Britain and Europe in a Troubled World by Vernon Bogdanor (Yale University Press, £16.99)
During the summer of 1992, with the crisis over Britain’s membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism reaching a climax, John Major called the head of his policy unit, Sarah Hogg, for advice. Major had been hoping for intervention from the Bundesbank to help bolster Sterling. Hogg was on a walking holiday in Scotland and had to use a police phone in the days before mobile technology. “Prime Minister, I don’t think we can rely on the Germans,” she said. One of the policemen who overheard the conversation commented: “Dead right”.
In this short exchange, the whole history of Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe is captured. On the one hand, a political class believing the country’s best interests lie in forging a close economic relationship with our neighbours; on the other, a section of the British public deeply sceptical about a project involving our historical enemies. Originally written as a series of lectures delivered at Yale University in 2019, Vernon Bogdanor’s book is full of such telling anecdotes.
He tracks the history of Britain’s European negotiations from the 1950s, when our economic relationship with the Commonwealth remained of paramount concern and Labour’s NEC could state that “we in Britain are closer to our kinsmen in Australia and New Zealand on the far side of the world, than we are to Europe.” Bogdanor understands that Britain’s difficulties with Europe always stemmed from a misplaced view that we could somehow dictate terms to a club we joined only belatedly. Indeed, he suggests the word “negotiations” is really the wrong term to use in this context: “If one wants to join a tennis club, it is not sensible to quibble about the rules. If one intends to leave but still hopes to use the tennis courts… one has very little leverage”.
Bogdanor is at his most incisive when analysing the cultural shift that took anti-European sentiment from the fringes of UK politics (the Communist Party, the National Front, Sinn Fein, Ian Paisley and the hard-left of the Labour Party) into the mainstream.
In this, he pays due credit to Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party, which, despite a stunning lack of electoral success itself, persuaded the Conservative Party that it needed to yoke Euroscepticism to immigration control in order to survive electorally.
In the historical sections, Bogdanor, the eminent Professor of Government at King’s College, London, rarely lets his slip show, but sometimes he just can’t help himself. He quotes Roy Jenkins in 1975 telling a rally that if Britain were to leave Europe it would be to install itself in “an old people’s home for fading nations”.
Bogdanor adds: “Perhaps the outcome of the 2016 referendum bears out his warning!”
This is the work of an idealist intellectual sympathetic to the European project as a civilising force. But he never lets this get in the way of his scholarship. For this reason, Britain in Europe in a Troubled World will act as a definitive primer for all students of Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe —and a very readable one at that.
Martin Bright is a former Political Editor of the JC
