Book review: a treatise of Britain's time in and out of the EU
Edinburgh, UK - June 24, 2016: The front pages of a selection of British newspapers on the day following the referendum on membership of the European Union, known as the Brexit referendum.
- This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe
- Robert Tombs
- Allen Lane, £16.99
WHEN in 2006 the then British prime minister David Cameron derided members of Nigel Farage’s growing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – and by implication all Brexiteers – as "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly", he could not have had Professor Robert Tombs in mind.
Tombs is Emeritus Professor of French History at Cambridge University, a Fellow of St. John’s College, and a recipient of the Palmes Académiques awarded by the French government. The most zealous of hate-speech detectors would be unable to find the faintest stain of racism in an extensive corpus of published work that includes major studies of French history and more recently his 1,000-page The English and Their History.
Tombs, however, has been and remains a leading academic voice in the pro-Brexit cause. He founded – a year after the UK’s EU referendum – a non-party online forum, Briefings for Brexit (now Briefings for Britain) which he co-edits.
Written largely by profs for profs, its aim in part was and remains to challenge a prevailing media view that informed voters opposed Brexit while those who did were wanting in the education and intellect departments.
With this book, Tombs explains why Britain – or more precisely, England – voted as it did in 2016, and then twice in 2019 at the euro-parliament and general elections to get Brexit done.
Unlike Farage and other dyed-in-the-wool Eurosceptics who had been opposing the federalist tide since the 1960s, Tombs was a Don’t Really Know until almost the eve of the 2016 poll. He voted to Remain in Britain’s 1975 referendum, suspicious, he says, of the aspirations of the continent’s federalists but taking membership as a “fact of life, like the weather”.
His expectation in 2016 was that Cameron would get a sell-able package of revised membership terms and a Remain majority. That didn’t happen. Cameron went to Brussels – and Berlin – asked for half a loaf, and came back with a handful of crumbs that neither side thought worth talking about as the referendum campaign got under way.
In this lucid account of Britain’s enduring Brexit argument – one that has in part or in whole finished the careers of six Tory prime ministers – he says two things were important in swaying his vote in 2016. At a public meeting in Cambridge, he asked a panel of specialists if it would be better to exit now or stay in the EU and leave later if the union’s problems became perilous.
The question was answered by Dr Chris Bickerton, a Reader in Politics at Cambridge and an EU affairs expert. Now was the answer, because there might not be a second chance. At a dinner days before the plebiscite another guest was Dr Kenneth Arrow, an American Nobel prizewinning economist who, with nine other Nobel laureates in that dismal science, declared in a letter to The Guardian: “We believe the UK would be better off economically inside the EU … the economic arguments are clearly in favour of remaining.”
Tombs asked him if leaving the union would cause economic disaster, to which Arrow replied: “No, there will need to be some adjustment, but certainly no disaster.”
A different answer might have made the prof a Remainer. Instead, after some hesitation, his mark went in the Leave box, along with the other 15,188,405 English votes that settled the question.
But, as someone who should have known better, said, we’ve had enough of experts. Tombs moved from observation to advocacy when he was struck after the 2016 poll by what he saw as the disdainful attitude of Remainers: “I remember a fellow guest at a party in Cambridge telling me she had finally understood why people voted Leave because her gardener and cleaning lady had explained it. When it became clear that influential groups were trying to neutralize or overturn the referendum result, I was convinced this was potentially disastrous.”
The arrogant sureness of the metropolitan political class about the unquestionable permanency of Britain’s European Union membership was such that dissent could be rendered explicable only with slurs suggesting stupidity, mental health problems, or racism.
This quite short book is Prof. Tombs’ reasoned explanation of the British decision to end its participation in the Brussels project, an involvement which given the longevity of the unions Rome, Charlemagne and the Hapsburgs imposed on their neighbours was relatively fleeting. Notwithstanding the romantic idealism of Britain’s post-war EUphiliacs, for the most part it’s been semi-detached and often sullen.
He starts by recalling the last chapter of his English history, which he concluded by quoting G.K. Chesterton – “But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet” – and adding, “No one had the faintest idea what they might say”. Tombs provides an early reminder, to set the island’s debate in its continental context, of a French man who back in 1970 did have an idea of what they might one day, sooner or later, say.
“Our neighbours across the Channel,” said Charles de Gaulle, the French president who vetoed two British applications to join the embryonic union, “being made for free trade by the maritime character of their economic life, cannot possibly agree sincerely to shut themselves up behind a continental tariff wall.”
A brisk yet comprehensive summary of the offshore island’s history – 13 centuries of invasion and conquest from the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons to the Danes and the Normans, the cobbling together first of England then Britain, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, the rise and decline of empire, and two world wars – leads Tombs to his conclusion, which is that as critical as history can be in the stories nations have, geography trumps it.
“Islands,” he proposes, “cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland, or Hungary. The close continent is the mass towards which these islands gravitate, but which they rarely join.”
But join it did in 1973, with the passing of the 1972 European Communities Act, now repealed. Tombs pull apart, gently, the assertions and analyses on which the governing class made its pitch for signing the Rome treaty. Britain’s post-war economy wasn’t thriving, but it wasn’t quite as bed-ridden as the pro-Marketeers said it was.
The UK’s industrial numbers could not be fairly compared to those of Germany, Italy, and France, where economic recovery would unavoidably take chunks of Britain’s global export trade. The UK’s industrial decline – the main public case in the 1970s for joining the Common Market – was, says the prof, “illusory”.
What kept the chaps – civil servants and centrist politicians – in Westminster and Whitehall awake at night was the prospect of Britain, having lost its empire, losing status and influence. The offshore island was likened to a sinking Titanic, and Europe, also known as then six-member Common Market, would be its lifeboat.
The Foreign Office & Commonwealth (FCO) official, Sir Con O’Neill, running the entry negotiations, had no doubt about the priority objective: “What mattered was to get into the Community, and thereby restore our position at the centre of European affairs.” O’Neill conceded in private that none of the EEC’s policies were essential, and many were objectionable.
That counted for naught; as another FCO panjandrum saw it, Britain risked becoming just a “greater Sweden”. EEC membership then, says Tombs, “was to cure the nation’s imaginary malaise, re-gild the prestige of the elite, and find a role”.
Tombs’ analysis of the UK vote also shows that it was not as uniquely British as it has been perceived.
Opinion polling done in 2016 found that the 48% of British voters who had a broadly unfavourable view of the EU was matched by similar scores across the Channel; 46%, 48%, 49%, 61%, and 71% in, respectively, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, and Greece.
President Macron admitted France would “probably” have voted in a referendum to leave, which was why, of course, there was no referendum there.
Tombs discusses what might have been an important part – along with anxiety about free movement of labour, immigration, and the dominant role of the European Court of Justice – played in the UK’s plebiscite, and in its exceptionally rancorous aftermath in the Commons and the courts, by what Tombs calls the Magna Carta tradition, the idea being that when vital decisions have to be made by the people, the government obeys.
This surfaced, he suggests, in the way people described their reasons for voting in the 2016 poll. More than 8.5 million Leavers – almost half of them – said ‘decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’.
“Behind this,” Tombs proposes “is both an emotional attachment to national sovereignty, and a range of other issues which might be summed up as the hope that a British government outside the EU would pay more attention to voters’ wishes.”
So what are we to make after all of Britain’s years in what the European Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen calls the “giant” union? “Now it looks,” says Tombs, “as if the uneasy attempt to place the islands ‘at the heart of Europe’ has been merely one more geo-political fantasy, like the Plantagenet ambitions to be Holy Roman Emperors or kings of France.”
This most elegant canter through the many centuries and our recent decades will hearten England’s Leavers, more convinced than ever that their mark went into the right box. It might perhaps put a doubt or two into the minds of Remainers, but I won’t be putting a penny or a cent on that.
