EU membership: the divide between party politics and public opinion

Stuart Smedley explores the evolution of British public opinion towards the European Union over the course of Britain’s membership, arguing that there has been a consistent divide between political actors and the general public. 

Today, Brexit is a fact of political life. But how Britain came to be a former member of the European Union is still open for debate.

My new book, ‘British Public Opinion and Party Policy Towards European Integration, 1973-2016’, seeks to contribute to this discussion. Analysing the intersection of public opinion and party policies towards Europe, it finds that throughout Britain’s period of EU membership, the European policies of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties – who, aside from Labour’s brief support for withdrawal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were all consistently in favour of membership – were frequently out of step with public opinion.

These divides were present across a range of developments that deepened the policy areas for which the EU had responsibility, expanded its membership and transformed the organisation to which Britain belonged.

That these divides existed represented a consistent failure to convince the public of the benefits the parties felt EU membership delivered, and to set out what exactly the UK’s participation in European integration entailed.

While evident during the first decade of Britain’s membership, these divides were arguably of weaker importance given the 1970s and early 1980s were a period of stagnation for the European project.

The Single Market programme brought that to an end though. Aimed at further liberalising the EU’s internal market by eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade (such as regulations and other costs and impediments to business), this was a development that the Thatcher government helped spearhead and which eventually enjoyed strong, cross-party support in Britain. Public enthusiasm, however, was rather muted – from 1987 to 1992, Eurobarometer found that between 36% and 43% of British adults considered its completion to be a good thing.

An immediate spillover effect of the Single Market programme was moves, promoted by then-European Commission President Jacques Delors, to develop common policies in the field of social policy. This drew the ire of a Conservative Party which celebrated having “rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain”. Among the British public, however, a majority initially felt social policy integration was a good thing.

But public support cooled as the issue became politicised in the 1990s – especially as Labour gave up Britain’s opt-out from the Social Chapter (a framework that sought to set minimum standards on social and employment rights within the EU), that the Conservatives had negotiated when agreeing the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

Opt-outs, which, beginning at Maastricht, British governments of different persuasions negotiated and guarded closely, were something else over which there was a divide between party policies and public opinion. There was clear political support for measures that enabled differentiated integration – and for Britain to carve out a special status within the EU. But according to various Eurobarometer questions asked in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the British public typically opposed the idea of certain member states developing common policies in particular areas while others did not participate (as opt-outs allowed).

Subsidiarity – the principle that the EU should only be responsible for policy where objectives could not be met at a national or regional level – was another somewhat arcane means through which Britain’s parties sought to limit the competences the EU possessed. Enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty, the Conservatives even claimed to have ‘pioneered’ subsidiarity. A two-thirds majority of the public supported the concept in the early 1990s. But – coinciding with a decrease in positive views of EU membership in general – support declined to less than half, falling most among Conservative supporters.

Some divides later in Britain’s period of membership were perhaps benign – such as the British public’s greater preference for defence over foreign policy cooperation, despite the three main parties all expressing stronger enthusiasm for working together with its EU partners on foreign policy matters.

Yet other divides were consequential, laying some of the foundations for the sovereigntist, anti-immigration Euroscepticism that delivered Brexit. Maastricht had seen Britain negotiate an opt-out from economic and monetary union (EMU), which led to the common EU currency. Such resistance made sense considering public opposition to EMU was always strong – and grew.

Despite this, the Blair government flirted with adopting the euro. Labour saw benefits in joining a ‘successful single currency’ – if five economic tests were met and public approval was received via a referendum. The latter never appeared likely but it took until 2003 for Labour to put the issue to bed. In the meantime, anti-euro campaign groups emerged. They peddled arguments about the single currency leading to a loss of control and identity, which the British public found convincing – and which prominent personalities involved in these groups, among them Dominic Cummings, would seemingly revisit and repurpose in the 2016 referendum.

Another New Labour decision – the choice not to impose transition controls on the free movement rights of citizens from the central and eastern Europe who joined the EU in 2004 – created another divide over EU enlargement.

Britain’s main parties were consistent advocates of the benefits of enlargement. They saw expanding the EU’s membership as a key foreign policy tool to spread democracy and promote economic development in parts of the continent that for much of the post-war period had been accustomed to authoritarian rule.

But they showed little realisation of the divisive consequences it could have for domestic politics. Indeed, the wave of migration which the EU’s 2004 expansion brought about soon led to public opposition to further enlargement outweighing support.

Indeed, from 2006 onwards around half or more of Britons opposed this, with support dropping to around a third. What’s more, enlargement policy enabled a pivotal link to be formed between immigration and the always controversial issue of free movement, which eurosceptics weaponised to great effect.

Divides between public opinion and party policy were thus a consistent feature, present across policy areas, and most acute ahead of the 2016 referendum. Although they may not have made Brexit inevitable, they certainly made the 2016 vote to leave more likely – and contributed towards British participation in European integration becoming a matter of history.

By Stuart Smedley, Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton.