Henry McLeish: Let’s opt to end Britain’s identity crisis

Inspired by a fear and contempt of foreigners, asylum seekers and migrants, fuelled by a growing English nationalism and rooted in a civil war within the Tory party, the EU referendum debate has become ugly and unreal and in a sense, despairing and demeaning and certainly one of the darkest periods in British politics.

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The big questions are not being asked. What kind of world do we want to live in? What role can Britain play? What future does the EU offer? How can we improve the quality of life of our citizens? What is the purpose of Britain?

The most serious arguments – political, economic, environmental, employment and social – confirm the benefits of remaining. The EU is one of the great success stories of the post-war era, reaching out beyond the nationalism, fascism and militarism of the killing fields of 1870, 1914 and 1939 and giving us, and new generations to come, the possibility of security, stability, prosperity and peace. The excesses of the nation states within the EU have been contained. When Brexit say they want to take Britain back, the question is back to where?

Making sense of Brexit has to be understood in terms of a United Kingdom in post-war decline; a deepening ambivalence towards the EU; an obsession with our special relationship with the US; and ignoring Britain’s role in European history and civilisation.

At the heart of this Referendum campaign there is a crisis of national identity. Britain’s failure to evolve a new world view and find a new role is holding us back. A lack of confidence and insecurity has created a growing mood of isolationism and an English nationalism that feeds off its own cynicism and seeks to blame others for all of Britain’s ills. Britain is fragmenting. The EU provides a convenient scapegoat for a bitterly divided Britain.

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The right of the Tory Party and the Ukip leadership are shackled to the past .They are thirled to a mind-set of nostalgia and sentiment that refuses to accept that Britain no longer rules the waves, controls an Empire or has any unique or special relationship with the United States. Europe, in their eyes is seen as having little significance or relevance for Britain in the 21st century Brexit sees a complex organisation as a conspiracy against Britain; independence not interdependence; sharing sovereignty as interference; narrow nationalism over internationalism; competition over cooperation isolationism over solidarity; and cynicism over idealism. This is the agenda of those who refuse to acknowledge that Britain is struggling to find a new role in a new world. Instead Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher are used to illustrate how revered Tory icons and patriots would be supporting their case. But Thatcher and Churchill would never be Brexiteers. The truth, as ever, is more complex and nuanced than the myths and lies being pedalled.

The Leave campaign wants to shrink Britain. There is a Donald Trump feel to the empty rhetoric of, “making Britain great again”. Global issues require collective responses: it’s called sharing sovereignty.

Britain has learned nothing from history. It remains, as former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson described in a speech at West Point in November 1962, a country that “has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”. He added: “The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength — this role is about played out”. Acheson was right about Britain then and this remains true today. This is the identity crisis.

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In the post-war period, Britain has been ambivalent about its attitude towards the EU. Churchill played a part in this. He was one of the founding fathers, of the European project and was the first politician to propose a Union of Independent European States.

In his famous Tragedy of Europe speech in Zurich in 1946, he said: “We must build a kind of United States of Europe” and added that “Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America – and, I trust, Soviet Russia, for then indeed all would be well – must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live. Therefore I say to you ‘let Europe arise’.

But despite Churchill’s vision, he also sealed our ambivalent attitude when, in later comments, he said: “We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed”. Churchill was a major player in building a new Europe: not only the inspiration behind the EC/EU but also, the Council of Europe, The European Court of Human Rights and the Convention. “I do not agree that the solution to our problem is to create a Europe excluding Britain”, he wrote in December 1949. “British participation is essential to the success of a European Union”.

However in 1949, he also wrote: “British participation is essential to the success of a European Union.”

Brexit supporters have seriously distorted, and in Boris Johnson’s case, abused Churchill’s views.

Margaret Thatcher adds a confusing mix of ideology and nationalism to the issues of identity and ambivalence. In her Bruges speech in September 1988, she said: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels”.

However, as Sir John Major tells us in his autobiography, Thatcher “unwittingly brought European Union (integration) closer by her own actions as PM” when she agreed to the Single European Act, committing Britain to “progressive realisation of economic and monetary union”. Thatcher’s priorities of protecting the free market, resisting socialism and reducing the size of the state remain the same for much of the Tory party today. To what extent though were her views ideological rather than being against the idea of Europe? John Major in his Autobiography, published in 1999, sheds some light on this. Talking about U-turns, he said: “Margaret Thatcher, whose later enmity towards all things European became astonishing to behold, unwittingly brought European Union (integration) closer by her own actions as PM. In the 1980’s she pushed for a truly free market for goods and services across Europe. For in the Single European Act of 1985 she conceded the most dramatic advance of decision making by majority voting-in essence a partial surrender of our sovereignty of decision making in return for a share of pooled sovereignty” In 1985, European heads of government unanimously agreed the Single European Act. It also committed Britain to “progressive realisation of economic and monetary union”. John Major added: “Why she accepted this I have never understood. She made no attempt to secure an opt-out for the UK”.

How ironic and uncomfortable for the Conservative right to accept that the single biggest step towards a closer economic and monetary union and the greatest giving away of British national sovereignty was conceded by the “Iron Lady”. Is Germany any less of a successful sovereign nation state for being an active and serious member of the EU and sharing sovereignty in areas of common interest and ambition? Membership of the EU should be driven by internationalism, idealism and hope. The EU has rebuilt a broken Europe but Brexit is in danger of breaking up the EU and Britain.