On 23 June 2016 the UK’s EU referendum took place, and the UK voted to leave the European Union. After several years of debates as to how this would take place, the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. After that, the transition period that was in place – during which nothing changed – ended on 31 December 2020, and the rules governing the new relationship between the EU and UK took effect on 1 January 2021.
The issue of the UK’s departure from the EU continues to be hotly debated, but it can be easy to forget that our relationship with the European project has never been a smooth one. Here is a brief(ish) history of Britain and the EU.
A rocky start
Perhaps it’s geography – the fact that the UK is a group of islands and separated from the European mainland. Or perhaps it’s the innate sense of superiority that Britain continues to feel over its European neighbours – a hangover from its time as the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
Whatever it is, Britain has always seemed like a outlier of the European project, a reluctant participant with one foot always out the door.
The former president of France, Charles de Gaulle, seemed to recognise this from the off. In 1967, he cited the UK’s “deep-seated hostility” to European construction as one of his reasons for rejecting its second application to join the European Economic Community, one of the precursor bodies to the EU.
Many have accused De Gaulle of having a personal grudge against Britain. But it’s fair to say that there was some truth in what he was saying. When the British Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan announced in the House of Commons that the UK was making its first formal application to join the EEC in 1961, some in the chamber responded with cries of “shame”.
Listen NowOf course, this wasn’t the whole story; many in Britain were desperate to join the ECC, in particular the Europhile politician Ted Heath, who was the Conservatives’ chief negotiator in discussions to join the Common Market in the early 1960s.
Two years after De Gaulle’s death, the UK was eventually accepted into the ECC under Heath in 1972, who was by then the British prime minister, and officially became a member the following year on 1 January 1973. But almost immediately its membership appeared to be under threat from naysayers back home.
The first referendum
Just under two years after the UK became a member of the EEC, the opposition Labour Party ran on a general election platform that promised a referendum on this membership. Sound familiar? Well, in some ways, it was.
Like the Conservative Party under David Cameron, the Labour Party under Harold Wilson was thoroughly divided. After Labour won the election in October 1974, the government was officially in favour of staying in the ECC. But a party conference held in April the following year had attendees voting two to one in favour of withdrawal.
Unlike in June 2016, however, the British public in June 1975 – when Labour followed through on its promise to hold a referendum – wasn’t so split. Although turnout was low at just under 65%, 67.2% voted in favour of remaining in the European Communities – the collective term for three European organisations that were governed by the same institutions, among them the ECC.
By contrast, just 51.9% of voters chose to leave the EU in 2016.
The logo for the “Remain” campaign in the 1975 referendum. (Image Credit: MrPenguin20 / Commons).
But the UK still wasn’t what you’d call a full paid-up member of the European project. In 1979 it opted out of the European Monetary System, an arrangement designed to stabilise exchange rates across its members that is commonly viewed as a precursor to the eurozone.
And in 1983, an opposition Labour Party ran a general election campaign on the promise of withdrawing from the EC without a referendum at all.
Thatcher’s renegotiation
Though Labour was roundly defeated in 1983, it didn’t mean that British-European relations were in for a smooth sail with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government at the helm.
Part of the lingering hostility towards Europe was based on the perception that Britain was putting in more than it was getting out. Financial contributions were partly based on the VAT base of each country and not only was the UK’s proportionately higher in comparison to its gross national product than other members, but it seemed to be losing out when it came to agricultural subsidies too.
Around 70% of the European Communities budget went towards the Common Agricultural Policy, something that implemented a system of subsidies for farmers and other programmes. With the UK having a small agricultural sector, it wasn’t benefiting from CAP.
As a result, in June 1984, Thatcher negotiated a rebate for the UK that amounted to roughly 66% of its net contribution. This rebate did not come easily, however, and has remained a source of much tension between Britain and Europe ever since. In addition, the fact that the UK is the only member state to have what is effectively a permanent rebate has only added to its outside status in Europe.
For a few years after the rebate’s negotiation, though, it did seem as though things were beginning to look up for British-European relations.
Listen NowIn 1975, the UK ratified the Single European Act with the full support of Thatcher’s government. Not only was the act the first major revision of the 1957 Treaty of Rome – which established the ECC – but it set the Economic Community the momentous target of achieving a single market by 1992, as well as deepening political cooperation.
But, of course, the (sort of) good times weren’t to last.
The Eurosceptic ‘bastards’
Despite Thatcher’s deep reservations, in October 1990 the UK joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism, yet another precursor to the euro zone which this time saw the pound pegged to the German deutschmark. A month later, Thatcher resigned as prime minister amid divisions that stemmed at least in part from her party’s increasingly polarised views on Europe.
In September 1992, the Eurosceptics seemed to be proved right when the UK came crashing out of the ERM after the government was unable to stop the pound from going below its agreed lower value limit – an episode known as “Black Wednesday” due to the huge losses it brought to bear on taxpayers.
And that wasn’t to be the end of Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s Europe-related headaches. A rebellion had already begun within Major’s party against legislation designed to bring into force the Maastricht Treaty – an agreement that formalised European coordination in the areas of security, justice and foreign and home affairs, and created the EU.
The legislation was eventually, and torturously, passed by the House of Commons on 23 July 1993 and the treaty went into effect on 1 November of that year. But not before several showdowns between the prime minister and the rebels – including a rebel-orchestrated defeat of Major’s government over the legislation just a day before it was eventually passed.
The bill’s passage on a Friday did little to heal the battle wounds. That weekend, Major, who had previously had a reputation for being a “nice guy”, was famously caught on video tape referring to the Eurosceptics in his own cabinet as “bastards”.
The flag of the European Union. (Image Credit: MPD01605 / Commons).
Conservative in-fighting, the rise of UKIP and a decline in public support
With the UK now part of a European Union, it was more entangled in Europe that ever before. And, as we now well know, Conservative in-fighting over the issue didn’t go away.
Over the next 25 years, the debate over Britain’s membership of the EU would plague the Conservatives, with the European question coming to define much of the party’s internal politics.
Ironically, given the events of the 1970s and 80s, Labour became mostly united on the issue – though Euroscepticism among its more radical left-wing ranks persisted. The successive governments of Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair aimed for closer integration with the EU.
That all changed once the Conservative David Cameron was prime minister, however. After initially rejecting calls from those on the right of his party to hold an in-out referendum on the EU, the centrist politician soon changed his mind. In 2013 Cameron announced that his government would hold such a poll if re-elected in 2015. And, of course, he followed through on that promise.
Cameron, who campaigned to remain in the EU, announces his resignation after the 2016 referendum returned a “Leave” vote. (Image Credit: Tom Evans / Commons (Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.)).
But Conservative right-wingers weren’t the only Eurosceptic powers at play during this time. Running in parallel to events on the mainstream political stage were single-issue parties and candidates campaigning for Britain’s exit from the EU.
The most famous and effective of these was undoubtedly the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, which managed to grow from an inconsequential political player in the 1990s to take first place in the 2014 European Parliament election with a 27.5% share of the vote.
The party’s electoral success can be largely attributed to the former leadership of Nigel Farage who widened UKIP’s policy platform and successfully exploited and encouraged anti-immigrant sentiment, creating an inextricable link between unemployment, immigration and Britain’s membership of the EU in the minds of many.
Indeed, many believe that Cameron may not have promised a referendum had the pressure from UKIP not been so great.
Watch NowAlongside all of this, anti-European views were growing amongst the general public. According to the British Social Attitudes surveys, Euroscepticism increased from 38% in 1993 to 65% in 2015 – though it must be noted that Euroscepticism does not necessarily equate to wanting to leave the EU.
This potent cocktail of factors – and many more besides – helped not only lead Britain into the referendum in 2016 but also to the UK’s exit from the EU and it’s new relationship, which took effect on 1 January 2021.
(Main Image Credit: Christoph Scholz, CC).
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