Stop the world, I want to get off!
The Treaty on European Union is what it says on the tin, the foundational framework for the transition from the then European Economic Community to what we now know as the European Union. It was signed by the representatives of the then 12 member States at Maastricht on 7 February 1992 but came into force only in November 1993 because of bumps in the road to ratification in several member States.
Referenda were required in Ireland, France and Denmark. The treaty sailed through in Ireland, squeaked through in France and was accepted only at the second time of asking in Denmark. But the most difficult journey to approval was through the UK parliament where it was the principal political preoccupation for much of 1992 and 1993, mainly because of opposition to the Treaty by a small but adamant and vocal minority of MPs in the governing Conservative party.
Along the way, on 22 April 1993, Prime Minister, John Major, made a speech encouraging support not only for the Treaty but the broader project of his country’s participation in “Europe”[i]. Especially in the light of more recent events, it repays reading now.
Mr. Major’s fundamental point was this:
…outside the Community? Doing our own tiny thing, splendidly adrift? It’s just not on. Outside Europe Britain can survive; inside we will thrive.
We take from the Community. And we put into it. Europe needs Britain just as Britain needs Europe.
The Prime Minister accepted that “the Community has become too intrusive in our national life” and this needed correction. “But some intrusion is necessary and is in our interests.” However, he rejected the idea that Europe was on a path that would reduce Britain to the status of “a cog in some centralised superstate. As the Community would expand from 12 to 20 and more member States, the notion of it becoming a centralised superstate was “a grandiose doodle” and, in any event, “not what the people of Europe want”.
He turned his gaze to “the opponents of Britain’s full participation in the EC”. What moved them was frustration.
Frustration that we are no longer a world power. Frustration that nowhere is the nation state fully sovereign, free to conduct its policies without concerting with ruddy foreigners. There is frustration that some of the fixed and treasured aspects of our national life are subject to seemingly relentless change. They practice a sort of phantom grandeur, a clanking of unusable suits of armour.
We cannot afford to subject ourselves to the despotism of nostalgia. We need to use cleverness and shared strength. We must operate a network of little threads to make most use of the influence we do have. And the European Community is a handful of threads for the pursuit of our domestic and foreign interests.
Being a principled supporter of and contributing to shape a new Europe, larger, more open and less intrusive was putting Britain’s interests first, not second. It was not throwing away history or knocking down traditions.
Gazing into the hazy, distant future, he predicted:
Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and — as George Orwell said — “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way — Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.
He concluded:
Surely we trust our own integrity as a people quite enough to fear nothing in Europe. We are the British, a people freely living inside a Europe which is glad to see us and wants us. After 20 years we have come of age in Europe. One Conservative leader put us there. This Conservative leader means us to thrive there. So let’s get on with it.
Of course, in invoking George Orwell’s essay of half a century earlier, Mr. Major was shamelessly deploying nostalgia as a weapon against itself, his point being that the best way to prevent his country lapsing into neuralgic nostalgia was to protect and preserve its essential enduring positive characteristics, something best promoted within rather than outside Europe.
Though Mr. Major won that round by forcing the treaty through parliament as an issue of confidence in his government, the opposition to it from within his own party was the first serious step on the road that led to Britain’s eventual withdrawal from Europe.
Brexit and Beyond is the best regular chronicle of and commentary on Brexit and its effects. Normally published weekly, its author, Chris Grey, is an Emeritus Professor of the University of London. In his very first piece from September 2016, Professor Grey nailed his personal colours firmly to the mast.
This new blog will comment on the aftermath of the UK Referendum decision to leave the European Union. It starts from the position that this decision was a national catastrophe to which I was completely opposed…
His opposition has not wavered one iota since.
In his blog of 1 March 2024[ii], Professor Grey reflected on the role of nostalgia in the Brexit process.
Getting out of Europe and taking back control was supposed to usher in a great reset or return to “the time before”, regaining good things that have been lost, only vaguely defined but encompassing a simpler more comprehensible country, a world which was less economically and culturally globalised and also, as John Major suggested, a world in which Britain stood unquestioned as one of the tallest poppies, able to impose the terms of its engagement with the “outside” world rather than being obliged to negotiate agreement on them.
In the Professor’s view, nostalgia is an important reason why Brexit had and still has far more support amongst the old than the young.
These older voters may have had some overlap with those ‘left behind’ economically but, more obviously, they were those who were left behind psychologically and culturally. That is not a sneering disparagement. It’s just a recognition that it is quite normal, perhaps natural, for older people to tend to see the world they grew up in as being the normal and proper order of things (just as the reason why younger people tend to be relaxed about multi-culturalism and social liberalism is not because they have some special virtue but because it is what they have grown up with). It’s equally normal to overlay nostalgia for that world with the different kind of nostalgia for youth and vitality; perhaps, even, to conflate the two so as to feel, if only unconsciously, that if the proper order of things could be restored then so could that lost vitality.
This kind of nostalgia is as understandable as it is sad, perhaps an inalienable aspect of being human.
But it is politically toxic.
It is straightforwardly impossible to wind back either the human or the social clock. Real life, individual and collective, is not a soap opera in which lengthy previous story lines can be erased simply by representing them later as a character’s dream. Time goes in only one direction. Things happen as it creeps in its petty pace and what’s done cannot easily be undone. The world before Britain joined the European Community in 1973 could not be restored by a single, simple vote partly because EU membership was only one aspect of a wide and continuous flow of social change since.
Professor Grey offers examples. The British economy has changed. Millions of ordinary working people no longer fit the mid-20th century template for “working-class”, predominantly male, cloth capped, unionised, manual labourer, just like Andy Capp of the Mirror cartoons except that they worked while he skived, but otherwise sharing his devotion for such pursuits as pigeon racing, football, snooker, darts and drink. The new more white-collared “workers” are certainly not part of some kind of “elite” either.
And though not perfect or unproblematic, liberal multi-culturalism is not only a reality but has (in the Professor’s tenable view) been rather successful — certainly not an unalloyed disaster.
According to Professor Grey:
… the pre-existing boil of nostalgic grievance has not been lanced by Brexit, but has become infected and inflamed by Brexit.
… a new ‘knot’ of grievance has been created: these ‘ordinary decent people’ have not only been denied ‘real Brexit’ but they have been denied the more amorphous great re-set they were at least implicitly promised. The clock hasn’t been turned back, the past hasn’t been regained, and the politicians who promised to ‘take back control’ have not been able to deliver on any of the senses of that slogan. From which one obvious conclusion that can be drawn, and which brings us back to where this post began, is that ‘someone else’ — the globalists, the Establishment, the Islamists, perhaps all of them! — Them! Them! The Others! — must be in control.
For example, these comments from Lee Anderson MP after he switched party allegiance from the Tories to Reform earlier this month.
I, like millions of people up and down the country, want my country back.
I think we’ve given the country away to people that don’t like our country.
The Brexit referendum wasn’t the only seismic political tremor to shiver in 2016. Nor was it the only one to promise a great societal reset. Donald Trump promised to make America great — again with a similar implication of a reset amounting to a rewind and a revival.
Brexiteers were happy to allow the notion to percolate that Britain’s “finest hour” was indeed the 1940s when it first stood alone against Hitler before going on to win the war with modest assistance from the US and USSR (and, lest one forget, the “colonies” too). After the war, everything went slowly downhill.
Mr. Tump has been smart enough never to point to any specific prior period in its history as the template for American greatness. But it seems reasonable to postulate the 1950s as that perfect time partly because Mr. Tump went from child to teenager through that decade and partly because it predates the humiliation of Vietnam. While American greatness might have been reasserted to some degree in later times — for example, the collapse of communism in Europe — more of it was lost by setbacks like 9/11, misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the great crash of 2008.
But the 1950s is the most plausible, if not indisputable, candidate to represent the apex of America’s post-war greatness in terms of global power and economic prosperity, certainly as one imagines Mr. Trump understands “greatness”.
In 1993, David Halberstam, a distinguished chronicler of many aspects of mid-20th century America, wrote a book about the country’s transition through the 1950s under the simple title The Fifties. Some snippets from the preface:
Three decades later, the fifties appear to be an orderly era, one with a minimum of social dissent. Photographs from the period tend to show people who dressed carefully: men in suits, ties, and — when outdoors — hats; the women with their hair in modified page-boys, pert and upbeat. Young people seemed more than anything else, to be square” and largely accepting of the given social covenants.
Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well being… security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs.
…few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. …most Americans needed little coaching in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future.
Even if the spectre of Communism lurked on the horizon — …Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to make sound decisions, and to keep them out of war.
Nevertheless, the era was a much more interesting one than it appeared on the surface. Exciting new technologies were being developed that would soon enable a vast and surprisingly broad degree of dissidence, and many people were already beginning to question the purpose of their lives and whether that purpose had indeed become, almost involuntarily, too much about material things.
The birth-control pill was developed and the nation became wired for television during the 1950s, just two of the changes that would have profound social effects through the following decade. But there were already other unsettling, stirrings and smoulderings beneath the serene surface of the time: McCarthyism, the Korean War, CIA coups abroad, the nuclear arms race, race relations (Brown v Board of Education, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks), not to mention Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley.
If Mr. Trump did manage to make America substantially greater during his Presidency, it is hard to understand how his successor managed to turn it into the dismal dump Mr. Trump now represents it as being so quickly since. Perhaps, he simply left it as he had found it; a mix of greatness and weakness, good and bad, the balance of the mix a matter of perspective.
It is comforting to hug the vision of a period within our lifetime that was truly golden: a kinder, gentler, more peaceful and orderly time when change came dropping slow, where we all had an assured lane in life, knew what it was and felt happy, secure and esteemed within it, even if some enjoyed wider lanes than others. But golden ages exist only in the retrospect of imagination. It is in the nature of nostalgia that reflexive recall is only of the pluses and not the minuses of earlier times. The former spring to mind spontaneously. The latter have to be dredged into memory.
But, even if there were only plusses or the many plusses far outnumbered and outweighed the few minuses, we cannot freeze a “time” and preserve it in place forever, as in aspic or like a screenshot. Life never stands still. It is not and cannot ever be a version of The Truman Show.
[i] Mr Major’s Speech to Conservative Group for Europe — 22 April 1993 — The Rt. Hon. Sir John Major KG CH (johnmajorarchive.org.uk)
[ii] Brexit & Beyond: How the failures of Brexit feed Radical Brexitism (chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com)
