Rejection and flirtation
When the six founding members of the European Economic Community (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and asked Britain whether it fancied hanging out to see what might happen, Britain said thanks, but no thanks.
Buoyed by a confidence in its own exceptionalism, by memories of a great empire and a glorious war, Britain was after all a major power, with a seat on the UN security council, a special relationship with the US, and a Commonwealth. Detached from the continent physically and culturally, it did not need Europe, and showed it by sending a mid-ranking trade official, one Russell Bretherton, to the treaty signing – as an observer.
By the early 1960s, though, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, had realised the mistake (it’s the trade, stupid) and started making overtures towards Brussels.
This time the brush-off came from Europe, or more specifically France. In 1963, Charles de Gaulle said “non”. Britain had “very special, very original habits and traditions”, he said, and was “very different from continentals” – it would prove an Anglo-Saxon trojan horse in a European stable.
Faced with such a cruel, if prescient, put-down, Britain, in the shape of poor Macmillan, wept (literally). It was not until 1973, four years after De Gaulle departed, that Britain – by now headed by the convinced European Ted Heath – finally got it together with Europe.
Doubts and drama
The honeymoon was barely over before the bickering began. The then Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell (Labour led the Eurosceptic charge back then, seeing Europe as a capitalist plot) railed against the loss of “1,000 years of history”. Within a year, Britain was calling for wholesale reform to the common agricultural policy (CAP) and in 1975 Harold Wilson’s Labour government called a referendum.
Seven Labour cabinet ministers campaigned for Brexit then, but an impassioned Margaret Thatcher positively shone for remain, and two-thirds of the country voted to stay. Michael Foot’s Labour party made a breakup with Europe a key plank of its 1983 election platform but was heavily defeated by Thatcher’s still largely pro-European Conservative forces.
The following year, Britain won its first serious spat with Europe: Thatcher argued that the iniquities of the CAP meant the UK was contributing way more than its fair share of the bill and she wanted her money back. Britain got its rebate – though it was not as big as it wanted – and Thatcher earned an early European reputation as Britain’s Iron Lady.
The dynamics on Britain’s side of the relationship, meanwhile, were shifting.
Labour, realising that the European commission president Jacques Delors’s idea of a social Europe might protect workers from the worst effects of Thatcher’s free-market capitalism, slowly came round. But an idea was born in the Conservative party that far from being a cooperative venture in which Britain had a say, Europe was a continental plot hellbent on robbing it of its sovereignty.
In 1988, barely two years after she signed the 1986 Single European Act that swept away many of the national vetoes barring the way to the single market, Thatcher stood up in Bruges and slapped Brussels in the face. She had been betrayed, she said: Europe was not just a common market but a federalist superstate in the making.
Resentment – and rapprochement
An increasingly reluctant partner, Britain – but especially the Conservative party and the anti-European press – was hardening its heart.
This was an abusive relationship in critics’ eyes: France controlled the institutions; Germany dominated the economy; silly continental notions such as “social solidarity” between government, employers and unions ran counter to sensible Anglo-Saxon practices such as unfettered free-market capitalism.
Crashing calamitously out of the European exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992 did little to patch things up.
And although John Major won opt-outs on the single currency and the social chapter on workers’ rights at Maastricht, the Eurosceptic genie was out of the bottle, prompting harsh words, fierce rebellions, and incendiary headlines (though few matched the Sun’s iconic Up Yours Delors from 1990). In the end, not even the silver-tongued early charm of a properly pro-European Tony Blair, elected in 1997, could squeeze it back in.
Granted, to the casual observer, all seemed to be going swimmingly. Hiccups – the row over beef exports during Britain’s BSE crisis, for example – aside, the Anglo-EU twosome looked set for the long haul: Blair opted back in to the social chapter, his calls for reform were applauded across the continent, his commitment to the project was unquestioned. He even got on with Jacques Chirac.
The treaties of Amsterdam and Nice, paving the way for the EU’s expansion, were duly signed in 1997 and 2001. Ominously, plans for a proposed EU constitution were scrapped after founding members the Netherlands and France rejected them and replaced by the Lisbon treaty.
But throughout the Blair years most of the press and a hard core of Conservatives, spurred on by a new-ish anti-EU party called Ukip (three seats in the 1999 European elections, 12 in 2004), continued to demand a separation. Brussels was bureaucratic, arrogant, wasteful, undemocratic, unreformable.
It also wanted to control our judges, our soldiers, our farmers. Britain was ruled by “unelected Eurocrats”, “barmy Brussels officials” and “po-faced EU pen-pushers”, who would like to ban pounds and ounces, bendy bananas and double-decker buses, force us into eurocondoms, and rename British chocolate “vegelate”.
Heading for the rocks?
In a clear sign of acrimony ahead, one of the key factors in David Cameron’s victorious 2005 bid to lead the Conservatives proved to be his isolationist pledge to pull the party out of the main centre-right group in the European parliament in favour of an altogether less “federalist” movement.
And with the Anglo-EU relationship rapidly deteriorating once more, it took Cameron barely a year after becoming prime minister in 2010 before he deployed the ultimate weapon – the veto – at a high-stakes 2011 summit. The British leader was determined to block an EU-wide treaty aimed at saving the single currency in the wake of the financial crisis.
Two years later, Cameron – increasingly alarmed at the prospect of losing Eurosceptic Conservative voters (and MPs) to Ukip – promised an in/out vote on Britain’s EU membership if he won the 2015 general election. As if to confirm his fears, Ukip, making electoral hay from high levels of EU immigration, finished top in the 2014 European poll, winning some 28% of the vote.
And after one final, particularly bruising tiff – as Cameron attempted desperately to negotiate a whole “new deal” for Britain in Europe, which wasn’t much interested in Britain’s problems when it had a migration crisis to deal with – it’s now crunch time.
So, will it be the bad-tempered breakup, a passionate, crazily romantic bid for independence and the liberty of a single life – followed, in all likelihood, by years of acrimonious wrangling over the furniture?
Or will it be kiss and make-up: a rational decision to remain in what has, in truth, often seemed a rather tedious, restrictive, even loveless marriage of convenience – but one, nonetheless, that has brought both parties many benefits?
We will find out on 23 June.
