The Lies of the Land

by Adam Macqueen

  Politicians had been making similar noises about any form of European grouping involving a subsuming of national identity since the very earliest days. Cabinet minutes from the Attlee era show his ministers were fretting that the integration of the coal and steel industries under the Schuman Plan ‘appeared to involve some surrender of sovereignty’,4 and in 1962, when Harold Macmillan was leading the first unsuccessful attempt to get us into what was then the European Economic Community, his Labour counterpart Hugh Gaitskell warned that it would make us ‘no more than a state… in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California’.5 Macmillan dismissed this outright: ‘What nonsense!’6

  It wasn’t nonsense. The concept of an ‘ever closer union’ – one seen as so unacceptable to the British that David Cameron made its abandonment one of the ‘red lines’ in his renegotiations ahead of the 2016 referendum – was right there in the second line of the Treaty of Rome, which had established the European Economic Community in 1957. And that ‘ever closer union’ was not just a platitude. The Hague summit of 1969 specifically committed members to ‘paving the way for a United Europe capable of assuming its responsibilities in the world of tomorrow’.7 Two years later a committee led by Pierre Werner, the prime minister of Luxembourg, proposed a supranational body to take over decisions on economic policy for all members and suggested that ‘the adoption of a sole currency… would confirm the irreversibility of the venture.’8 The year he proposed for its introduction was 1980. It would be a further twenty-two years before the euro went into circulation.

  This was fully comprehended back in London. Noted a Foreign Office report:

  the plan for economic and monetary union (EMU) has revolutionary long-term implications…. It could imply the ultimate creation of a European federal state with a single currency. All the basic instruments of national economic management… would ultimately be handed over to the central federal authorities…. The degree of freedom which would then be vested in national governments might indeed be somewhat less than the autonomy enjoyed by the constituent states of the US.9

  Was Prime Minister Edward Heath, who had been fully committed to the European project from the outset and was now busy trying to negotiate our own entry, put off? Certainly not. They ‘discussed the progress of the European Community towards economic and monetary union, and its implications for existing financial relationships,’ runs the official communiqué of the summit he held with French president Georges Pompidou in May 1971. ‘The Prime Minister reaffirmed the readiness of Britain to participate fully in a European spirit in this development.’10

  There was, however, no mention of this ‘European spirit’ in the sixteen-page booklet distributed to every household in the UK that summer. Instead, it paraphrased a government white paper to assure the soon-to-be Europeans: ‘There is no question of Britain losing essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the economic interest.’11 This was rather different to how a secret Foreign Office document drawn up that year put it:

  we shall be accepting an external legislature which regards itself as having direct powers of legislating with effect within the United Kingdom, even in derogation of United Kingdom statutes, and as having in certain fields exclusive legislative competence, so that our own legislature has none…. The loss of external sovereignty will however increase as the Community develops, according to the intention of the preamble to the Treaty of Rome ‘to establish the foundations of an even closer union among the European peoples’.12

  When, courtesy of Ted Heath’s Labour successor, Harold Wilson, the UK eventually got a vote on the matter in 1975, the official leaflet encouraging Britons to vote to stay in quoted several of the other aims as laid out in the Treaty of Rome – but, funnily enough, not that one. The section, headed ‘WILL PARLIAMENT LOSE ITS POWER?’, noticeably ducked away from answering that question too. In its place it made the striking argument that ‘in the modern world even the Super Powers like America and Russia do not have complete freedom of action.’13 The British people voted 67 per cent to 33 per cent to stay in Europe.

  Writing his memoirs in 2015, William Waldegrave, who was Heath’s private secretary at the time of the referendum, was straightforward about the duplicity. ‘If the “Yes” campaigners had said “This is what we want! A single great new nation of Europe to stand as equal with America and Russia”, a majority of the British people might even have signed up to the European integration project,’ wrote Waldegrave. ‘Instead, they said “Nothing will really change. Britain will still be Britain. Just trust us.” Because that was palpably false, Britain never committed itself to an honest and fundamental change.’14

  ‘Now they’ve really gone bananas – Euro bosses ban too bendy ones.’

  The Sun, 21 September 1994

  Strictly speaking, it is true that EU rules do ban wholesalers from selling bananas which have a ‘malformation or abnormal curvature’ to shops. The regulation, number 2257/94, later superseded by number 1333/2011, also insisted that fruit should be ‘intact, firm, sound [not rotting]… clean… free from pests [and] damage caused by pests, with the stalk intact, without bending, fungal damage or dessication, with pistils removed, free from malformation or abnormal curvature… free from bruises’ and from damage inflicted by speed-chilling and damp – and not strange-smelling.15 As such, the Eurocrats only really disadvantaged those of us who prefer our fruit stinky, rotten and unpalatable, and we could still take our chances with bananas graded ‘class 2’, which were allowed to have as many ‘defects of shape’ as we desired.

  This regulation was one of thousands of such rules aimed at protecting consumers, the existence of which seem to come as a personal affront to the same sort of people who (I strongly suspect) are first at the supermarket customer service counter demanding their money back if they find so much as a blemish on their groceries. In 2016 it was new rules about the thickness of oven gloves that were particularly exercising Eurosceptics, who insisted on the inalienable right to spend money on kitchen accessories that would allow them to get badly burned. But the bananas – first ‘straightened out’ in the autumn of 1994 so as ‘to ensure that we are not paying out for rubbish and [to stop] Euro-subsidies acting as an incentive to produce poor bananas’ – just wouldn’t go away.16

  A few weeks before the 2016 referendum – apropros of nothing but a random heckle in the middle of a speech – Boris Johnson announced: ‘It is absurd that we are told that you cannot sell bananas in bunches of more than two or three bananas…. This is not a matter for an international supranational body to dictate to the British people.’17 Of course it wasn’t, because as everyone who has ever been into a greengrocers or supermarket, or so much as glanced at a fruit bowl, knows, bananas were still being proffered in bunches of four, five and even more. The Remain campaign immediately dispatched staff to photograph bunches of bananas to prove the point. When Johnson’s Leave colleague Iain Duncan Smith was challenged about the remark, he replied: ‘I don’t know, because I don’t eat bananas.’ He didn’t rely on benefits, but that had never deterred him from banging on endlessly about them.

  Johnson himself had form on this front. After being sacked from The Times in 1988 for making things up he had been taken on by the Daily Telegraph and sent to head up its Brussels bureau. There he became known for his, to put it charitably, ‘imaginative’ spin on stories about the antics of the European authorities. While campaigning for Brexit in 2016 he was still boasting of how ‘I informed readers about euro-condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp’, undeterred by the fact that both tales had been proved false a quarter of a century earlier.18 (Condom regularization had to do with their safety testing, not size, as he had claimed, and the palaver over prawn flavouring came from the fact that a careless British official had left it off some paperwork, not any attempt to ban it.) ‘He wasn’t making things up, necessarily, just over-egging to a degree that
was dishonest,’ said his counterpart on the Independent, David Usborne.19 Johnson described his approach to reporting on the EU: ‘I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall. I’d listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door, over in England.’20

  And his legacy was a long one. Days after Johnson went bananas over bananas, the Daily Express – which had allied itself uncritically to the Brexit cause when its proprietor donated more than a million pounds to UKIP – ran a list on its website of what it called ‘Amazing things we get back if we leave the EU.’ It stated as fact that you could no longer buy eggs by the dozen in the UK, and that jam could no longer be called ‘jam’, both thanks to European rules. Challenged by press watchdog IPSO, the Express stated that ‘it was satisfied that the picture gallery and accompanying captions were accurate.’21 IPSO thought otherwise and forced them to run a correction. Four months later the paper ran an almost identical list; this time it had straight bananas on it too.

  ‘I went to Brussels with one objective: to protect Britain’s national interest, and that is what I did.… I made it clear that if the eurozone countries wanted a treaty involving all 27 members of the European Union, we would insist on some safeguards for Britain to protect our own national interests.… frankly I have to tell the House that the choice was a treaty without proper safeguards or no treaty – and the right answer was no treaty.’

  David Cameron, House of Commons, 12 December 2011

  When David Cameron stalked out of a Brussels meeting room at 4 a.m., and his officials began briefing that he had used the never-before-employed British veto to scupper the EU’s fiscal compact treaty, the Eurosceptic papers were ecstatic. ‘Mr Cameron resolutely defended British interests by rejecting demands for treaty change across the EU as part of a rescue plan for the single currency,’ frothed the Mail.22 ‘CAMERON’S VETO CREATES NEW ERA FOR EUROPE,’ hollered the Telegraph.23 The Sun reported that he had ‘blasted the bully-boys of Europe with a sensational Winston Churchillstyle “Up Eurs”.24 Even BBC political editor Nick Robinson could barely contain his excitement: ‘For years people have talked about a British veto. For years it has existed as a threat never used. Not any more. The consequences could scarcely be greater for Europe and for Britain’s relationship with Europe.’25

  So was that the end of the treaty, which was meant to create financial reforms to help the struggling eurozone? Er, no. Representatives of the other twenty-six countries simply carried on with their discussion, and agreed unanimously to press ahead with their plans, but called them something else, an ‘Accord between the Euro Area Heads of State or Government’. The newly named accord had exactly the same language, with exactly the same lack of safeguards for the City of London, and it was signed at the same EU meeting by the same EU representatives, just with very slightly different proverbial hats on. They didn’t even bother to move meeting rooms.

  ‘We renamed it a veto to claim it was a veto,’ one Downing Street aide told Tim Shipman, first and best historian of the referendum campaigns. Another told him: ‘he never thought he was going to veto it. It was initially, “Oh fuck, what have we done?” Then the polls went up. It was a completely accidental triumph.’26

  Not everyone was convinced.27 ‘The Prime Minister claims to have wielded a veto,’ jeered opposition leader Ed Miliband in the Commons a few days later. ‘Let me explain to him that a veto is supposed to stop something happening. It is not a veto when the thing you wanted to stop goes ahead without you. That is called losing. That is called being defeated. That is called letting Britain down.’28

  All Cameron had actually done was remove Britain from the negotiating table and ensure that it didn’t get a say any more. But by now an awful lot of people were beginning to think that as a position, that sounded just fine.

  ‘I was astonished last week when Nick Clegg claimed that only 7 per cent of our laws are made in Brussels. He said it was there in the House of Commons library note and therefore was unequivocal. I’ve got the note with me, and on page one it says the British government estimates that around 50 per cent of UK legislation comes from Brussels. There are other estimates coming direct from the European Commission that over 70 per cent of our laws are made in Brussels.’

  Nigel Farage, TV debate with Nick Clegg, 2 April 2014

  In a deliberately provocative speech in 1988, former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors predicted that 80 per cent of the laws affecting the economy and social policy in ten years’ time would be made in Brussels. Thirteen years later Conservative think tank The Bow Group said it was 55 per cent. Campaign group Business for Britain put forward a precise-sounding 59.3 per cent a year after Farage and Clegg’s ding-dong. In the summer of 2017, Donald Trump’s favourite website, Breitbart, offered a ‘definitive’ 65 per cent.29

  Perhaps the most damning statistic comes from the House of Commons briefing paper which both Clegg and Farage waved about during their TV debate in April 2014: it offers fifty-five pages of dense, numbers-heavy analysis, but warns that ‘there is no totally accurate, rational or useful way of calculating the percentage of national laws based on or influenced by the EU… it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts.’ The paper goes on to note that it isn’t as if every bit of legislation that Brussels had a hand in was forced on the UK: ‘the degree of involvement varied from passing reference to explicit implementation.’30 Since the UK has, or – depending when you’re reading this – had, a voice in each and every institution in Brussels, it’s a certainty that our national government was actively pushing for, and even instigating, some of the measures in question.

  The picture is further muddied by the fact that there are two different types of ‘law’ which the EU can impose: 1) directives, which are given to national governments to impose through their own legislation; and 2) regulations, which apply automatically to all member countries. A lot of these laws cover topics that are completely irrelevant to Britain, such as trading standards for industries that don’t exist here. You’re welcome to have a go at producing olive oil or tobacco in Britain, but it’s not EU red tape that will stand in your way; it’s the weather.

  As part of its sloganeering around Article 50, the clause that enables any country to exit from the EU, Theresa May’s government proposed to sweep away the whole lot of them with a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which, they said, will make ‘the UK an independent, sovereign nation again’.31 It will do away with every single obligation contained in the ‘acquis communautaire’ applying to EU states. In the same stroke, it will replace every single one with an identical British version that is somehow magically free from the taint of Brussels. In May’s own words, ‘The same rules and laws will apply on the day after Brexit as they did before.’32 The Eurocrats will have been swapped for good old-fashioned Bureaucrats (the ‘B’ obviously standing for British, even if it is a suspiciously French-sounding word). And everything will apparently be better – even though it is exactly the same.

  ‘We know the bigger issue today is migration from within the EU. Immediate access to our welfare system. Paying benefits to families back home. Employment agencies signing people up from overseas and not recruiting here. Numbers that have increased faster than we in this country wanted…. Britain, I know you want this sorted, so I will go to Brussels, I will not take no for an answer, and – when it comes to free movement – I will get what Britain needs.’

  David Cameron, speech, Conservative Party Conference, Birmingham, 1 October 2014

  The prime minister arrived at the party conference in 2014 fresh from a gamble that had paid off. He had allowed Scotland a referendum on independence, something the Scottish National Party had been pushing for since the seventies, and, despite things looking a bit dicey towards the end of the campaign, he had brought his side comfortably over the winning post. He was also starting to believe his own publicity materials: ‘judge me by my record. I’m the first Prime Minister to veto a Treaty,’ he boasted to the packed
crowd. ‘Around that table in Europe they know I say what I mean, and mean what I say.’33 He had committed himself to staking everything on an in–out referendum, but only – and he couldn’t stress this enough – after he had negotiated a spectacular new relationship between the UK and the EU.

  At the heart of the new relationship between the UK and EU was the issue of immigration. Upstart UKIP had made the issue their own, and were using it to leech tens of thousands of supporters from Cameron’s own party. The 2004 expansion of the EU to ten more countries, mostly from Eastern Europe, had seen an unprecedented influx of people into Britain. Shifting demographics were putting strains on services and labour markets; they were also creating resentments among those people who can’t cope with hearing languages they don’t understand on the bus or shops selling pickled things they haven’t seen before. Now Cameron – undeterred by having pledged in 2010 to get net migration down to ‘the tens of thousands’ only to see it rocket to over 300,000 – was putting his political life on the line by promising to fix the immigration ‘problem’.