How Tony Blair’s attempt to put the UK at the heart of Europe backfired

Pro-Europeanism was central to New Labour’s efforts to modernise ‘New Britain’ – but, asks John Rentoul, did it only sow the seeds of Brexit?

Blair left a Eurosceptic deluge. When the dam broke in 2016 the wave carried Britain out of the EU (AFP/Getty)

I don’t like it,” said Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, when the Labour government considered what to do about the Council of Europe, an early attempt to unite the continent in 1948. “When you open that Pandora’s box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.”

Well, they opened that Pandora’s box. Here we are, 72 years later. Britain joined the Council of Europe, despite Bevin’s reservations, but the Cold War paralysed it. We stood aside from the European Economic Community when it was formed in 1957, but tried to join in 1963 under a Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and again in 1967 under a Labour one, Harold Wilson.

When Edward Heath finally succeeded in joining in 1973, Labour opposed him, but a large minority of Labour MPs, led by Roy Jenkins and including John Smith, defied their whip and voted in support of the government. They outnumbered the small minority of Conservative MPs who rebelled against theirs.

Wilson overcame his party’s division by holding the country’s first national referendum to confirm membership in 1975. It didn’t heal Labour’s split: the party advocated withdrawal in 1983, but then it became reconciled to membership, especially after Jacques Delors made the case for a social Europe at the Trades Union Congress in 1988.

The Trojan horses of division and discord now gained entry to the Conservative Party, as Margaret Thatcher delivered her Eurosceptic speech in Bruges a few weeks later.

The Tory party then tore itself apart over Europe for the next 30 years. This division helped Tony Blair achieve his dominance, and to secure 13 years of Labour government. Contrary to popular myth, the European question didn’t bring Thatcher down – her refusal to modify the poll tax did that – but it was Europe that ended the careers of the next three Tory prime ministers: John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May.

And yet, between 1983 and 2011, the European question in British politics was never “in or out?” From 1983, when Labour under Neil Kinnock abandoned the policy of withdrawal, until 2003, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown decided that the five tests had not been met, it was “to adopt the euro or not?” After 2003, it became a dispute over the symbols of integration: first the EU constitution, and then – when that was rejected by referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 – the diluted version known as the Lisbon Treaty.

For Blair, the Europe question was how to give Britain a leading role in the EU after the confusions of the late Thatcher and Major years. So he sounded warm about the euro, which was launched in 1999, and strongly supported 10 new countries joining the EU, which they did in 2004. It was then that Blair took the decision to allow free movement of workers from the new member states from day one, rather than insisting, as Germany and France did, on a transition period. If there was one decision that led to the Brexit vote 12 years later, this was it.

However, it wasn’t until November 2011, when 81 Conservative MPs rebelled against Cameron to demand an “in or out” referendum, that the question of membership itself started to move to the centre of politics. At the time, only a handful of Tory MPs publicly advocated leaving. As Remainers endlessly pointed out, the issue hardly featured in opinion polls of the most important issues facing the country.

But there was a pent-up reservoir of Euroscepticism that conventional politics ignored. All opinion polls found majorities opposed to closer European integration and in favour of returning powers from Brussels. Tony Blair understood this instinctively. As Denis MacShane, his European minister, put it recently: “Blair knew that calling any referendum on any aspect of EU partnership or integration in Europe would have only one result – a No vote.” It wouldn’t matter what the vote was about, he said: the people would vote for the more Eurosceptic option.

Blair’s approach to Euroscepticism became a millstone around Cameron’s neck (AFP/Getty) (AFP via Getty)

That is why I think Blair never had any intention of trying to join the euro – having said in opposition that any such proposal would have to be put to a referendum. I agree with Ed Balls’s view that his pro-euro posture was just that: a pose designed to persuade fellow EU leaders that he was a good European. It was convenient for him to say to them, in effect, I would love to join but Gordon Brown and John Prescott won’t let me, knowing all the time that there was no prospect of winning a referendum on the subject.

As prime minister, Blair promised many more referendums than he held. Apart from not having one on the euro, he didn’t have one on the EU constitution, and he didn’t have one on electoral reform either. On that, his caution was vindicated when Cameron let Nick Clegg have one in 2011, in which change was rejected by a two-to-one margin.

But it was Blair’s promise of a referendum on the EU constitution that was one of the causes of the 2016 referendum. He made the promise before the 2005 election because he feared Michael Howard might make it an issue in the campaign. He struck lucky, in that his pledge forced Jacques Chirac, the French president, to hold a referendum – which he lost, proving that MacShane’s observation about British public opinion also applied to supposedly pro-EU France.

Blair’s short-term gain was Cameron’s millstone. The new leader of the Tory party took over at the end of 2005, and part of the price he paid to win was the Eurosceptic Danegeld. He promised to pull out of the Christian Democrat grouping in the European parliament, but he also found himself demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Cameron might have thought that was just a tactic, but it had consequences. He thought the matter was closed when the treaty was ratified in 2009, but many Tories regarded his refusal to continue to repudiate the treaty afterwards as a betrayal. The virus of a referendum had taken hold. And the quack science of thinking the best anti-viral treatment would be an in-out referendum was becoming increasingly respectable.

Clegg had proposed an in-out referendum in 2008, arguing that forcing the country to choose on the fundamental question of membership would finally settle the matter. I have always argued that Cameron had no choice but to promise a referendum, which he finally did in January 2013, if he wanted to win the 2015 election. Otherwise, he would have lost too many votes to Nigel Farage’s Ukip. But he may have persuaded himself that forcing the in-out decision was the best chance of securing our EU membership.

And the deeper causes of our departure from the EU had already been laid by Tony Blair. By allowing unrestricted free movement from day one in 2004, and by promising referendums but not holding them, he left a Eurosceptic deluge waiting to break. The dam finally burst in 2016, and now the flood has carried us out of the EU.