In July 1961, when Harold Macmillan first announced that Britain would investigate terms for its entry into the Common Market, one man who favoured the decision was Enoch Powell. A year later, Powell entered the cabinet and thus became a fully acquiescent member of the team collectively responsible for negotiating, with ever more urgent anxiety, to get in. He didn't last long, resigning from his ministry in outrage at the replacement of Macmillan by an unelected politician, Lord Home. But it is one of the choicer ironies of the history of Britain-in-Europe that for Powell, who became the refulgent prophet of Euro-scepticism, his only year in the cabinet coincided with the year in which the work of government was dominated by the process of trying to get into Europe.
This was not, for the later prophet, merely an inconvenient accident. At that time, Powell found in the concept of British entry the kind of logical satisfaction, the ideological coherence, which he sought and immoderately applied to every position he took. When the Tories lost the 1964 election, he was among the MPs who published a pamphlet, One Europe, which was little short of a federalist tract. Edited by his friend, Nicholas Ridley (then strongly supporting continental unity with the offshore island), this argued for "the full economic, military and political union of Europe." It dismissed the political nightmare which came to possess the minds of 1990s Euro-sceptics, Powell among them, by noting that through Nato, the IMF and the Gatt, "we have lost much sovereignty." A little later, in his role as shadow spokesman on defence, Powell objected to Labour's plans for reducing British troops in Germany on the very grounds that this would imperil the larger objective.
In the taxonomy of modern British politics, the name of Powell is often linked with his equal and opposite, Tony Benn. While Benn's trajectory over Europe was not identical with Powell's, there were similarities. Benn was against the Macmillan application, and in his diaries for the early 1960s represented himself as a Gaullist. But by 1967, he was telling the cabinet's remaining pro-Commonwealth buffs that it was time "to cut Queen Victoria's umbilical cord" and arguing, as minister for technology, for "an integrated commercial market" in Europe. Without this, said the future scourge of every Brussels-connected initiative, "we shall be condemned... as a continent to the status of industrial helotry with all that that means in terms of world influence."
Powell and Benn, who became the most unrelenting enemies of Britain-in-Europe for the full quarter-century after entry, expose a particular disability which has afflicted the British European debate ever since it began. This is not merely about this nation's capacity for indecision, with which the history is so obviously marked. Such hesitation-entwined around Britain's infatuation with the Commonwealth, its fear of losing the American connection and its propensity to insist that the island can never become fully continental-is, of course, the central puzzle. What Powell and Benn personify is something at the heart of this, but also different: not so much the collective argument about the future of the nation as the exceptional licence individual politicians allowed themselves to change their minds on Europe; sometimes, as in the case of Denis Healey, frequently.
As the world changes, leaders must adjust. But the manoeuvre is usually one they take care to accommodate within some larger framework, allowing them to define what they are doing as consistent with higher truths they have always believed in. Although party leaders change their minds, even their grandest new postures are located within the grammar of what will never change. When Margaret Thatcher was turning the Conservative party upside down, she took care to invoke the principles that her predecessor, the iniquitous Edward Heath, had, according to her, betrayed. Tony Blair's destructive march through the beliefs and institutions of the Labour party has been accompanied by reassurances that Labour's "values" remain untouched. Deep down, Blair insists, nothing that matters is violated. He has simply returned the party to the road that will carry it towards its timeless objectives. All he has re-thought are the modalities. At bottom, he says, there is no inconsistency between the Blair who got into parliament in 1983 on a party manifesto then described as the longest suicide note in history, and the Blair who now leads a party which sucks up to business and never mentions socialism.
The argument over Europe is played by different rules. Here, mind-changing is usually conducted without any attempt to link it to historic verities. Different categories of deviation are observable in postwar politicians, but they all testify to a belief that, while on most matters the voters need to be enlisted in the belief that a principle is at stake, over Europe they can be fobbed off with neurotic vacillation. The normal requirements of leadership do not apply.
A few politicians have fulfilled them. There was a blazing consistency in the positions of John Biffen and Peter Shore. From the start of their careers, they regarded British membership of "Europe" as an offence against history, an affront to national sovereignty and a project ultimately doomed to both political and economic failure. For more than 30 years, all their words and most of their actions, even in cabinets that pursued a different line, were true to this position. On the other side, Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins, Geoffrey Howe and Roy Hattersley, not to mention the Ashdowns and Heseltines and Clarkes, maintained a European allegiance through thick and thin. But most of the rest have dodged and dithered.
Contradiction, without even a reliable thread of expediency running through it, dominates their story. The Europe question destroyed the normal behaviour of individual politicians and thereby grievously hampered the country's ability to influence the EU in a British way. They could not plot a course and stick to it.
For the voters, who care less about Europe than the politicians do, this is a bewildering record. What do these people really stand for? Europe is a large question, certainly complex, hardly amenable to the passing shifts and eddies which can plausibly make politicians for and against tax rises, or new fashions in penology, at different times. Yet, more than on any other subject, the politicians have torn up the rule-book in which consistency was once important.
For some, the shift was a matter of pragmatism. Consider the two relevant Labour leaders. Harold Wilson was once a dedicated anti-European. When Hugh Gaitskell told the 1962 party conference that Macmillan's venture would put paid to a thousand years of history, Wilson led the exuberant ovation. In the early postwar years, Michael Foot, along with fellow travellers opposed to US power, was a pro-Europe agitator against the policies of Ernest Bevin. But the left came to see the EEC as a capitalist conspiracy and, as leader, Wilson began by ventilating all his scorn upon it. Yet he changed his mind in the mid-1960s, negotiated with de Gaulle and, after Heath secured entry in 1973, manoeuvred to ensure this decision was not revoked when Labour returned to power. Wilson never came out as a pro-European, but submitted himself to the inexorable fact that realists could envisage no alternative destiny for Britain.
Tony Blair is another sort of pragmatist. He, too, has changed his line. The leader who now convinces us that he may be the first since Heath seriously to want Britain to become a proper European country, said in his first successful election address that Labour would "negotiate withdrawal from the EEC, which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs." It is unlikely that he believed this. His temporary adherence to the line reflected the ideological tyranny experienced by those, like him, who wanted to be in a position to overthrow it. An excusable reason for duplicity, perhaps. Not a single Labour MP who first reached the Commons in 1983 said anything different. But, as a natural pro-European, Blair takes his place in the almanac of deviants alongside the instinctive anti-European, Wilson. For both, the issue found them betraying the consistent approach which voters are surely entitled to get from leaders when the very fate of the nation is at stake.
The quarter-century is littered with instances of such tactical shifts. Some have been comically abrupt. In June 1971, Nicholas Winterton secured the Tory nomination for the Macclesfield by-election as an anti-marketeer. By September, when Heath's entry project faced a critical parliamentary test, Winterton won the seat as a pro-marketeer. Before him, a more luminous Tory figure, Peter Walker, having achieved a youthful reputation as a Commonwealth man campaigning against the Macmillan negotiations, glided into Heath's circle and saw the error of his ways, to be rewarded by high office in the 1970 government.
Office-its gaining and its keeping-has been integral to the saga. Because Europe has divided both the Labour and Conservative parties, manoeuvre was inseparable from assembling the cross-party majority which has always existed for keeping Britain in-even if it didn't always exist for getting Britain there in the first place. To Wilson, Blair and Walker, we might add the name of Malcolm Rifkind as exemplar of the cringing ambiguity which overtook the Major government. Rifkind started life as a committed pro-European. As junior minister in the Thatcher period, he was a ready instrument of the Euro-zeal which by then the Foreign Office saw as a professional obligation. As foreign secretary in Major's dying months, though, Rifkind chose to operate as a cack-handed sceptic, lecturing Helmut Kohl on the heresy of further European union. It was an inept, humiliating performance, a nemesis for what might remain of "Europe" in the party which took Britain into the Common Market. But one could, between gritted teeth, put it down to mere expediency.
There is naked expediency, too, in the crop of Tory MEPs recently selected as candidates in next year's European elections. Several, to retain their seats, pretended they agreed with William Hague on ruling out the single currency for a decade, when their private views and earlier public gestures all pointed the other way. But they are responding to a context created by something deeper than pragmatism. This second category of reversal, I now think, originates beyond conventional politics, somewhere closer to the realm of the psyche and the viscera.
Some of the more violent switchers-Michael Spicer and William Cash are examples-contend that the real change has happened not to them but to the idea of Europe. They at least feel a duty to account for their enmity for a project they once embraced. But most of the lurchers-from Woodrow Wyatt to Max Beloff via countless others-do not. The queen of this camp is Margaret Thatcher. It is true that she never pretended to be a full-hearted European. She spent 11 years stoking British opinion against Brussels and all its works. At the same time, judged by deeds not words, she was an integrationist. The Single Act was hers, as an architect, not a grudging accomplice. It greatly expanded the reach of majority voting and thus diminished national sovereignty. Although she fought Jacques Delors and resisted sterling's entry into the ERM, she eventually put her name to everything Delors proposed except the single currency. If you leave aside Thatcher's menacing oratory, empty threats and futile struggles, she was a "European" prime minister.
It is said that she was pushed into the ERM by forces in her cabinet for which she was not responsible-this from the most domineering prime minister of modern times. It is also said that she worked for a Single Act which turned out quite differently from what she understood would be the case-this from the most famously well-briefed leader ever to grapple with the small print of what was put in front of her. She was, in other words, not to blame for either of the seminal "European" events that touched British interests in the second half of her stewardship. Out of this, her apologists find a way of linking her present attitudes seamlessly with her past performance, each phase, they say, marked by the same principled critique.
These explanations are relevant in a different way. To discover, in retirement, that you have been responsible for the momentum of the 1980s is an unwelcome awakening. For someone who, ever since her wartime adolescence, hated the Germans and despised the French, coming to terms with the integrationist process of which she had allowed herself to be a part is difficult. For a conviction politician, such a conflict between principle and action in her own record must be insupportable. What it calls forth is denial and then stridency-which may never eradicate, but might diminish, the guilt about the past.
Such is the pathology of the Thatcher contribution to the voters' bewilderment. How could this leader who took Britain so much further into Europe now denounce every consequential development of the EU, and implicitly demand-without having the nerve to say so, or the wisdom to map out the connections with the real world-that Britain should quit the Brussels table and settle for global free trade? Only by denying, against every scrap of evidence, that first-phase Thatcher ever really existed.
The Conservative party is full of lesser voices which take their lead from hers. The Tory politicians who maintain an unbroken line between what they said in 1971 and the case they will still be arguing in 2001 are dismissed as "dinosaurs": the word Hague's people use about Michael Heseltine. On the other hand, those who passed the laws and assisted the momentum of recent years, yet now embrace a new orthodoxy, defend their modern Europhobia with a piety in inverse proportion to any consistent principle underlying it.
Not all changes of mind, even radical ones, are unreasonable. When the facts change, as Prospect's "Previous Convictions" column reminded us of the JM Keynes saying, intelligent people re-think their positions. Emu is arguably that kind of change, and elicits anxious scepticism from thinkers who remain uninfected by the visceral disease. Ralf Dahrendorf's rationality is as impeccable as his support for some version of the EU, yet he thinks Emu a false move. Indeed, anyone who believes in "Europe" has plenty of concerns about Emu. It is a big gamble. It may not last forever. There will be periods when it is divisive, not unifying, imposing disciplines some national politicians don't like living with. It will not easily withstand the first economic recession and will be the scapegoat for every economic setback suffered by each participating member. Even if it survives that, and thus "works," it desperately needs a political infrastructure, which there is not yet a collective will to create.
There is a serious debate to be had, also, about the limits of further integration in non-monetary fields. Douglas Hurd recently proposed an attempt to categorise more rigidly the proper zones of integration, of co-operation and of national separation. A hazardous venture, as Hurd recognised, but one which may be essential if sense is to be made of the need for an EU and the need to deepen popular support for it. Such constructive criticism has nothing to do with fundamental apostasy: can't exist, in fact, alongside it.
What the apostates have been doing is something different: re-organising history and trying to exorcise their own role in it. First, they contend that the EU has indeed changed unrecognisably and therefore fulfils Keynes's requirement. They present it as a federalising entity, which they say it never used to be. Norman Lamont, once a strong pro-Europe man, said he only found out when negotiating at Maastricht that the continentals really wanted a United States of Europe (which, actually, most of them no longer do), and this is what drove him to argue for a British exit. For Michael Howard, also once pro-Europe, the culprit is the European court. As home secretary, he said the court's powers should be "repatriated."
But nothing that has happened in the EU exceeds what was present in the words of the Treaty of Rome. Aspirations were murky, but all would have a veto on their formulation. When the treaty was signed, and then when Britain joined, nobody knew where the joint enterprise would take "Europe," but the desire for "ever-closer union" was there in the text, and the curtailing of national sovereignty was openly accepted. That was the whole point. As for the court, how else were trading and economic disputes to be arbitrated?
These wild thrashings seem to indicate political minds in a state of inner conflict they are incapable of acknowledging. Is it the very magnitude of the Europe decision Britain took in the 1970s, coupled with the awareness that it is in practice irreversible, which has led a generation of Tory politicians into the perversity of trying to renounce it? Either they didn't know what they were doing when they were pro-Europeans, or they are reversing their opinion about a strategic choice that was supposed to imply a serious fixity of purpose. Neither stance does much for their credibility, despite their raging sense of rectitude. In their Europe phase, apparently, they never understood the scale of what was being attempted. Perhaps they blinded themselves to it. Or perhaps they are now simply running away from what they did. Whatever: there is a terrible frivolity about the ease with which so many Tories have turned coat, and a certain political inadequacy in the fact that, 18 months after liberation from the Major cabinet, none of its alumni has felt the need, despite the apparent urgency of the coming EU catastrophe, to produce an alternative blueprint to the destiny they now detest.
Awaiting the start of the euro, Britain needs a political class capable of steady analysis of the reality which is now established: politicians who stop their futile cavilling at the context in which all big economic and social decisions now have to be taken; leaders prepared, while fighting the British corner, to stick by the full implications of what the EU means. Tony Blair is one deviationist who appears to have learned the lesson, although how he will make sense of it is the biggest issue facing his government. Ranged against him is a band of apostates working out personal crises, who have yet to give an adequate accounting of why, in the light of their own history, we should take them half as seriously as they take themselves.
