These are the 10 stupidest things Britain has ever done – starting with joining the European Union

There was a lot of economic misery with 'Brentry' – higher inflation, unemployment and sluggish investment. Maybe it was all worth it – but it took many years for the benefits to show up (er, like Brexit?)

The tide is turning when it comes to Brexit (AFP/Getty)

According to Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, mega rich businessman, brain and Anglophile, Brexit is the “single stupidest thing any country has ever done” – apart from, he was gracious enough to add, America electing Donald Trump as their president.

As someone who voted for Brexit (a marginal decision, and one that has troubled me lateoliverly, I confess), I feel impelled to find some other things that Britain has done that have been stupider, or at least that some people think so, if wrongly. It’s mostly an exercise in alternative history, with all the pitfalls that entails. So here goes…

Joining the then European Communities (Common Market) in the first place (1973)

The eerie thing about the probable consequences of leaving the EU is that they have such a sharp parallel with what happened when we joined on January 1^st 1973.

It was, in the phrase de jour, going to be a “cold shower” for British industry, which would be duly invigorated by the challenges from continental companies. Well it was certainly that, and British industry almost died of pneumonia.

The British soon developed a near insatiable appetite for Renaults, Peugeots, Fiats, Citroens and Volkswagens which decimated the home car-makers – and they didn’t buy our cars much in return. Much the same happened in electrical goods, textiles, industrial equipment – you name it.

Not only that, but after a “transitional period” of a few years (another familiar phrase) the British were forbidden from sourcing their traditionally cheap foodstuffs from the Commonwealth and world markets, and had instead to make do with inferior and more expensive wheat, sugar, meat and dairy produce from the Continent.

We also had to pay vast sums into the EC budget until Margaret Thatcher got some money back after 1984. So, there was in fact lots of economic misery with "Brentry" – higher inflation, unemployment and sluggish investment. Maybe it was all worth it – but it took many years for the benefits to show up (er, like Brexit?)

Going into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (1990)

Such a dry-sounding thing, but the decision to link sterling to the German Mark, the foundation stone of an embryonic euro currency system, left interest rates in the UK at ruinously high levels, prompting deep recession and, eventually, the UK's humiliating ejection from the system in 1992.

It cost the Treasury and the wider economy very dear, that piece of economic folly, and brought the British no benefits in political influence in Europe – John Major was to face many more beatings in Brussels in the ensuing years.

It made George Soros very rich, by the way. (Similar episodes were the return to the Gold Standard in 1925 to 1931 and the futile attempt to avoid sterling devaluation before 1967, both depressing economic growth and dynamism.)

Declaring war on Germany (1939)

This is a controversial one, the case being made most famously by that most controversial of controversialists, the late Alan Clarke, roué, diarist and mischievous politician and military historian.

The argument is simply stated. If the British had stood aside and allowed Hitler to set up a Continental System of dictatorship, then in return, so the idea goes, the British would be allowed to hang on to their navy and Empire (especially India) and enjoy some autonomy, maybe with Oswald Mosley as prime minister and Edward VIII back on the throne.

In addition, the national bankruptcy Britain faced by 1945, having mortgaged all its assets to pay for the struggle, would have been avoided.

Against that, Britain would have had to participate in genocide and become a slave nation. So in reality declaring war on Germany was not a stupid blunder at all, but mentioned because there are still a few dangerous eccentrics who think that somehow the British could have got away with it – and because there is the obvious alternative to this alternative, being that Britain might have lost the war anyway, and then been occupied.

The Second Iraq War (2003)

Apart from members of the Blair family, there seems no one who wants to defend Britain’s decision to participate with the Americans in this entirely optional war. It cost too many lives (especially of Iraqis), cost too much treasure and achieved little, if anything, apart from toppling Saddam Hussein, who did of course torture and kill his own people.

Yet Saddam even at his most murderous could never have destroyed so much for so many and for so long as George W Bush and Tony Blair did. A very stupid war indeed – illegal and based on a false premise too.

The Balfour Declaration (1917)

When the British foreign secretary, Lord (Arthur) Balfour, sent his letter 100 years ago promising a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine, he gave the cause of Zionism a huge moral and political boost, especially as the British were soon to gain control of the territory after the defeat of Turkey in the Great War.

Balfour’s declaration did not come out of nowhere: it was a considered response to centuries of persecution of the Jewish people, more of which was soon to follow. It was also tempered by a commitment that “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

Whatever you think of the eventual creation of the State of Israel in 1948, there is a case that Balfour’s initiative wasn’t properly followed through by the British during their stewardship of Palestine, to the detriment of all concerned.

Votes for women (1918)

Only joking. I refer in fact to the failure to grant women the vote in the decades before. Unaccountably for a progressive party such as the Liberals or even for a pragmatic party such as the Tories, there was adamant refusal to countenance giving any women the vote before they had proved their worth by helping to win the First World War, which was more than a little condescending.

Even then, the franchise was retracted to women over the age of 30, and full female participation only took effect in the general election of 1929.

It is at least arguable that some of the other great mistakes of the Edwardian era might have been avoided had politics involved women a little more; maybe Ireland would have been pacified, poverty more effectively relieved and even the Great War avoided if more diverse voices on the issues had been heard. Then again, by the 1930s it was plain that the Conservatives had gained the net advantage from the women’s vote.

Letting Rupert Murdoch into the British newspaper industry (1969)

When the Dirty Digger arrived on these shores to take over the ailing Daily Herald and convert it into the soaraway Sun, it marked a turning point.

There had always been sensationalist, titillating tabloids, but Murdoch systematically pornographied his titles, debased journalism and had a baleful influence on public life, not least after he acquired The Times with the flimsiest safeguards on editorial independence in 1981.

Since then this Australian/American has sought to control our politics, bully governments, and his titles have indulged in the most appalling abuses, as highlighted in the Leveson Inquiry and culminating in the closure of the News of the World.

Murdoch also, I think, waged a predatory pricing war to eliminate rivals such as The Independent and used his influence to destroy the BBC, a rival to his own BSkyB. It is hard to believe that British public life wouldn’t have been a better pace without him.

The restoration of the monarchy (1660)

One of the greatest of British, or, rather, English national myths is that the House of Windsor can trace its rule over the kingdom back through the millennia in an unbroken golden thread of continuity. Yet England was a Commonwealth – that is to say a republic – for a decade or so after the Civil War.

Under Oliver Cromwell and then his son Richard, the regime turned steadily more autocratic, and thus unsustainable. The revived monarchy was duly restrained by the Bill of Rights of 1689, but it is possible that a purer form of parliamentary democracy might have evolved without Charles II getting back on his gilded throne in 1660 and re-establishing the institution for his many successors – not all of whom have been an unalloyed gift to the nation, and none of whom have ever been elected to anything except maybe a yacht club.

The dissolution of the monasteries (1536 to 1541)

OK, the monks were often corrupt and immoral in habit (no pun intended), and the influence of Rome intolerable for a proud sovereign nation, and Henry wanted a big navy and a new wife.

Yet was it really necessary to go on such an orgy of destruction that left us with great abbeys standing only as ruins, all their art and literature gone, as well as much of their musical traditions and the actual good they did for their communities? A very stupidly and cruelly done thing.

Winning the World Cup (1966)

This is of course an especially English blunder, but this particular national moment seems to have merely inflicted vast misery on the national game ever since.

It might have been better all round if, like somewhere along the lines of Malta or New Zealand, the English team had never ever been a serious contender for qualification in the tournament, let alone have a chance of lifting the trophy. With that mindset, we could all enjoy watching the Argentines, Italians, Dutch, Brazilians, French and Germans show us how it should be done.

England winning in 1966 created an entirely unrealistic expectation that it could be done again, and a four-yearly cycle of heartbreak in turn. On the other hand, look at Scotland…