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Reluctant European by Stephen Wall; Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford – review

Was it written in the stars? As the histories are composed, there will be an “always doomed” school of interpretation, which contends that Britain’s relationship with the EU was a bad marriage of the incompatible that was destined to terminate in nasty divorce. The Channel. Agincourt. Shakespeare’s “precious stone set in the silver sea”. Waterloo. 1940 and all that. The “thousand years of history” once invoked by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell militated against it. Even once the UK had grudgingly joined the club, regular rows about the levels of subscription and the terms of membership meant that it often seemed to be hovering by the exit.

Stephen Wall is not an inevitabilist, but his account will give a lot of ammunition to those who are. It began badly. In the years immediately following the defeat of Hitler, senior politicians, both Tory and Labour, failed to engage with the first stirrings of integration on continental Europe. They struggled to imagine that war-ravaged France and Germany would make a success of it and still clung to a delusion that Britain had a future as an imperial power. By the time the mistake had been recognised, Charles de Gaulle was at the Élysée Palace from where the French president subjected Harold Macmillan’s application to join to a humiliating rebuff. So when Britain did eventually enter, more than 10 years after first asking, the rules had been constructed to advantage the interests and promote the aspirations of others. Entry in 1973 was not accompanied by much enthusiasm. It was “a distress purchase” by a Britain aghast to find that it was being economically and diplomatically bested by states that it had helped defeat or liberate during the second world war. Prime ministers then spent the next decade trying to reset the terms of membership. First, there was Harold Wilson’s largely cosmetic renegotiation prior to the 1975 referendum. Then, in the pursuit of a better financial deal, Margaret Thatcher bashed European leaders with her handbag for five years as she cried “give me my money back”. Every dispute gave Britain a reputation with the rest of Europe as its most truculent member and Europe a reputation with the British public as a source of constant conflict rather than a cause for celebration.

Europe was depicted as something that was “done to” Britons against their will

This veiled the important truth that the UK made hugely significant contributions to the development of the EU. The partnership now encompasses the vast majority of European states. It does so thanks to successive enlargements that were driven by the British, often against the resistance of the French. Post-dictatorship Greece, Portugal and Spain were locked in to democratic norms after their accession in the 1980s. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU then embraced the former prison states that had escaped the tyranny of the Soviet Union. It was the British who accelerated the integration and enhanced the competitiveness of European economies by spearheading the creation of the single market. Yet the dominant narrative put before the British people throughout their membership was one of slippery continentals scheming to do down Blighty.

Wall tells this sad tale with authority, expertise and a gift for lucid explanations of complex issues and convoluted negotiations. He knows of what he writes. He was a British diplomat for 35 years, including five as the UK’s permanent representative in Brussels. He is also the author of the multi-volume official history of the relationship.

A recurring theme is the failure of successive generations of British politicians to make a positive case for Europe. At best, membership was portrayed as a grim necessity. As often, if not more so, Europe was depicted as something that was “done to” Britons against their will. Europe was always “them”. It was never “us”.

Leave supporters gather to celebrate Brexit day, 31 January 2020
Leave supporters gather to celebrate Brexit day, 31 January 2020. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Boris Johnson is far from the first British politician to align himself with anti-European sentiment in order to further his personal ambitions. In the 1970s, Jim Callaghan sought to rehabilitate his position in the Labour party by pandering to its then strong Europhobic faction. As part of Gordon Brown’s long campaign to supplant Tony Blair from Number 10, he would regularly stage phoney fights in Brussels in the expectation of winning plaudits from the rightwing press. David Cameron set off on the road to his disastrous referendum when he calculated that he had to suck up to his party’s Europhobes in order to secure the leadership of the Tory party.

Ted Heath, John Major and Tony Blair were the only postwar prime ministers to put in serious effort making the positive case. Each was then fatally handicapped. Heath by the disintegration of his domestic policies. Major by Black Wednesday and the ensuing struggles over the Maastricht treaty that tore apart his party and immiserated his premiership. Blair by what the Iraq war did to his relations in Europe and his standing with the British public.

Wall’s emphasis is on the high politics. The focus of Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford, two political scientists at Manchester University, is on the societal trends that fuelled the ultimate rupture. They make a compelling case in Brexitland that Brexit was the expression of deep-seated conflicts within the British electorate that had been building for decades. Pressures that had been accumulating for a long time were given sudden release in June 2016. “The fuel for a wildfire gathers on the forest floor for season after season before the transformational spark arrives.” Different groups of voters with conflicting interests “finally recognised themselves as two distinct and opposing camps”. “Two tribes” went to war over identity, diversity, immigration, culture and globalisation on the battlefield called Brexit. Theirs is a highly acute and insightful analysis, making telling use of extensive research, which induces the reader to think afresh about the political landscape we now find ourselves in and how we arrived here.

I’m still not convinced that Brexit was inevitable. It is worth recalling that the referendum result was very tight. Just 52% of those who voted chose Leave. That was a narrow margin in a plebiscite that couldn’t have been held at a less propitious time to make the case for membership. It is not hard to conceive that things might have turned out differently had the Tories been led by a smarter strategist than Cameron and had Labour been led by someone less hopeless than Jeremy Corbyn.

Brexit wasn’t written in the stars. It was most of all the outcome of multi-generational failures of political leadership.

• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

• Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit by Stephen Wall is published by Oxford University Press (£25)

• Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford is published by Cambridge University Press (£15.99)