Somewhat more controversially, it\u00a0reframes the referendum less as an angry backlash from the economically left-behind, and more as the intellectually coherent outcome of\u00a0a\u00a0relationship that was always fundamentally unstable.<\/p>\n
From the beginning, McTague makes clear, Britain\u2019s choice was between joining a union whose purpose (of\u00a0pooling sovereignty, initially to contain a German resurgence) we distrusted, or staying out of something potentially powerful enough to threaten our national interests in the long run. Whatever else has changed \u2013 and bear in mind that in the 1970s Labour was the Eurosceptic party, while Ted Heath\u2019s Conservative government led the pro-European charge \u2013 the constant has been British reluctance to be either wholly in or wholly out. Successive governments, he argues, managed those tensions by conveniently ignoring the EU\u2019s core mission of ever closer integration in hot pursuit of all its other benefits.<\/p>\n
European perspectives are largely absent from a narrative that is hooked around a series of big British characters<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Seen through this prism, David Cameron\u2019s decision to call his career-ending referendum becomes less a\u00a0panicky response to the rise of Nigel Farage and more a willingness to face up to contradictions others had brushed under the carpet, and which an expanding Europe had more clearly\u00a0exposed.<\/p>\n
History is famously told by the\u00a0winners, and McTague\u2019s lead witnesses lean towards the leave side. With its focus on tracing Brexit\u2019s origin\u00a0story, the book feels oddly thin\u00a0on insight from the Blair-Brown governments, an eventful period for EU membership when the battle was essentially between pro-Europeans over exactly how deep to go. Instead we get an exhaustive account of the academic influences on Michael Gove\u2019s and Dominic Cummings\u2019s thinking, and of the formation of the Eurosceptic campaign group Business for Sterling.<\/p>\n
European perspectives are also largely absent from a narrative that is hooked around a series of big British characters, from Enoch Powell to Margaret Thatcher to Cummings and Farage. The rest of the continent is relegated to a kind of vague background presence in Britain\u2019s internal dramas. We\u2019ve all been in relationships like that, I suppose, but it would have been nice to hear a little more from across the Channel \u2013 perhaps about why other member states such as Ireland and Denmark, who struggled to gain public\u00a0consent for further integration, nonetheless stuck with it, or whether the great rupture of 2016 was avoidable. (McTague considers the Faragist argument that had the Blair government-imposed transitional curbs on immigration from eastern European members, eurosceptic feeling might never have grown so strong, before concluding that it lacks nuance.)<\/p>\n
The book ends, however, by acknowledging that Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe may not be as settled as it currently looks, a prudent hedging of bets now that the threat from Putin is once more drawing British interests closer to those\u00a0of its neighbours. But it\u2019s also a\u00a0reminder of the book\u2019s underlying theme: that the British idea of Europe has never really been fixed, and changes conveniently to suit us. Though this chapter of our joint histories may be concluded, the story goes on.<\/p>\n
Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 by Tom McTague is published by Picador (\u00a325). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A\u00a0whole 10 years of turmoil, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-407222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115167434290690375","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}