FT political editor seems to take eu-scepticism reasonably seriously.

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This sceptical isle
By George Parker and Illustrations by James Ferguson

Published: July 25 2008 22:04 | Last updated: July 25 2008 22:04

For years they have resisted the dream of “ever closer” European Union; viewed from the mainland they are a tribe of backward-looking island-dwellers, inspired by their warrior queen, Margaret Thatcher. But Britain’s eurosceptics remain convinced they are now in the ascendancy.

When the people of Ireland voted “no” to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty (designed to streamline the workings of the EU) in June, they did more than put the brakes on 50 years of European integration. They sent an electric pulse across the Irish Sea, re-energising one of Europe’s most powerful – and complex – political movements. Didn’t the Irish vote prove the British eurosceptics were right all along: that given a chance to express their views on Europe, the people would say “no”? Vindicated and inspired, the bards of Britain’s tabloid press went to work with renewed gusto to ensure the good work done by the Irish was not undone. “Oi Sarky, now we’re really narky over EU treaty malarky,” waxed The Sun – the eurosceptic standard-bearer – expressing its scorn for attempts by Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, to “bully” the Irish into voting again on the treaty so that this time they got the answer right.

The Poles too have been lauded for having second thoughts about the treaty, and the Poles – as the tabloids rarely forget to mention – flew with the RAF in the Battle of Britain. These are heady times indeed for the eurosceptics, tipsy again on that familiar cocktail of wartime nostalgia, Brussels-bashing and French-baiting.

The EU’s most recent survey showed that only 30 per cent of Britons think membership is a “good thing” compared with an average 52 per cent across Europe; only Latvia is less positive. Underlying the feeling of euphoria among the europhobes is a sense that Britain may soon be run by a government that shares the population’s gut suspicion of anything to do with Europe. David Cameron’s Conservative party – 20 points ahead in the opinion polls – is no longer split over Europe. The old pro-European wing has been routed: a Cameron government promises to be the most eurosceptic ever elected in Britain. The only debate is whether the battle with Brussels should take the form of guerrilla raids or a full-scale assault.

Britain has its own dedicated eurosceptic party – the UK Independence Party – for those who find even Cameron’s Tories a little soft on Europe. Nigel Farage, a dapper 44-year-old former commodities broker, says hostility towards Brussels is now deeply ingrained in the country’s psyche. “It’s a different world,” he says. “Back in 1993, when UKIP was first set up, euroscepticism was a minority sport. If you went to a dinner party and said Britain would be better off outside the EU, it would be considered so extraordinary – so off the wall – you would never be invited back.” Farage’s party wants Britain to negotiate a free trade relationship with the EU, disentangling itself from the Union’s political work in areas such as foreign policy, defence, employment, social affairs and regulation. In reality, it would probably mean leaving the 27-member club.

Farage admits this vision used to be the preserve of “old colonels and majors”, but now says he is just as likely to win support from university students – hostile to the cold bureaucratic face of the EU – as port-swilling military types with memories of empire.

In 2004, Farage’s party won 12 seats in the European parliament, a body made up almost exclusively of members who support the European dream. Until recently they have been treated as British oddballs. But Farage claims the Irish vote has forced his euro-colleagues in Strasbourg to confront the unwelcome prospect that UKIP might be on to something. “Since the Irish vote they have been pretty unpleasant to us,” he says. “We have been called mentally ill and our behaviour has been likened to the National Socialist party in Germany. It’s pretty vicious stuff. We have never seen it before.”

Even Tony Blair, a convinced pro-European, left office admitting he had failed to shift British public opinion in favour of a constructive engagement with the EU. The difficulty of crafting European policy in such a hostile environment, he said, was “acute to the point of the ridiculous”.

In 2005 Blair warned that the European elite had to wake up to the rise of anti-EU feeling. “The people are blowing the trumpets around the city walls,” he told the European parliament. If the sceptics had their way, the walls would be stormed, the city overrun. That year, at the end of Britain’s six-month presidency of the EU, Blair’s frustrations erupted in the normally antiseptic chamber of the European parliament. When Farage and his colleagues taunted the prime minister, Union Jacks stapled to their desks, Blair responded: “You sit there with our country’s flag but you do not represent our country’s interests. These are our partners and colleagues. This is 2005 not 1945. We are not fighting each other any more.”

It sounded tough, but in truth it was a cry of despair from a man who had given up trying to take his country with him.

In a mournful interview with the FT shortly before leaving office in 2007, Blair explained the choice he faced regarding Europe: isolate himself in a perceived defence of the national interest and win plaudits at home, or co-operate with his partners and face accusations of a sell-out. “It’s isolation or treason,” he said.

. . .

Good times, then, to be a eurosceptic. Ireland’s No vote delivered a bloody nose to the European elite, who believe the Lisbon treaty is vital to make an enlarged EU of 27 members work effectively, and pressure on Ireland to vote again will reinforce the impression of an arrogant club, out of touch with the people. But UK euroscepticism is more complex than the tabloid headlines and opinion polls suggest. Although Britons have traditionally been cautious about engagement with Europe – a continent they associate with wars (as Margaret Thatcher pointed out) – outright hostility to the EU is a relatively recent phenomenon.

To assess whether British euroscepticism will endure within Europe, one has to understand its roots. Conveniently, Britain’s political journey within Europe is perhaps best encapsulated in the political journey of Thatcher herself. Britain was not always eurosceptic and neither was its firebrand PM. In 1973, Thatcher campaigned vigorously for Britain to join the old European Economic Community, and in 1975, she campaigned again to remain in the club, when membership was put to a referendum – the last time Britons had a direct say on a European question. They voted by a margin of 2:1 to stay in.

The clue to Thatcher’s enthusiasm was in the club’s title: she saw Europe as an economic entity, a free market including countries such as Germany, France and Italy, which had overcome their postwar problems and had overtaken – or were in the process of overtaking – Britain, by then the sick man of Europe.

In 1984, as Conservative prime minister, she berated other European leaders at a summit in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and demanded a refund for Britain on its annual contribution to the EU budget. “I want my money back,” was not from the lexicon of approved communautaire language, but even then Thatcher had by no means turned her back on Europe. Indeed it was arguably Thatcher’s own actions after Fontainebleau that sowed the seeds of euroscepticism in Britain today. Soon after the summit, she embarked on her campaign to make the European single market work properly by tearing down national barriers – including myriad different standards and regulations – which inhibited free trade. The only trouble was that every country hid behind its special standards in order to thwart that ideal. Thatcher was lobbied by British banks struggling to get into German markets. She saw no alternative: she supported the scrapping of national vetos to ensure that single-market legislation could be passed.

“That soured the atmosphere because it led to a great raft of legislation,” admits Ken Clarke, the former Tory chancellor of the exchequer and one of the few remaining europhiles left on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons.

Unifying one set of rules for the whole of Europe was a vast task, creating as many national losers as winners. Local cheesemakers were closed down by new health rules. The approved curvature of bananas was laid down by European law. Even lawnmowner noise was regulated.

“You had to do that,” explains Clarke. “We had a British regulation on lawnmower noise, so it made sense to have a single piece of legislation.” Indeed, British lawnmower makers had themselves lobbied for such an EU law because they were prevented from exporting to Germany by that country’s lower noise limits.

But those arguments were rarely heard. Instead the public saw a vast steel and glass bureaucracy in Brussels spawning meddling regulations. And, thanks to Thatcher, patron saint of eurosceptics, Britain was no longer able to block them. Her single-market push was a great success – the UK does about 60 per cent of its trade with the EU – but the cost was a huge erosion of public sympathy for the European project.

. . .

If Thatcher’s Single European Act of 1986 laid the foundations for today’s euroscepticism, the superstructure was built by Jacques Delors, the charismatic French president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. Delors, a socialist, decided that Thatcher’s liberal view of a free-trade Europe needed to be balanced by “a social Europe” with similar working arrangements and union rights across the bloc, including a maximum 48-hour week. Since this was related to the functioning of the single market, Delors successfully argued that national vetos should not apply.

A furious Thatcher claimed she had been “tricked” as the French socialist attempted to apply his vision to the newly deregulated British economy. Delors’ appearance before an adoring Trades Union Congress audience in 1988 hardly helped her mood. His vision of a political Europe, with its own single currency, foreign, tax and justice policies was anathema to Thatcher, who by 1990, the year she was ousted from Number 10, had become the steely “Britannia” figure eurosceptics still revere today. “No. No. No,” she told the Commons, rejecting the concentration of more power in European institutions.

In many respects, Britain’s view of Europe is still shaped by the tumultuous final years of Thatcher’s reign, a period chronicled with tabloid brilliance by Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun from 1981 to 1994. He encouraged his millions of readers to shout “Up Yours Delors” in the direction of France. People living on England’s south coast were told they could locate this Gallic threat if they faced the sea and turned “steadily to the left until they smell the garlic”.

“We used to invade France at regular intervals,” MacKenzie recalls. “We would hire a tank and send over a couple of Page 3 girls. To be fair we were always treated with a great deal of courtesy.”

This sort of stunt might make The Sun seem a potty irrelevance. In fact, its presentation of European issues – and the eurosceptic views of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch – still shape the British debate and leave politicians fearful of making any kind of positive case for the EU. Why does Murdoch hate the EU? MacKenzie doesn’t think it has to do with “cheese, milk and butter” – a reference to the fact that British EU membership imposed tariffs on the farm produce it once imported from old colonial trading partners such as Murdoch’s native Australia. Nor is it to do with sales: The Sun’s circulation falls when it puts a serious political issue on its front page.

MacKenzie says Murdoch, who has ready access to all Britain’s political leaders, simply dislikes the centralising tendency of the EU. And the paper is just speaking for its readers. “If it was just a free trade area, then yes,” says MacKenzie, who still writes a column for The Sun. “But it’s no to taxation, to a European army – it’s preposterous, ridiculous. Even if it is commercially damaging to run these stories on the front page, it will create a long-term good feeling for our readers.”

. . .

It is not just The Sun, of course. The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail are also deeply critical of the EU. With the press on board and with the pro-European Irish apparently joining their cause, one would imagine that David Cameron, the Conservative leader, is licking his lips at the prospect of power and a good old-fashioned row with Brussels, picking up where Margaret Thatcher left off.

Well, not quite. Cameron understands that while most of his party dislikes Brussels, and the public and press are generally sceptical, Europe remains a dangerous subject for a Tory leader. Eurosceptics like to point to polls showing headline hostility towards the EU, but deeper analysis shows that the public regard Europe as a marginal issue in their daily lives. “In June this year, it was only the 18th-most mentioned issue facing Britain,” says Helen Coombs, deputy head of research at Ipsos MORI, the polling organisation. She says it was higher in the 1990s, when Britain was agonising over whether to join the euro, but even the row over the Lisbon treaty has failed to push Europe up the agenda. “It’s simply not something that people vote on in general elections,” she said.

Even if Britons dislike the faceless bureaucracy of the EU, they do not necessarily dislike Europe. The network of routes opened up by the budget airlines to obscure European airports confirms a British appetite for travel to the continent. In 2006, 207,000 Britons left the country – mostly to other EU countries – and only 81,000 came back.

Cameron may also have noticed that young and better educated people tend to be more open to the advantages of EU membership. A recent Eurobarometer poll found that 43 per cent of the youngest segment of the survey saw the EU as being a good thing compared with just 25 per cent of those aged 55 or more. The variation when the data is reviewed by education level is even more marked. Sixty-three per cent of those educated to age 20 or above take a positive view on the EU compared with just 24 per cent of those educated to age 15 or under. Farage admits that his UK Independence party – languishing at 3 per cent in the latest Ipsos MORI poll – will struggle to make much headway at the next general election, although it is likely to do better in next year’s European elections.

Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a pro-EU think tank, says: “The failure of euroscepticism is its inability to convince people that what they are going on about is really important. People haven’t marched against the Lisbon treaty as they did, for example, against foxhunting. Even if there is broad support for the eurosceptic case, it is still a minority cult.”

This is a problem for Cameron, who wants to present a modern and compassionate face to the electorate. He wants his new government to talk about things people care about – health, education, crime – not to obsess over Europe, an issue that divided the party in the past.

Gordon Brown has been attacked over Europe himself, having ratified the Lisbon treaty without holding a referendum. But now he sees the issue as a Tory problem, sensing that the British public may not like Europe much but that they still want Britain to remain engaged. “He would be isolated in Europe,” Brown said recently in the Commons, pointing at Cameron.

There is another reason Cameron may be wary about fighting a big battle with Brussels: today’s European Commission, the EU executive, is adopting many of Margaret Thatcher’s old causes. Jacques Chirac, French president, witheringly described the Commission as being “neo-liberal” because of its passion for forcing open Europe’s energy market, promoting a world trade deal and expanding the EU’s borders to the east, including Turkey. The “threat level” from Brussels post-Delors is also diminished. The tide of single-market regulation that accompanied the Single European Act has slowed to a trickle; there is no single EU tax policy; European foreign policy remains a geopolitical pygmy; the tap of European social and employment legislation has been turned off. Britain is not about to join the eurozone.

Newspapers such as The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail would contest that analysis. Yet if they really believed – as they sometimes claim – that Britain is being run from Brussels, it seems curious that none maintains a staff reporter in the EU capital.

One point of (belated) agreement in Brussels is that the sceptics have been sustained by the EU’s endless obsession with updating its institutions – a process of treaty revision that has been in train almost without pause since the mid-1980s. Little wonder Europe’s citizens feel this is an organisation hard-wired for mission creep. Reijo Kemppinen, a shaven-headed Finn who runs the European Commission’s London office, admits this “obsession” with institutional change has stopped the EU explaining to the public what it actually tries to do: open markets, bring down consumer prices, fight climate change or develop energy strategies.

Whatever finally happens to the Lisbon treaty, most agree this marks the end of the kind of institutional tinkering that bores the public rigid. “Most people I’ve met would never regard themselves as either eurosceptics or europhiles,” Kemppinen says. “They are genuinely uninterested in the whole issue.”

Cameron’s problem is that he leads a party that is very interested in the issue. Ken Clarke says that the Tory grass-root members who choose parliamentary candidates will reject anyone who does not claim euroscepticism. “Someone who is pro-European has virtually no chance of being selected today,” he said. “You used to have the same problem when I was trying to find a seat if you said you were against capital punishment.” Cameron, as prime minister, will therefore have ranged behind him on the Commons benches several hundred MPs who are in the vanguard of the eurosceptic movement. Some of them want him to hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty even if it is already in force: the likely “No” vote would convulse the EU.

At the very least, Cameron has vowed to renegotiate Britain’s obligations under Europe’s social and employment policies, although he stands virtually no chance of success. Such a treaty revision requires a unanimous vote and France – for one – would not agree. A long and futile battle with Britain’s European partners would not satisfy the Tory benches; further struggles would almost certainly follow. As one senior Tory puts it: “David knows he has a serious problem. The question is, how does he address the expectations of the extreme eurosceptics?”

Euroscepticism may be a less endemic condition in Britain than some believe; its roots in the population may be shallower than generally understood; its longevity is hard to determine. But it remains a powerful political force that Cameron will do well to contain.

George Parker is the FT’s political editor.
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