The Brexit referendum was the right thing to do

Whether you are the most Spartan of Brexiteers or a wistful federalist, so much changed between 1975 and 2016 that the electorate was entitled to be consulted

I have only myself to blame, I suppose. On Friday I retweeted a short video the foreign secretary, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, had made at a NATO foreign ministers’ conference, in which he tried to explain what the meeting had been about and what the British government wanted to happen in the time it took him to walk from the meeting room to his car outside. In my own semi-professional opinion, it was a deft, clear and effective piece of social media communication, made by a man who has a gift for communication. I do, however, know there is a world out there, so I began the tweet with a disclaimer. “I know David_Cameron will forever divide opinion but…” I wrote.

It made no difference. In they piled. The usual stuff, of course, some of it fair, some of it not, almost all of it missing the point that I’d acknowledged that Cameron divides opinion in the broad sweep of policy and achievements. The issue I was highlighting was small and limited, and it was that he had made an effective piece of content, reminding us that he has considerable skills as a political communicator. He was, after all, prime minister for six years, winning enough in 2010 to get into government and then a majority that few saw coming in 2015.

For many, however, he is one of the architects of Brexit, the original sin of the British nation. He allowed it to happen, he arrogantly called a referendum on our membership of the European Union, which was the beginning of all our misfortunes. If he hadn’t caved in to Nigel Farage and the other unspeakables, if he hadn’t been either so weak or so arrogant as to allow this constitutional outrage of a referendum, then the people would never have spoken (the bastards) and anyway they were lied to and didn’t understand and didn’t know what they were doing. Well, perhaps.

I think we can make a few reasonable points here if we just calm down for a moment. First, let’s strip away the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and the knowledge that Leave did narrowly win the referendum in 2016. Roll back to 2012, and the NATO summit in Chicago. Cameron, his foreign secretary, William Hague, and Ed Llewellyn, the Downing Street chief of staff, were sharing pizza at O’Hare Airport and discussing domestic political tensions. The idea was floated, as a way to curry favour with the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party, of offering an in/out referendum on the EU, a lancing of the boil and what many Eurosceptics had always wanted.

On 23 January 2013, Cameron gave a major speech on the future of the European Union during a visit to Bloomberg’s headquarters in the City of London. It was the work of Llewellyn, with the assistance of John Casson, Cameron’s foreign affairs private secretary, speechwriter Tim Kiddell and Helen Bower, Downing Street chief press officer for foreign affairs, with an opening penned by Cameron’s long-time party wordsmith Clare Foges. It was bold, dynamic but simple, a mood in which Cameron shone, and did three things: acknowledged long-standing Eurosceptic unhappiness that the electorate had not been consulted on the European project; pledged to seek major reforms of the European Union; and promised to put revised membership terms, after those reforms had been negotiated, to a referendum on the UK staying in the bloc.

Simply asking the British people to carry on accepting a European settlement over which they have had little choice is a path to ensuring that when the question is finally put—and at some stage it will have to be—it is much more likely that the British people will reject the EU. That is why I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue—shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.

This was classic Cameron. In substance revolutionary, but framed as a common-sense, indeed inevitable response to a situation which others had neglected for too long. What it had required was a clear-eyed dose of rational judgement, he implied, and that was something he had in abundance.

Philip Collins, once Tony Blair’s speechwriter, was insightful when he said in 2015 “Cameron is at his best when things are broken and he can set about fixing them”. He added, ironically in hindsight, “He could yet turn out to be the man who saved the union and kept Britain in the EU”. More fundamentally, Cameron is a man who tends to hope for the best. One anonymous friend called him “a generous-spirited optimist”, and that was reflected in his Bloomberg speech. From the perspective of early 2013, I would argue, the plan he had hatched was a perfectly defensible one, and might even have turned out to be a masterstroke.

It was expected that any referendum after 2015 would affirm the United Kingdom’s place in the European Union. If membership terms were improved, then that would be a bonus, but at that point, the idea that the electorate might vote to withdraw from the EU and turn its back on every assumption governments had made for 40 years was not treated as a plausible outcome. Given that consensus, the idea of a referendum was at worst free of downsides, but offered much more than that. It was not far-fetched to imagine that Cameron would wring enough concessions out of his EU allies to convince the electorate to support him generously, and a healthy referendum victory would effectively say to the hardline Eurosceptics “You do not have the numbers for your dreams of leaving the EU” and invite them to hold their counsel for perhaps a generation.

That would have been an astounding prize for a Conservative leader. Cameron had been elected in December 2005 determined to wean the party off its obsession with the EU, warning the party conference the following year “we were banging on about Europe” rather than addressing issues important to voters. If he could have shown the most extreme Eurosceptics, as well as the party and the public, that their most cherished wish simply had no substantial support, it would have been a huge tactical victory and a boost to party management.

In political terms, therefore, I think you can argue that the commitment to hold an in/out referendum was not only not foolish, but had the potential to offer huge benefits. More than that, however, I think it was justified because one of the arguments most frequently and passionately deployed by Eurosceptics, that the electorate had not been consulted, had more than a grain of truth to it.

When Edward Heath had led the Conservatives to an unexpected victory in 1970, he had triumphed with a manifesto, A Better Tomorrow, which had committed to applying to join the European Economic Community but had contained a number of qualifications and conditions.

If we can negotiate the right terms, we believe that it would be in the long-term interest of the British people for Britain to join the European Economic Community, and that it would make a major contribution to both the prosperity and the security of our country. The opportunities are immense. Economic growth and a higher standard of living would result from having a larger market.

That was a reasonable stance, but the manifesto went on to reassure doubters. “Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less. As the negotiations proceed we will report regularly through Parliament to the country.” Heath had of course secured terms he regarded as favourable, and following the tortuous passage of the European Communities Act 1972, the United Kingdom joined the Common Market on 1 January 1973.

Still, the electorate had never expressed an opinion specifically on Britain’s membership of the EEC. It was given the opportunity to do so in June 1975 almost entirely for reasons of internal Labour Party factional strife and management: Labour was divided in the issue, so Harold Wilson had, as Cameron would do, proposed that the terms be renegotiated and the result put to a popular vote. The preponderance of mainstream politicians campaigned for a Yes vote, as did almost every newspaper, and the referendum result was emphatic: 67 per cent of voters, on a respectable turnout of 65 per cent, voted to stay in the EEC, just 33 per cent backing withdrawal.

Except on the fringes of politics, that settled the existential question of British membership for decades, though there would be enough shades of opinion within those borders to keep the Conservatives in internecine warfare for many years. Another outcome was that by the early 2010s it was legitimate to argue that the electorate had not expressed an opinion on the matter of Europe for nearly 40 years. A counter-argument is that Britain does not determine policy by referendum, which is generally true: the 1975 plebiscite was the first UK-wide referendum we had ever held, and there have only been two more since (the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum and the Brexit poll). There have also been three referendums in Scotland (1979, 1997 and 2014), three in Wales (1979, 1997 and 2011) and two in Northern Ireland (1973 and 1998), as well as the London-wide devolution poll in 1998 and the rejected 2004 offer of a devolved assembly for the North East of England.

I don’t much life referendums. They are crude and lacking in nuance, and as someone who is a diehard enthusiast for the King-in-Parliament, part of me regards them as an abdication of responsibility by our elected (and unelected) lawmakers. However, the fact that there had been a referendum in 1975 gave some weight to the argument that holding another one, four decades afterwards, was neither a gross affront to our constitutional norms, nor a dangerous descent into the populism of direct democracy. Essentially, I think taking the nation’s temperature on something as important and pervasive as membership of what had become the European Union once every 40 years is a reasonable and defensible proposition.

Moreover, I think this case becomes even easier to sustain if we look at how much the organisation of which we were a member had changed between 1975 and 2016. The UK acceded to the EEC at the beginning of 1973, at the same time as Denmark and Ireland, taking it from six member states to nine. That was the first time the EEC had grown since its foundation in 1957. (It might be remembered that in 1973 Greenland was a county of the Kingdom of Denmark, though it had voted 70/30 against joining the Common Market.) The most significant areas of concern for the UK were the Common Agricultural Policy and our overall budget contribution, which was felt to be disproportionately high. The EEC was also publicly committed to achieving Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) by 1980: that is, a single currency, a common monetary policy and the co-ordination of economic and fiscal policies. In the mid-1970s, this was a major concern for the Labour Party, which feared that unemployment would be allowed to rise as the price for achieving monetary union.

The European Parliament was not yet directly elected in 1975, but made up of legislators nominated by their national parliaments (like the NATO Parliamentary Assembly or the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe are today). The UK delegation theoretically comprised 36 MPs and peers, but the Labour Party refused to name delegates until after the 1975 referendum. Familiar names today from that 1975 delegation include Labour MPs Betty Boothroyd, Tam Dalyell, John Prescott and Gwyneth Dunwoody, former foreign secretaries Michael Stewart and Lord Gordon-Walker, one-time British ambassador to France and the United Nations Lord Gladwyn, sitting as a Liberal, Tory grandees Sir Derek Walker-Smith and Sir Brandon Rhys Williams, and the SNP’s Winnie Ewing, known in the assembly as “Madame Ecosse”.

There was free movement of goods in the EEC in 1975 but what know think of as the single market was at least a decade off. Likewise there was no Schengen area, nor did the Commission have any competence in justice and home affairs. If we hold this EEC, which it was not utterly misleading to dub the Common Market, as many habitually did, against the European Union of 2016, the differences could hardly be starker. The UK was one of 28 member states of the EU, the union’s territory stretching from Oporto on the Atlantic to the shores of the Gulf of Finland north of Estonia. Economic and monetary union had taken in 20 members, with a single currency and a European Central Bank. The Schengen area, compromising all member states except Ireland and Cyprus, as well as Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, has abolished almost all internal border controls. The EU has a Common Foreign and Security Policy managed by a high representative, and its own defence and diplomatic establishment, the European External Action Service, as well as official embassies and missions in many cities and at many multilateral organisations.

It is a difference of night and day. In 1975, it was just about possible to argue that the EEC was a trading bloc with grandiose ideas. By 2016, it is a federal union only lacking some levers at the centre. I make these observations not in a judgemental sense: there are people who find the very membership of the original customs union an offensive compromise of sovereignty, while others see a fully united federal European state as the fulfilment of their ambition. But to pretend nothing had changed over the intervening 41 years is simply dishonest. And it is equally true that the British electorate had not specifically made any decisions on that transformation. It was hardly surprising that many people aggrieved and disenfranchised.

Ultimately we have to be able intellectually and emotionally to disaggregate the process from the result. The idea of a referendum was not illegitimate or absurd, nor was it the inevitable gateway to Brexit. My own view is that the 2016 poll came just in time: something had to give, or the sustained pressure of ill will and grievance would have burst through the surface in some other way. Remember the extraordinary result of the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, when the UK Independence Party won 24 of the 73 seats, Labour trailing on 20 and the Conservatives beaten into third with only 19 MEPs. The Liberal Democrats lost all but one of their seats. This was not so much a whole-hearted and hard-headed endorsement of UKIP or its leader Nigel Farage, as a bottled-up shriek of frustration and a willingness to kick over the traces simply to register a protest.

As someone who voted to leave, I’ve often tried to imagine how I would have felt and acted had the referendum tipped the other way, even if only by the same agonising 52/48 margin. It is pleasing of course to imagine that I would have acted with grace and equanimity, praise for a fight well fought and the best traditions of British fair play, but I’m sure I would have had periods of disappointment and brooding. But they would have been tempered by experience: I had more or less come to the conclusion that the European Union was not the answer to the questions I had when I was an undergraduate back in 1994, in the midst of the Maastricht Treaty wars, so I had two decades of being in a minority to fall back on.

History is a process of imagining and reimagining the past until we find a consensus, and so it will be with Brexit. But there are too many understandably disappointed pro-Europeans who cannot see anything either good or even legitimate in the last 10 or 15 years, and it robs them of light and shade. Something had to happen in the mid-2010s in connection with Europe. It may be the case, in the end, that a messy referendum was very far from the worst possibility.