It took 30 years, but the European question destroyed the Tories. Now Labour could be next
Labour’s policy of sticking to the Brexit status quo deprives it of the economic and electoral benefits of moving significantly closer to the EU
In October 1993, the then Conservative Prime Minister John Major gave an interview in 10 Downing Street to ITN political editor Michael Brunson. While the technicians prepared to film, Major and Brunson chatted about the pressure being brought to bear on the PM by three of his Europhobe Cabinet members. Their aim was the removal of the UK from the EU, but in the short term, they wanted to slow up all further political and economic integration with Europe.
Unaware that the microphones were live, Major was untypically candid. He called the three ministers “bastards”. The word became shorthand for the anti-EU wing of the parliamentary Conservative party. It was a moment that brought into the public domain the depth of the Tory split over EU membership. It kept rumbling on, distracting Major from government.
To bring the matter to a head, in 1995 Major resigned as leader of the Conservatives (not as PM) in order to force a leadership contest, believing that a good win for him would silence the “bastards” and put the issue of Europe to bed.
“Don’t underestimate the bitterness of the European policy until it’s settled,” Major had told Brunson. The consequences of that bitter split brought the party to the dire condition it is in today.
A policy too far
Its fall from greatness has allowed the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The Conservative party will limp on, though it’s unlikely to return any time soon to being a contender for the government of the UK. It stabbed itself in the front and the back.
It thought a brave new world waited for a Britain free of Europe. Instead, anti-Europeanism was to be a policy too far. It was the one that brought the party close to its demise as a great political force.
Major won the leadership election in 1995 but went on to lose the 1997 general election in a landslide win for Tony Blair. Over the next 13 years in opposition, the Tory Europhobes grew stronger and louder.
That faction engineered the 2016 Brexit referendum, forcing out David Cameron as PM, splitting the party over the deal to be done with the EU, and ending Theresa May’s premiership. This enabled Boris Johnson to purge the Tories of economically and socially moderate and pro-Europe MPs, and ushered in the disastrous reign of Liz Truss and then the lame-duck term of Rishi Sunak.
Tories once knew how to survive
Eviscerated in the 2024 general election, the Tory’s prospects for the elections next year for Holyrood, the Welsh Senedd and London mayor look already hopeless. Their leader, Kemi Badenoch, is at war with her colleague, Robert Jenrick, over who will lead the party. Both are focussed on out-Reforming Reform.
Over the centuries, the Conservatives knew how to survive, shifting their ground to win, ruthlessly disposing of leaders who’d run out of road, including the sainted Margaret Thatcher.
It was a broad church of hang ‘em and flog ‘em, blood-and-kin country squire MPs, hard-line economic ‘small state’ fundamentalists and the more consensus, pro-Europe, interventionists.
Thatcher willing to compromise
When unemployment soared during the 1980s, as the UK’s industrial base vanished and famous towns saw dreadful hardship and little hope, Thatcher, who loathed the idea of state intervention, gave Michael Heseltine (a rival from the party’s Europhile left) his head to intervene in local economies.
Both were at opposite ends of the Tory party broad church. She was reluctantly persuaded that the best interests of her party lay in allowing Heseltine to invest state money and time in easing the pain of some post-industrial towns. The Iron Lady bent in the face of political reality.
Along with the fruits of “peak oil” in the North Sea and the “Big Bang” of deregulation in the City of London, it was the creation of the European Single Market that made the greatest contribution to the long-term strategic strengthening of the UK economy. It was a British idea.
Benefits of the Single Market
Thatcher was no Euro-fan. By nativist instinct and political ideology, she was suspicious of Europe’s big government. She disliked the social democrat beliefs of most of its leading figures. But she did like free markets, and she wanted her cake and to eat it. Knocking down barriers to trade across Europe appealed to her mercantile mindset.
Europe then offered a market of some 300 million people. Today, without the UK, the single market has a GDP of 17.1 trillion euros, 450 million people, 30 million businesses and 15 per cent of global trade.
Thatcher was a pragmatist willing to sacrifice elements of her political creed if she believed there were demonstrable benefits to the UK. Brexit has shown what a huge error leaving the Single Market was.
It is estimated our economy has already been significantly damaged and will ultimately be reduced by 4 per cent because of Brexit, with the problems continuing, in the recent words of the Governor of the Bank of England, “for the foreseeable future”.
The knock-on effect is far less money in the public purse to renew our towns and cities, maintain decent public services, build new infrastructure and be fit for the new geopolitical, technological and climate change challenges of the coming decades.
With the anti-Europe right now represented by the Conservatives and Reform, Labour’s policy of sticking to the Brexit status quo deprives it of the economic and electoral benefits of seriously closer EU rapprochement.
The SNP, Plaid Cymru, Lib Dems and Greens stand to gain from Labour’s intransigent Europe position. Getting Europe wrong might harm Labour as deeply as it has their ancient Tory rivals.
Martin Roche sits on the executive committee of the European Movement in Scotland. He had a 35-year career in international public relations and is a writer.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.