First Confession

by Chris Patten

  Spotting the differences in Britain between theories and facts, as Conan Doyle suggests we should, we have to begin with the growing corrosion of trust in the EU as a whole over the years. I referred in an earlier chapter to some of the reasons for this, above all the growing eurozone crisis and the sense of alienation between the public and the professed aims of the European partnership. But we also had to confront myths, exaggerations and lies about Europe which we allowed to destroy much of the credibility of the institution. We usually – nearly all of us who took a completely different pro-European view – failed to confront all this negative sentiment for fear (for those of us in the Conservative Party) of stirring up the right wing and more generally of standing up to the tabloid press. We have to take back control, we are told. It would be nice if we could for a start take back control of the political agenda from a handful of newspapers. The EU is not a corrupt, inefficient behemoth; it did not seize from us more than we gain from membership; it did not usurp our ability to govern ourselves; it did not flood our country with men and women who stole our jobs and bled dry our welfare and health systems. These claims were untrue. The fact that they were believed is partly a result of the collapse of trust in democratic politics (especially in England), the trust which should help bind us more closely together. When we ask, ‘Who are we in England? Who are we in Britain?’, the answer is partly that we are plainly (especially in England) not citizens of a country where the governed these days trust those who govern them. The overwhelming majority of parliamentarians wanted Britain to remain in the EU. What did they know that those who voted for them did not comprehend? Why the gulf between the ruled and their rulers? What brought together the blazers of Chichester and the blue collars of Barnsley to deal such a blow to our international reputation, credibility and interests, and to our long-term economic prospects? What brought us to vote for relegation to a lower division?

  Any analysis of the vote to leave the EU should recognize straight away the differences between blue-collar alienation in industrial England and middle-class myths and truculence in more affluent areas. The former was affected as well by two powerful influences on the outcome, with the Leave vote 7 per cent higher in England than Remain, a figure which fell to 4 per cent in the United Kingdom as a whole. In Scotland, blue-collar voters still had a party with which many of them could identify, the Scottish Nationalists. But in England, though party membership has grown, the Labour vote itself has been in free fall; voter identification with its leadership and its core messages has been feeble. A healthy Labour Party, campaigning vigorously for membership of the EU, would have made a huge difference, preventing the erosion of the Labour vote which drifted away to UKIP. The Conservative Brexit vote was of course much more important than what was happening in the Labour Party. The places that voted most strongly to quit Europe shared a number of characteristics. They were older, whiter, less educated and often poorer than the places which voted to stay. They felt left behind and isolated by globalization, which was personified by EU membership. They saw Europe benefiting metropolitan Britain and particularly London. Their incomes were stuck; their public services pinched by public spending cuts and seemingly swamped by outsiders from the EU and beyond. When they were told that Britain would be much worse off outside the EU, they did not care because they believed that they would be worse off whatever happened. So (a second strong influence on the outcome) the main threat of the Remain campaign – that Britain would suffer economically from withdrawal – simply passed them by. Their electoral profile was very similar to that in rustbelt America in the presidential election.

  There is not much doubt that concern about immigration was a spark plug for the Leave campaign. What mattered most was not the absolute level of immigration in an area but the speed of increase in immigration. A consequence of growth in the economy (over the years since the financial crash) was growth in EU immigration, particularly to take on low-paid jobs. While the Conservative government had a good record in creating jobs for those who had been born in the UK, many of these jobs were low-paid. EU workers were attracted to take jobs at which English workers would often turn up their noses, jobs for example in agricultural work, retail and hospitality services, and social services. The country also of course benefited from skilled workers in the health services, research and information technology. If Britain now grows less rapidly outside the EU this should indeed reduce the flow of immigration, but it will not leave people better off, rather the reverse. This divide in our society between the alienated and those who are at home with globalization is going to be difficult to heal, and the extent to which what Brexit actually brings will disappoint the alienated is a worrying point to which I will return.

  The blazered rebellion against Brussels, with places like Aylesbury, Chichester, South Buckinghamshire and West Dorset voting to leave the EU, does not have all that much in common with the economic alienation of industrial England. It is even more strongly related to the state of the political party that normally represents these citizens. It also has its roots in a cultural aversion to one aspect of globalization. Where blue-collar workers in England, as in industrial states in America, worried about the threat caused by globalization to their jobs and standard of living, the blazered vote was irritated by the undermining of their sense of their own identity. (Virtually half of all respondents to a survey before the referendum felt that membership of the EU was undermining the national idea of identity.) While the blazers were usually members of the party which championed neo-liberal answers to many of Britain’s problems, they were curiously reluctant to embrace the consequences of globalization, internationalization and the opening to an ever more interconnected world. This paradox was given personal shape in the figure of the former Conservative Mayor of London, a great international city which was a sparkling advertisement for openness and globalization. Boris Johnson helped to lead the Leave campaign while trying rather unconvincingly to persuade the world that his position was not dictated by an unflagging, tumescent ambition. During the campaign, he was unable to explain how he could both proselytize for embracing the world and at the same time turn his back on Britain’s co-operation with its nearest neighbours; nowadays, as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, he argues that it is somehow easier to open up to the rest of the world by leaving the EU.

  Middle-class, white and on the whole older opposition to EU membership did of course encompass the narrowing heartland of the Conservative Party. It was the attempted appeasement of this shrinking regiment that brought Britain the EU referendum in the first place. It was an effort to manage the Conservative Party that went badly wrong. In a parliamentary system where the overwhelming majority of those elected favoured staying in the EU for very good reasons, the unparliamentary device of a referendum was the attempt to get the Party out of a hole, enabling it to absorb in due course UKIP supporters at the expense of the national interest. When the main cause of the result is sought, it would be unreasonable to look beyond the Conservative Party. Attempts to blame Labour and Mr Corbyn are far-fetched. About two thirds of those who voted Labour in the 2015 General Election voted to remain in the EU; less than half of those who voted for the Conservatives did so. The 2017 election was above all another attempt to manage the Conservative Party.

  The persistent, growing and occasionally slightly manic Conservative hostility to the European Union began in the late 1980s and 1990s and became a real menace as a consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s fall from office, Britain’s ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (made more certain by Norman Lamont’s hapless behaviour as Chancellor of the Exchequer) and the subsequent, not always camouflaged, encouragement by the fallen leader of Europhobic disloyalty to her elected successor. It became an act of faith on the new right of the Conservative Party that Thatcher was a victim of European integration and its adherents in John Major’s government. To be a proper Conservative, true blue in heart and soul, a disciple of ‘the Lady’, you had to oppose the EU and all its wor
ks. This mattered a lot more than any display of what used to be called the Conservative Party’s secret weapon, namely loyalty. Those were the days! John Major won the 1992 election after successfully negotiating the Maastricht Treaty, which confirmed Britain’s membership of the Union on pretty much Britain’s own terms. There was hardly a whisper of Euroscepticism or phobia in the subsequent election campaign. But afterwards, with a small parliamentary majority and a succession of political setbacks, the right wing pounced again and again, ambushing the government, colluding with the Opposition to embarrass it and actively conspiring to bring down the Prime Minister. John Major bravely faced down the reckless ideologues – ‘the bastards’, he dubbed them – but they were not satisfied until they had conspired to help destroy the government they had been elected to support.

  With Major gone in 1997, and a Conservative government too, the right wing redoubled their efforts. They first elected as his successor an able man who was thought to be more right wing and hostile to Europe than he was in practice. William Hague’s election loss in 2001 led to the choice of two deeply Eurosceptic leaders in swift succession, first the woeful Iain Duncan-Smith and then Michael Howard, a clever former Home Secretary who at least brought greater intelligence to articulating the same critique of all things European. Howard came from a family of pre-war Romanian immigrants. As Home Secretary he was hostile to any easing of immigration or visa rules, as I found while battling to safeguard the rights that Hong Kong citizens (some of whom were effectively stateless) would enjoy after 1997. As party leader, he brought in an Australian campaign adviser who specialized in ‘dog-whistle’ tactics, the idea being to call up a party’s base of supporters by referring however obliquely to the issues that they were thought to feel about most strongly. Conservative posters asked voters, ‘Are you thinking what we are thinking?’ In effect about race, immigration and crime. Perhaps we should be grateful that not enough voters turned up when the whistle was blown. During our respective political careers, I have invariably disagreed with Michael Howard while being surprised at the opinions held by a man I have never disliked.

  With Howard’s demise, the cupboard of available, experienced talent was pretty bare, and the party turned to a young (not yet forty) MP, David Cameron, very bright, very polished, with the gloss of someone who plainly believed that he had been born to rule and had the temperament to take this not-too-formidable challenge in his stride. Like others of his generation, he had grown up in a party where Euroscepticism was all the rage, enthusiastically pumped up by newspapers that had themselves mostly done an about-face on the question and embraced hostility to the EU for reasons which lay deep in the hearts of their proprietors and the editors they appointed.

  Cameron declared himself and his closest partners, like George Osborne, who was to become an intellectually powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer, to be ‘modernizers’, and he advocated a number of policies that were certainly not taken from any right-wing master plan, such as a strong sense of environmental imperatives, an unshakeable commitment to raising overseas aid to the targets proposed by the UN, and gay marriage. On Europe, however, the old tunes continued to play and they did not include ‘Ode to Joy’. He even took one wholly unnecessary step to shore up his support in the party leadership election: that is, a promise to withdraw the Conservative Party from the right-of-centre, largely Christian Democrat group in the European Parliament on the grounds that its instincts were too integrationist. This seemed to many at the time to be a ‘nerdy’ issue, of no great significance outside the thin ranks of those who followed closely the affairs of the European Parliament. In fact, it lost him friends, and sources of political intelligence and influence, when he became Prime Minister after the 2010 election.

  As Prime Minister, Cameron tried – not without success – to build bridges to other leaders like Angela Merkel, and to convince them that the political postures that he was obliged to strike would not impede his continuing pursuit of the British national interest by remaining within the EU. But he found it increasingly difficult to ride two horses – in Brussels, good sense; in Westminster, the Conservative Party’s prejudices. Before the 2015 election, in an effort to keep the right-wing Eurosceptics quiet and to protect his party’s flank from Nigel Farage’s UKIP, he promised that he would negotiate a new and improved relationship with the EU, and then put its terms to a referendum on whether Britain should remain an EU member. There are some who thought that he made this pledge not believing that he would ever have to carry it out – the prevailing assumption being that even if the Conservative Party actually won the election, it would continue to depend on coalition partners in the Liberal Party who would oppose any referendum. Others think that it was all a terrible miscalculation; and that – a clever fellow – he tended to operate on the ‘essay crisis’ approach to politics, believing that he was smart enough to get through the next test, whatever it was, like an Oxford tutorial essay, without taking a longer-term strategic view. But what would happen if it all went wrong? He did not believe that if he had to do it he would lose. He reckoned that as the ‘victor ludorum’, he would be able to hold the party together. ‘There you are, the voters have spoken: now, Duncan-Smith, Fox et al, you can shut up.’ Others still suggest that he had no choice save to offer the referendum. I do not buy this argument. First, you always have a choice, especially when you are proposing using as dangerous a blunderbuss as a referendum – a device which should have no place in a parliamentary democracy. It undermines the whole notion of parliamentary sovereignty, substituting a crude majoritarianism for discussion and compromise among those we elect to give us the benefit of their judgement. Before long we usually find that those who like referendums dislike all the checks and balances which go to make up a pluralist constitution, such as independent courts, and the complexities of civil society. This is exactly what has happened since the Brexit vote of 2016, with a rampant populism both stoked and policed by a few tabloid editors. Second, the reason for holding the referendum was to keep the Conservative Party together. This would certainly not have happened if Remain had won. Brexit Conservatives would have cried foul and plotted for the next assault. Even with a Brexit victory, I do not believe that the Conservative Party will now settle down to a happy old age, united and pacific; the national interest has been badly damaged in pursuit of a goal which is almost certainly well beyond reach. Sooner or later, a Conservative leader will have to face down the right wing of the Conservative Party, and it would have been better to do so before conceding the case for a referendum.

  Winning the referendum vote was made even more difficult by the speed with which the leaders of the Remain campaign had to reinvent themselves as enthusiastic supporters of the EU. Mr Cameron’s negotiation to strengthen Britain’s sense of its own national independence was satisfactory as far as it went, but that was no great distance. He then had to wave the European flag with fellow-believing Cabinet ministers for the cynical appraisal of voters who had hardly ever heard them in the past say a good word about the EU in which they were now urged to remain. Told that they would be poorer outside the EU, they voted in England by a margin of 7 per cent to leave because they did not trust the arguments of the Remainers; instead they believed the vauntingly implausible and mendacious claims of the Brexiteers. They were not convincingly told how membership of the EU was good for them and their families in financial and security terms, and felt no connection to any pro-European story about their identity and that of their country.

  Any accurate history of England and Britain, and of our national identity over the last few years, would regard membership of the EU as providing a helpful backdrop to our relative success. In what way had Europe impeded our progress? When I first got into politics in the 1970s we were widely regarded as the sick man of Europe. We had begun the years of peace in the 1940s in incomparably better shape than our liberated or defeated neighbours. Their economies were reduced to rubble. In 1947 we exported as much as France, Germany, Italy, Ben
elux, Norway and Denmark combined. Their currencies were pretty worthless. But by the time we became members of the Common Market in 1973 we lagged behind Germany, France, Italy and others. Now just over forty years later we have in some respects (for example, growth and job creation) one of the continent’s strongest economies. Before Brexit we were on the way to becoming the biggest European economy within the next fifteen years or so. The European Union’s greatest achievements – the creation of the single market and the enlargement of the Union, stabilizing Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union – had both been British initiatives. We had played a key role in bringing an uneasy peace to the western Balkans. At the same time, we had avoided becoming enmeshed in policies that we did not like; we resisted blandishments to join the eurozone. We kept out of the Schengen area of a largely border-free Europe, not least so far as internal movement was concerned. The idea that the European Union, representing almost half our export market, was a ball and chain on our progress is pretty much the precise reverse of the truth. Moreover, how many times do we need to be told by our friends around the world, including the leaders of most Commonwealth countries, that they take us more seriously as a leader in Europe than as a lone voice shouting our opinion in order to try to be heard? Leaders in the United States – presidents, diplomats, generals – told us that our relationship with Washington was underpinned by our membership of and influence in the EU. But we evidently did not care much about anyone’s opinion, including that of our friends. Only Presidents Trump and Putin appeared to favour our departure from the EU. You are frequently in life defined by your friends.

  Why was opinion in Scotland and Northern Ireland so different from that in England? The sense of identity north of both borders, in Britain and in Ireland, is infused with sentiments that are not particularly enthusiastic about England and far more comfortable with the notion of being European. The Northern Ireland border is the only land frontier that the EU has with Britain. A majority in Northern Ireland understands that flattening that border has brought both economic and political gains. When as a junior minister in Northern Ireland I went to meetings in Brussels, I met ministers from the Republic and we found ourselves in an increasingly normal relationship. Anyone who doubts the potency of the border in Ireland’s history should read Colm Tóibín’s account of his hike along its length, Bad Blood. Scotland has historically enjoyed a less truculent relationship with the European mainland, partly because it has distanced itself from England. While Scotland has a nationalist party and its own parliament, England has no nationalist party and no national parliament but a growing nationalist sentiment. This nationalism is not just a strong sense of patriotism. Patriotism does not require ‘the other’ in order to define or refresh itself. It does not draw strength from hostility to others. It does not do whistle-up xenophobia to give it some oomph. It does not sentimentalize its history, seeking to erase what might be regarded as the bad bits. It does not need to glamorize its institutions to convince itself that it has understood the secrets of good governance denied to others.