Brexit should signal a return to honest politics

“The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences, not asked.” So wrote Lord Thorneycroft in 1947 about the plan for a European Union, and in so doing he expressed the growing belief of the political class that this was a pursuit of the ‘greater good,’ which would become the hallmark of successive governments down the years. Yet there was something else those words indicated, that in pursuit of this greater good, the political ends would always justify the means.

What has followed in the intervening 80 years has been a collective deceit about the purpose of the European project. This can be seen in decision after decision taken on issues concerning the EU.

Even now after losing the referendum, the political establishment’s Project Fear narrative of economic Armageddon is as narrow as it was in 1973. One only has to look at the disastrous negotiations to join the EEC in 1972. As Sir Con O’Neill, the leader of the negotiating team said, the overriding principle guiding the UK team from the top was, “swallow the lot and swallow it now.” Which attitude led to the last minute and tragic abandonment of the UK fishing industry. Much of our manufacturing industry suffered a similar fate in our desperate haste to sign up to the ‘greater good’.

Despite what we now know was the clear advice of the Foreign Office to Prime Minister Heath that our entry would inevitably lead to significant loss of sovereignty, in January 1973, Heath said: “there are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified”.

And so the political equivalent of the three card trick became a feature of successive British government’s dealings with the British people when it came to the EU.

At the time of Maastricht, the government, having conceded a huge transfer of power to Brussels, claimed that the lack of the word federal somehow meant it was OK. “Game, set and match”, John Major claimed and Douglas Hurd even went as far as to say that we had reached the “high water of European federalism.” Considering that there were three more treaty amendments with further enormous transfers of powers from nation states to Brussels, such reassurances were at the very least disingenuous.

I recall how Tony Blair, after signing the Nice treaty, when each European leader from Schröder to Chirac maintained it was a big move towards political integration, spoke only of how the future was going to be inter-governmental.