Civitas
+44 (0)20 7799 6677

Divide and rule – how were both free market Tories and the Labour movement seduced by the EU?

Civitas, 27 May 2014

Ukip’s victory in the European Parliament elections has sent shockwaves through the political establishment. As both the Labour and Conservative parties begin to realise that their support for the European Union is growing increasingly out of step with the opinions of the electorate, it is worth considering how the mainstream Westminster leaders came to this pass.

In this extract from his new book, The Demise of the Free State, Civitas director David Green explains how the two main parties were seduced by Brussels as a shortcut to achieving their political ends.

DOTFS

The Labour party had traditionally been patriotic and strongly in favour of British independence, but it had always had a minority of members who rejected the established order. These rejectionists came to be the majority by the 1980s, by which time support for the ideal of liberal citizenship as ‘membership’ of the nation had been dwindling in favour of a culture of repudiation. Today, there are still strong voices within the Labour movement who defend our national independence. Austin Mitchell MP has been steadfast in the Commons and Labour campaigners such as John Mills have been prominent in the wider Labour movement, but the majority of Labour MPs appear to embrace the EU with enthusiasm.

The atmosphere among many intellectuals, notably in the 20 years after the ‘May Events’ of 1968 in Paris, was increasingly hostile to liberal democracy. The case for resisting EU domination rests on a commitment to our longstanding ideal of a law-governed democracy, but if that ideal is no longer understood or shared it cannot be the basis of the allegiance that makes the nation state viable. This breakdown of our own solidarity allowed the EU to pursue a policy of ‘divide and rule’. Sectarian groups in each nation state have been encouraged to look to Brussels to impose their views on other citizens.

During the 1980s the Brussels elite aggressively sought to expand central powers at the expense of member states, but they needed individual nations to agree to hand over their powers and used whatever arguments worked in particular cases. In the 1980s the Labour party was persuaded to see the EU as a way of defeating Thatcherism. Jacques Delors cleverly exploited the frustration of the trade unions with Mrs Thatcher’s policies. Previously suspicious of the EU as a ‘capitalist club’, the TUC came to see Brussels as an ally in imposing workplace regulations that would not be accepted by a Tory-majority in Parliament. Moreover, some sectarian groups used Brussels to impose laws that were nominally anti-discrimination regulations, when in truth they were laws granting preferential treatment to politically-defined groups.

Meanwhile, Brussels managed to convince free-market Tories that an extension of EU powers would help to reduce regulation, especially barriers to trade. This while simultaneously convincing the trade unions and the Labour party that Brussels would increase workplace regulation, by pushing through workplace laws that the Thatcher regime did not want.

From the late 1970s onwards, the Conservative party fell under the sway of free-market economists who defined the size and power of the state as the main political problem. Their solution was to reduce the scope of government. The smaller it was the better for everyone. Of course, recent British governments have undertaken many tasks which arguably would be better discharged within civil society, but an automatic presumption that less state action always equals more freedom cannot be justified.  As we now know, a free society requires active government and every reduction in the powers of the state is not necessarily a gain for personal freedom. It is now infamous that so-called ‘light-touch regulation’ of financial services permitted an economic crisis in 2008 on a par with the Great Depression of the 1930s. The absence of government is what earlier philosophers had called the state of nature. From Locke onwards they had understood that freedom was only attainable in a civil society under which the state was, not the enemy of freedom, but its guarantor. Freedom is a political achievement, not a return to a harmonious natural state, where there is no coercion.

The free-market economists who dominated thinking throughout the 1980s and 1990s were resistant to the virtues of the ‘free state’, but they were keen on state action to remove barriers to trade and protect ‘property rights’. And so when the opportunity arose in the mid-1980s to eliminate ‘non-tariff barriers’ and open the way for British companies to operate in Europe, they were glad to surrender British self-government in return for promises that the single market would be ‘completed’. This amounted to putting the interests of large companies above those of the British people. These Tories defined freedom as ‘less government’ and, so long as the rhetoric of the Common Market was about free movement of people, goods, services and capital, they were happy. The Coalition continues to be drawn to the idea of ‘completing the single market’ and sees the EU as a way of forcing other European countries to make it easier for British companies to break into their markets. Completion of the single market has been promised since 1986 but never achieved because it was largely a ploy to garner the votes of free marketeers for extending EU powers. Tim Congdon was one of the first economists to see through it and has called it a trap. Mrs Thatcher voiced doubts during her landmark Bruges speech of 1988: ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ But in practice she opened the way to the imposition of greater ‘harmonisation’, as she herself conceded soon after she had left office.

So long as significant groups in Britain regard Brussels as a friendly ally in forcing through measures without proper debate in Parliament, we are likely to witness continued erosion of self-government. A free state only works if we search together for the common good; not seeking to triumph over our opponents, but finding a reasonable way of living alongside one another. At first sight it seems paradoxical that our main political parties have not taken a clear stand in defence of our freedom, but Peter Oborne has skilfully shown how our main political parties became progressively divorced from their members. Leaders no longer see themselves as reflecting the opinion of the rank and file, or of the common good. They want power for themselves and view public opinion as something to be manipulated to achieve their objective.

This is an edited extract from The Demise of the Free State: Why British democracy and the EU don’t mix, which can be purchased here. It is available in hard format and for Kindle.

Newsletter

Keep up-to-date with all of our latest publications

Sign Up Here