his thumb as though denying a reprieve to a defeated gladiator”, and saying “That Macmillan vanishes!”
It was Edward Heath who took us into Europe in 1973. But, in the February 1974 election, he was narrowly defeated. A host of factors could have been responsible – but Enoch Powell, who broke with his party and urged voters to support Labour to secure a referendum – plus ça change – was undoubtedly crucial in Heath’s defeat.
In 1990, Margaret Thatcher ignored a Cabinet compromise on the euro by declaring that Britain would never join. This precipitated the resignation of her deputy, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and a leadership challenge which led to her resignation. Her successor, John Major, found his government riven by Europe – first by the ignominious departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, then by the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, and then by the question of whether Britain should rule out joining the euro. These conflicts led to the landslide Conservative defeat in 1997.
David Cameron hoped to prevent the Tories, as he put it, “banging on about Europe”. But he, like Theresa May, was ruined by Brexit.
Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in Britain’s post-war Labour government, was asked in 1949 whether Britain should join the Council of Europe, which he wrongly thought a supranational organisation. He gave the most prescient reply ever made about Britain’s involvement with Europe: “If you open that Pandora’s box, you never know what Trojan ‘orses will fly out.”
Why has Europe proved so toxic for the Tory party? Since Disraeli, the Conservatives have been the party of the nation, a nation that has existed far longer than most of its continental neighbours. Indeed, of the original six countries which formed the European Community – France, Germany, Italy and Benelux – only France had existed as a unified country 200 years before. Of more recent members, some, such as Poland, were not created until after the First World War, while others – Slovakia and Croatia, for example – did not come into existence until the Nineties.
Moreover, political upheavals on the Continent had hardly any resonance in Britain. On the other side of the Channel, the fundamental dates of modern political history are 1789, the year of the French Revolution, 1848, the year of the failed liberal revolutions, and 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. Britain escaped all of these convulsions.
The Second World War reinforced these divergences. The Continent, following Nazism and occupation, had to begin again with new institutions. Britain did not. Dunkirk was seen as a victory, not a retreat, George VI telling his mother: “Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper.” “And in these sentiments”, his biographer writes, he “was at one with the vast majority of his subjects.”
After the war, the sense of being European was a state of mind born of defeat and occupation, the need to bridge the gulf between those who collaborated and those who resisted, and, above all, to overcome the past. “Being European,” the Bulgarian political scientist, Ivan Krastev, has said, “is about being aware of what we did.”
Britain’s profound differences from the Continent and her long evolutionary history are reflected in the concept of the sovereignty of Parliament, a concept alien in continental Europe, and to be distinguished from the concept of national sovereignty with which it is often confused. It is the notion of Parliamentary sovereignty which makes it so difficult for Britain to subordinate herself to a superior legal order such as that of the EU.
In 1952, Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, told the Americans: “If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the motive force of its action... You will realise that I am speaking of the frequent suggestions that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe. This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.”
As a Remainer, I deeply regret that we are to lose our voice in Europe. But then I would have lasted as Tory leader for an even shorter time than Theresa May.