Some reflections on the historical relationship between the Labour Party and the EU

There has been much criticism of Starmer for avoiding the issue of Brexit. Corbyn was criticised for the same reason ; and Miliband, when we was leader, conspicuously avoided the issue of the referendum in the general election in 2015.

In fact, Labour's problems with the EU was not confined to the Left of the party, but that the sentiment was widespread across the party. Attlee and Bevin were suspicious of the Coal and Steel Community from its inception. Hugh Gaitskell claimed that Macmillan's efforts to join the EU (thwarted by de Gaulle) would bring an end to 'a thousand years of history.' Quite bizarrely, James Callaghan stated in 1970 that accession to the Common Market would destroy 'the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare.' This must count as one of the most Europhobic statements ever uttered by a British politician. Enthusiasm for the EU was limited to Roy Jenkins and his followers (Dick Taverne, Roy Hattersley, Shirley Williams, William Rodgers et al). Most of these politicians, except for Hattersley, were to leave Labour for the SDP. In 1983, the Labour Party manifesto advocated withdrawal from the EU. For many on the Right of the party, Atlanticism and a favourable attitude to the Commonwealth (particularly after decolonisation) were important motivating factors which fuelled antagonism. For the Left, there was the pervasive assumption that the EU was a 'capitalist club.' This was prompted by the provisions of the Treaty of Rome which referred to the removal of barriers to competition, an ambition which was partly fulfilled by the advent of the Single Market. When Jacques Delors pressed for a social dimension to the Single Market in 1988, this seemed to remove many of the objections which Labour had to a more favourable policy to the EU. Labour had under Kinnock's leadership been moving in a more pro-capitalist direction, anyway. Labour's Atlanticism had been waning over a period of twenty years, due to the war in Vietnam, Nixon's involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, revelations of the CIA's activities in the 1950s and 1960s, and Reagan's policies. The United States was obviously moving away from the social democratic promise of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, and moving in a neoliberal direction even faster than Britain. So, 'the stage was set', as it were, for a shift to pro-Europe policy. Those who were still hostile to the Common Market (Peter Shore, Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, Kate Hoey and a number of others) were marginalised. However, as Denis MacShane notes in his books, 'Brexiternity' and 'Brexit, No Exit', Tony Blair and Gordon Brown repeatedly refused to make the positive case for membership of the EU. As MacShane states, when he recounts a conversation with Blair which occurred when he was Blair's Minister for Europe, when MacShane explicitly pressed Blair to make the case for the EU, Blair cited fear of Rupert Murdoch's revenge if he did so. He recognised that such a move was necessary, but was afraid to take it. To be fair to Blair, most other politicians, with the exception of those who were ideologically committed to the EU, such as Edward Heath, Michael Hesseltine and Roy Jenkins, were also extremely shy of making that case. It is not as if the evidence was absent for this case, or that people would not have listened had the case been made convincingly and compellingly. But the case was never made, with terrible consequences which we are now bearing. The case which was made for remaining in the EU by Cameron and Osborne in 2016 was so burdened by Europhobia that it could barely muster any positive ethusiasm for the EU. In effect, a convincing case for remaining was never made, and never heard. In 2016. Corbyn's efforts were similarly burdened by his history of left-Euroscepticism: he could not be reasonably expected to make a convincing case for the EU when he was so obviously unenthused by the institution. So, as all three were not really pro-EU at heart, it is probably unfair to blame Cameron, Osborne and Corbyn for not having campaigned effectively. But one can blame convinced pro-Europeans, such as Tony Blair, John Major and many others, for not having had the courage in years past to make this case. The Labour Party's chequered career on the EU question is paralleled in many ways by the evolution of Conservative policy. In 1988, the Conservative party started to become 'Eurosceptic' for the same reasons as Labour's shift to a more favourable view of the EU. However, Labour missed opportunity after opportunity to make the case for the EU. IT could, for example, have showcased Britain's refusal to join the single currency as an example of the EU's flexibility.