Sunday, April 14, 2013
Think what you will about her, the late Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister for 11 years, has left a legacy that volumes of blog articles could be dedicated to. To mark her passing, it is worth considering the subject that became the ‘Iron Lady’s’ undoing: the UK’s place, role and may I dare say, destiny, in ‘Europe’.
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| From "Yes" to "No No No!" |
The British rebate that she negotiated was, however, only a small part of the story. The British Conservative Party was the vehicle through which the UK’s membership of the EC was attained, thanks to the personal conviction of Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Heath. She campaigned convincingly for the UK’s continued membership of the EC in the referendum campaign of 1975. Back then, it was broadly the Conservatives who were Europhile and Labour the Eurosceptics. Indeed, during their crushing general election victory in 1983, the Conservatives sort to distinguish themselves from Labour through a commitment the UK’s “European future”.
More than this, Thatcher made her own significant contribution to European integration, namely, the creation of the Single Market. The passing of the Single European Act in 1986, which saw her team-up with Socialist Commission President, Jacques Delors, (that’s right) was the treaty that paved the way for the creation of the European Union as we know it today. Importantly, it entailed the renunciation of significant chunks of national power to the supranational level.
Still, what became known as her Bruges Speech, in 1988, outlines most succinctly her ‘European vision’: an ideological opposition to the centralisation of power towards Brussels as an end in itself and the attempt to homogenise ‘Europeaness’ into a one-size-fits-all mould. Most significantly for UK policy, it symbolically defined the point from which the Conservatives ceased to be “the Party of Europe”.
The ardently Eurosceptic Thatcher of caricature however didn’t appear until the very end of her Premiership and was mainly saved for her time out of office – a few sandwiches short of the full pick-nick. Her hardening Euroscepticism was the trigger that led to Party rebellion and her downfall. More importantly for present UK policy, it spelt the beginning of a Conservative civil war over Party policy towards the EU. In the end, a turbo-charged Thatcherite Euroscepticism won.
Fast-forward from Bruges to Bloomberg and this poisoned legacy is on display. Cameron, you might have thought, might has well have blown the dust off Thatcher’s Bruges speech and read it out again. That would silence the back-benchers – wouldn't it? Not with revolutionary lines like, “Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.” Conservative Euroscepticism has increasingly become a caricature of itself. Now, Cameron is prepared to abandon Thatcher’s “seat at the table” policy to attempt peace within his Party and outflank UKIP. Hardly the statesman.
Thatcher leaves therefore two quite different EU legacies. First, what she actually did as a Prime Minister: furthering European integration and Britain’s enmeshment within that process. Second, spark a civil war within the Conservative Party, which has seen a warped and uncompromising version of her final Eurosceptic vision triumph.
Where does this leave the British Conservative Party now? They preside over a political group in the European Parliament with a name as oxymoronic as you’re ever likely to come across – both Conservative and Reformist in equal measure? Most fundamentally though they face a deep policy contradiction: they want a strong single market, but not the necessarily strong supranational governance to achieve this among a club of nation-states. The more pragmatic Thatcher of the Single European Act could not even argue with this logic.
