Why the European Union's big ideas are a beacon of hope for moderate left
The lack of vision on the left in the UK is being thrown into stark relief by the progress being made in the EU
In Jonathan Coe’s 2024 novel, The Proof of my Innocence, his character, Brian Collier, writes a memoir looking back from the Britain of recent years to the country he knew as a Cambridge University student in the early 80s.
“I think people used to believe in a different kind of society. We had a model for it, back then: more or less functioning, held together by the belief that things should not be shared too unequally,” Collier writes. “It was imperfect, of course, full of injustices and disagreements and bumps in the road, but above all it was cohesive.”
What he mourns is the end of what was known as the post-war consensus, an unwritten pact that saw Labour and Conservative governments broadly agree on the NHS, the welfare state, the expansion of higher education, building local authority housing, and the role of the state in the cultural life of the nation.
It was also a Britain in which many millions of adults remembered enduring a long war of heartbreak, sacrifice and deprivation. The fascism and militarism of Germany and Japan had been defeated. Together, Britain had won the war. Now, together it would win the peace.
A socially liberal country
That socially cohesive model of Britain had been given voice by Liberal and Socialist intellectuals, most notably the Liberal William Beveridge and the Oxford don and future Labour Cabinet minister, Anthony Crosland. Beveridge designed the modern welfare state, Crosland published The Future of Socialism.
Those ideas profoundly influenced the 1960s governments of Harold Wilson and how British people led their lives. They provided Labour with a vision and a framework that saw the introduction of policies like the great expansion of higher education, a nationwide school building programme, the creation of the Open University and the Arts Council, and the emergence of a more socially liberal Britain.
Some 1.3 million new homes were built between 1965 and 1970. In 1967, the UK applied to join the European Economic Community, only to be rebuffed when France said “non”.
Collier’s time at Cambridge coincided with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing St. While Crosland championed high taxes and high-quality public services, Thatcher believed in a smaller state, lower taxes, individual effort and responsibility, and the power of the free market to create a more muscularly successful capitalist Britain.
Many of Thatcher’s ideas were born in the universities and political salons of post-Second World War America. Their mantra was that individualism, a free market unleashed from taxes and rules, and a very small role for the state in the provision of public services was the route to not only economic success but individual liberty.
Thatcherism on stilts
Today, in Britain the inheritors of Thatcher’s creed are the rump of the Conservative party that has survived the near political suicide of Brexit, and Nigel Farage’s Reform party. A Farage government at Westminster will look like the Thatcher years on stilts.
Reform’s vision has coherence, even if in practice it will be far more divisive than we saw in Thatcher’s time. Farage is an extremist Conservative. His core appeal stems not from his ideas but from voters thinking “a plague on all your houses, we’ll give Reform a chance”.
For the Labour Left in Britain, the problem is lack of vision. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s administrations essentially followed on from the Thatcher and John Major years.
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The Liberal Democrats were able to prevent the worst excesses of Thatcher's legacy in coalition with the Conservatives under David Cameron and Nick Clegg, but were not strong enough in parliamentary numbers to impose their own internationalist vision for Britain.
In Scotland, the SNP has a big idea. It’s called independence, but it too needs a core philosophy that can show voters what sort of Scotland is on offer post-Union. Worthy tomes of densely packed type, of the kind favoured by the SNP, will not win hearts or minds, even when the ideas are good.
For the moderate centre of politics, on both left and right, the last 40 years have been almost barren of big ideas that are about bettering lives for the majority. Inequality has grown: global corporations challenge governments for agency over people’s lives. The collective society is in retreat.
EU emerging as new global superpower
The exception has been the European Union. It created a health care regime accessible in time of urgent need by citizens of all 27 member states, wherever they are in the EU. It gave birth to the Single Market for goods and services, delivered a unified currency in the euro, created a Europe-wide energy market and developed Horizon, the world’s biggest cross-border scientific research-and-development programme.
The EU also pioneered collective action in the fight against organised crime. It led the world in areas like car safety and social policies, notably maternity and paternity leave. It is progressive collectivism in action. What’s most impressive is that 27 member states have pooled their sovereignty to make the lives of ordinary people better.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in early February, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Europe, already an economic superpower, must learn to also be a political and military superpower.
For former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, that means a federal Europe and one that knocks down the barriers to trade and investment to make it more competitive, more innovative and more self-reliant.
Europe is waking up to new threats and urgently debating how it can ensure its citizens' security, freedoms and prosperity in the new world order ushered in by Donald Trump. Scotland and the UK must be part of that debate. “Action this day,” as Winston Churchill would say.
Martin Roche and Sir Graham Watson sit on the national committee of the European Movement in Scotland. Their views are their own.
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