Next year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A whole 10 years of turmoil, and still the country can’t seem to agree exactly why it happened or what should happen next, with both leavers and remainers increasingly united in frustration about what the referendum has delivered. How did we end up here?
In Between the Waves, New Statesman editor Tom McTague makes an ambitious attempt to answer that question by zooming out and putting Brexit in its broader historical context. The result is a great big entertaining sweep of a book, tracing the roots of Britain’s ambiguous relationship with its neighbours back to the end of the second world war, and will be joyfully inhaled by any reader who loves the kind of podcasts that invariably feature two men talking to each other. It charts the path from a time when membership was seen as an antidote to British decline – the chance for “a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent”, as the Sun put it in 1975 – to a time when it was singled out as the cause of it.
Somewhat more controversially, it reframes the referendum less as an angry backlash from the economically left-behind, and more as the intellectually coherent outcome of a relationship that was always fundamentally unstable.
From the beginning, McTague makes clear, Britain’s choice was between joining a union whose purpose (of pooling sovereignty, initially to contain a German resurgence) we distrusted, or staying out of something potentially powerful enough to threaten our national interests in the long run. Whatever else has changed – and bear in mind that in the 1970s Labour was the Eurosceptic party, while Ted Heath’s Conservative government led the pro-European charge – the constant has been British reluctance to be either wholly in or wholly out. Successive governments, he argues, managed those tensions by conveniently ignoring the EU’s core mission of ever closer integration in hot pursuit of all its other benefits.
Seen through this prism, David Cameron’s decision to call his career-ending referendum becomes less a panicky response to the rise of Nigel Farage and more a willingness to face up to contradictions others had brushed under the carpet, and which an expanding Europe had more clearly exposed.
History is famously told by the winners, and McTague’s lead witnesses lean towards the leave side. With its focus on tracing Brexit’s origin story, the book feels oddly thin on insight from the Blair-Brown governments, an eventful period for EU membership when the battle was essentially between pro-Europeans over exactly how deep to go. Instead we get an exhaustive account of the academic influences on Michael Gove’s and Dominic Cummings’s thinking, and of the formation of the Eurosceptic campaign group Business for Sterling.
European perspectives are also largely absent from a narrative that is hooked around a series of big British characters, from Enoch Powell to Margaret Thatcher to Cummings and Farage. The rest of the continent is relegated to a kind of vague background presence in Britain’s internal dramas. We’ve all been in relationships like that, I suppose, but it would have been nice to hear a little more from across the Channel – perhaps about why other member states such as Ireland and Denmark, who struggled to gain public consent for further integration, nonetheless stuck with it, or whether the great rupture of 2016 was avoidable. (McTague considers the Faragist argument that had the Blair government-imposed transitional curbs on immigration from eastern European members, eurosceptic feeling might never have grown so strong, before concluding that it lacks nuance.)
The book ends, however, by acknowledging that Britain’s relationship with Europe may not be as settled as it currently looks, a prudent hedging of bets now that the threat from Putin is once more drawing British interests closer to those of its neighbours. But it’s also a reminder of the book’s underlying theme: that the British idea of Europe has never really been fixed, and changes conveniently to suit us. Though this chapter of our joint histories may be concluded, the story goes on.
• Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 by Tom McTague is published by Picador (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
