COMMON MARKET CON
MANY of us are beginning to realise that we have been victims of the biggest confidence trick of our lives. When Edward Heath took the British people into the European Common Market in 1973 saying, “there are some who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified”, he was lying. Much worse: Heath knew he was lying.
Whatever your personal view of Brexit — Leaver or Remainer — one thing is indisputable: Britons went into the great European project 50 years ago on a barefaced, deliberate lie. Britain was not joining a “Common Market”, a simple trading bloc, as people thought — the government knew at the time it was signing up to a new “United States of Europe”, intended to have one flag, one currency, its own army and individual nations with fewer powers than the US’s states. And the mendacious politicians knew it.
Along with the other great deceit, “do Britons want to live in a multicultural society?”, politicians have secretly allowed a divided nation to evolve. Until the referendum no Briton had ever voted to be a citizen of a country called “Europe”, run by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Now the chickens have come home to roost. When 17 million Britons voted in 2017 to leave the EU, they were igniting a political bomb. Never has a single issue divided the country so badly since Suez in 1956.
The referendum result sent most of the governing class into a collective fit of the vapours. Horrified that the simple, ignorant voting public has made a dreadful mistake — and one that must be circumvented at all costs — they have ever since strained every legal sinew to overturn the vote. As the Marxist Bertolt Brecht dryly noted: “Would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
This is dangerous stuff. Wiser heads have understood democracy’s virtues — and vices — very well indeed. Edmund Burke in the 1790s said that our freedoms rested on “the wisdom of unlettered men”; Gladstone believed that “the views of ordinary voters ensured the morality of government”. And although Churchill famously opined that “democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others”, once the people are ignored or lied to by their elected representatives, democracy is in peril. But that is exactly what politicians did in the early 1970s, to drag Britain into the Common Market.
It’s important to remember that back in the 1970s Britain was an economic basket case, with high unemployment, falling growth and with trade unions virtually dictating government policy. Harold Macmillan and the “commentariat” genuinely believed that the only way to succeed economically was to become part of a large and integrated trading bloc on Britain’s doorstep. For the UK that meant joining the Common Market as an economic necessity – nothing more.
However the Common Market was a Trojan horse. Right from the start in 1971-73 politicians of all parties, plus the snivel serpents in the Foreign Office, spotted the danger to British independence. Both Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, highly unlikely political bedfellows, warned of the perils of “Europe”. They spotted the dangers of signing up to some form of a “United Europe”, ruled by unelected fonctionnaires in Brussels. They saw that the UK was sleep-walking into a federal Europe, as did the FCO, which warned Heath that he was deceiving the British public. Heath not only ignored the FCO’s warning that “joining the EEC will have far reaching political implications” but insisted his ministers kept the true facts secret. In 2000 Crispin Tickell, one of the negotiators at the time, admitted that “worries over the loss of sovereignty were very much in our minds; but the line was, ‘the less that came out in public the better’”.
This was reinforced in the 1971 government booklet distributed to every household in the country: “There is no question of Britain losing essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the economic interest.” Heath was well aware this was a lie; he was sitting on a confidential FCO paper that warned that “there would be very substantial restraints on Britain’s independence and power of selfgovernment” and that “the people would become increasingly alienated as decisions were taken by unelected officials in Brussels”. Heath ignored it all.
Perhaps the most blatant deception of all was the scandal of Britain’s fisheries. Britain’s chief negotiator, Geoffrey Rippon, swore blind in Parliament that “Britain would retain full control of its coastal waters after becoming a member of the EEC”. This was completely untrue; he had already secretly agreed with France’s Pompidou that Britain’s waters would become a free-for-all for the fishing fleets of France and Spain. The derelict docks at Grimsby stand as mute testimony to his ministerial lying.
Today we can see the impact of Britain’s fateful decision to join the Common Market back in the 1970s. Everything has come true as predicted by Heath’s advisers, from an unelected group of foreign bureaucrats in Brussels giving orders to Britain, to an open drive for a United States of Europe with its own anthem, army and flag. Sir Con O’Neill of the FCO foresaw this outcome, warning Heath: “If you want to swallow this European hedgehog, you’ll have to swallow it whole.”
Half a century later the people have rumbled the great European con and have spoken; they want out.
Now it’s up to Mrs May’s Conservative government to take her country out of Europe on the best terms. Although she was clear in her Lancaster House speech in January this year — “We will take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain” — many Leavers don’t trust “Theresa-the-Appeaser” and believe that her heart is not in Brexit. The political Establishment remains determined to keep Britain in the EU, or so closely aligned that it effectively makes no difference. As one UK diplomat commented dryly, observing the reactions of Brexit-supporting MPs to PM May’s latest Brussels deal: “They can smell a rat. But they are keeping quiet for now because they are not yet quite sure which rat it is they can smell.” The real problem with Brexit is that the UK’s difficulties are not economic but political. The British elite is at war with itself. Most MPs want to stay in the EU. They would reluctantly settle for an arrangement that kept Britain closely aligned with the EU and its rules and regulations. They could yet succeed. The difficulty is that this could end up with the UK still paying a huge amount of money for an arrangement with Brussels that is actually worse than the current one. However, the idea that Britain could end up with something close to membership of the customs union and the single market, but without a voice in EU decisionmaking — while still being subject to the European Court of Justice in important matters — is like a red rag to a bull to the dedicated Leavers. They want nothing less than a complete break from the EU, allowing British laws, rules and regulations to diverge in Britain’s longer-term interests. In turn, the EU wants Britain to decide whether it wants a free trade agreement, like the one the bloc has with Canada, or membership in the single market, like Norway. London wants something in between. But no-one knows; even the Cabinet can’t decide. That’s Mrs May’s Brexit dilemma.
If nothing else however, the unedifying saga of the way Britons were deceived into joining Europe 50 years ago confirms the old joke: “How can you tell if a politician’s lying?” “Easy! His lips are moving.”