Once upon a time there was a union…

Photo by Hadrian

You can trace Brexit back to even before the UK joined the European Union. We joined late – and we joined late because we were more sceptical than the others. Even once we joined, we were never particularly comfortable; the very fact of being a late joiner made us uncomfortable because we had to join an organisation that was shaped largely by the French.

There were all sorts of things about the European communities from the start that we never felt very comfortable with – the Common Agricultural Policy; the European Commission had these weird things called cabinets. Moving towards the present, there are lots of things that can be said both about the way in which David Cameron called the referendum and how he campaigned for Remain during that referendum, which helped the Leavers’ cause no end.

Why did the UK decide to join the EU in the first place?

To understand the UK’s relationship with the European Union, you need to go back to the beginning. In a sense, that means understanding why the UK didn’t get involved with European integration from the start. Remember, for the original “Six”, European integration started with the Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s. The UK felt it didn’t need to be part of this. We, after all, thought we’d won the war. We didn’t suffer from the sort of weakness of our continental partners. We could stand aloof and, in particular, we had this three-circle theory of British foreign policy – the Commonwealth, the US and Europe – and because we didn’t want to privilege any one of those over the others, we stayed out.

We finally decided to apply to join when it became clear that the economies of the “Six” were doing far better than ours. In that statement, there is a clue that, for us, membership was instrumental. It was about making the economy work better. I think that made our relationship with European integration very different to that of other Member States.

A remarkably successful Member State

One of the paradoxes once we joined was that you could argue that the UK was a remarkably successful Member State. Other Member States used to look at us with a hint of jealousy saying, well, look, you’ve got the best of all worlds. You’re in the European Community, the European Union later on, but you’re out of the bits you don’t like. You’ve got a semi-detached relationship with Schengen. You’re not in the euro. You’ve got this wonderful budget rebate. You’ve managed to negotiate for yourself the ideal position with regard to European integration. Yet, the flip side of that, of course, was that this series of opt-outs pointed to the fact that we were never fully committed to the project of building a European Union in the way that other Member States were.

Under David Cameron, those pressures came to a head, with a Conservative Party that simply didn’t like the fact that we were, as they saw it, trapped within a series of institutions over which we didn’t enjoy full control.

Margaret Thatcher’s masterplan

Perhaps a very neat way of thinking about UK achievements when it comes to European integration is to go back to 1988 when Margaret Thatcher gave what became a famous – or infamous, depending on your perspective – speech at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges.

In that speech, Margaret Thatcher, apart from attacking the State-building ambitions of the European Commission, also laid out three ambitions. She said, when it comes to European integration, I want three things. I want to create a single market. I want greater co-operation on matters related to foreign and defence policy, and I want to see the European Community expand eastward so that the countries of Eastern Europe will have the possibility of joining. The striking thing about that speech is that she achieved all her objectives. The single market was indeed a success. The European communities, and then the European Union, did indeed start to collaborate on foreign and security policy, and, ultimately, we had the enlargement to the east. What’s interesting is she was probably the only national leader of that era, of the late 1980s, who achieved exactly what she wanted from European integration.

If you look at other leaders, whether it’s Chancellor Merkel or President Mitterand, they had slightly different visions for the future of European integration. That gives us an insight into the way that – and we certainly didn’t talk about it enough – the UK was tremendously successful in shaping the development of the European Union.

How and when dissatisfaction crept in

The semi-detached nature of the UK’s relationship with European integration wasn’t a sudden development. In fact, we had a referendum in 1975, where we voted almost two to one in favour of remaining inside. Polling only three years later was showing a majority in favour of leaving. The UK public was never massively supportive of being inside the European project. All the way through our membership, you would find that we were the people who felt the least sense of European identity. We were the people who were amongst the least well informed about the European Community. So, there was a solid bedrock of disinterest at best, hostility at worst, towards the European project from the start.

The factors that fuelled Brexit

Photo by SilvaAna

There were various factors that fuelled the referendum result in 2016. Firstly, immigration. The UK had decided not to impose transitionary measures on people coming from Central and Eastern Europe. After the enlargement of 2004, we had a large increase in immigration from the EU. We had the migrant crisis going on just before the referendum. On our TVs, day after day, we had pictures of people coming into the European Union, which the Leave camp exploited ruthlessly. We had a Conservative Party in government, a majority of whose MPs ended up supporting leaving, including very high-profile people like Michael Gove and Boris Johnson.

Added to that, the referendum took place at a time when dissatisfaction amongst a number of British people with the establishment – I think many British people lumped the EU in with the establishment – was very high for a number of reasons: partly because of levels of immigration, partly because of the continuing fallout of the financial crisis of 2008, partly because of the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2008, which had also hit our faith in politics. So, part of this was about the European Union specifically, and part of it was about a more generalised sense of dissatisfaction at a whole series of institutions, of which the EU was simply one.

Charting the rise of the referendum

What’s unique to the United Kingdom is that David Cameron decided to have a referendum where every vote was equal. This gave people a unique opportunity to express their dissatisfaction in a way that’s not usually possible in general elections, where, of course, your choices are constrained by the parties that you get to vote for. The offering in a general election doesn’t necessarily allow you to express your dissatisfaction. But what is interesting about the referendum is the lessons drawn from it. We need to pay attention to several features of the UK that we should have known about beforehand but that we didn’t pay sufficient attention to – primarily, the emphasis of successive governments on helping people who aren’t doing as well.

Regional inequality, what the Boris Johnson government calls “levelling up” – this agenda has come directly out of a referendum which was seen in part as an expression of dissatisfaction, not just with the political elite but also with an economic settlement that left large parts of the United Kingdom not doing anywhere near as well as the richest parts in the South East and in London.

The intention of the referendum

I think that for David Cameron, promising a referendum was a way of dealing with the internal party politics of the Conservative Party and nothing more or less than that. This was at a moment when more and more of his own backbenchers were getting restless and were rebelling over issues related to Europe. It was a time when the UK Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage, was doing better and better in the polls. Remember that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won the 2014 European elections. It was a time when some of Cameron’s own MPs – thinking about Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless – defected from the Conservative Party to join and stand as MPs for UKIP. So, there’s not much doubt in my mind that the decision to call the referendum was based on the need to protect the position of the Conservative Party rather than any broader consideration of the national interest.

It might have been preferable for us, for our politicians, to deliver on something which all of them promised. Tony Blair promised it, David Cameron promised it: a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. That at least allows a population to express its dissatisfaction about the state of European integration without it being this all or nothing, in or out sort of question.

A question over which we couldn’t agree

Photo by Ben Gingell

There are many things you can say about the democratic and largely parliamentary process that took place after the referendum. It took the UK the best part of four years to figure out how to leave the European Union after the referendum.

Many people have drawn the conclusion that that is a sign of political dysfunctionality. I would take issue with that just slightly. One of the things about the UK after the referendum is that we were divided 50/50 more or less between Leave and Remain, and our parliament was divided as well. There wasn’t a stable majority for any kind of Brexit outcome. There wasn’t a majority for Remain. But equally, there wasn’t a majority for any specific sort of Brexit. In a sense, the fact that parliament took so long to deal with this question wasn’t a sign of democratic dysfunctionality. It was a sign that parliament was accurately representing the deep divisions and lack of majority amongst the British population as a whole. This was a question over which we couldn’t agree.

So, it would have been strange if parliament had come out and said this is simple. Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s move forward. That being said, the way the process dragged out, some of the scenes we saw in parliament and some of the intemperate language we heard from people on both sides of the debate did very little for the reputation of British democracy and certainly helped to increase a sense of distrust in politics within this country itself.

Discover more about

the build-up to Brexit

Menon, A. (2008). Europe: The State of the Union. Atlantic Books.

Hayward, J., & Menon, A. (Eds.). (2003). Governing Europe. Oxford University Press.

Jones, E., Menon, A., & Weatherill, S. (Eds.). (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the European Union. Oxford University Press.

How Britain got to Brexit