From Bruges to Brexit in 30 years
What does it mean to be a Eurosceptic? It depends *when* you ask.
What does it mean to be a Eurosceptic? Well, it depends when you ask.
Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Bruges Speech1 is often portrayed as a landmark statement of modern British Euroscepticism. In it, the prime minister warned against a federal Europe, arguing instead that national governments should remain the primary source of political authority. Yet Thatcher also reiterated her belief that Britain’s “destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”
Fast forward to late 1990s and early 2000s and Euroscepticism principally meant opposition to monetary union and the single currency. In that vein, the Conservative position evolved from John Major’s ‘wait and see’ approach to William Hague’s ‘LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE POUND’ campaign.
By 2005, David Cameron’s Euroscepticism combined a plea for the party to “stop banging on about Europe” with an attempt to partially offset his scary modernising agenda by promising to withdraw the Conservatives from the centre-right European People’s Party grouping in the European Parliament.
But by the mid-2010s, things were getting dicey. To be a Eurosceptic in 2013 meant being one of the 116 Conservative MPs — representing more than half of all the party’s backbenchers — who defied the government by backing an amendment to the Queen’s Speech expressing “regret” that legislation paving the way for an EU referendum had not been brought forward. Three years later, and with notably rare exceptions (see: May, Theresa), to be a Eurosceptic effectively meant campaigning to leave the EU altogether.
True, there had always been a small band of “swivel-eyed loons” who never reconciled themselves to Ted Heath’s treachery or the verdict of Harold Wilson’s referendum. But it is remarkable how, through a combination of retirements and fear of activists, being a Eurosceptic went from mere opposition to a ‘super state’ to glorious isolation in less than 30 years.
“Weak, weak, weak”
I’ll be honest, that intro — like Tory Euroscepticism itself — kind of got away from me. I was only trying to set the scene for the sheer strangeness of the 1997 Conservative election campaign, where not only did sitting ministers issue personal manifestos contradicting the party line on the single currency, but the prime minister declined to sack them!
For instance, just watch health minister John Horam explain. Warning: the whole episode is just incredibly camp.
You may think that, well, you know, Britain was never going to join the euro or that support for the single currency was some weirdo, hashtag FBPE thing. Not true! It was largely a combination of Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Tony Blair’s foreign policy adventurism that put paid to it in the end, but in 1997 there was a real possibility that the UK would join in the next decade. Think about it:
