Today sees the publication of the University of Bath's Instiutute of Policy Research's referendum policy brief, a document that brings together contributions from a number of academics with the purpose of informing readers about the issues at stake in the EU referendum. Many of these issues are not new, but the way they are debated has changed dramatically over time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the Conservative Party that led Britain into membership of the European Economic Community. Seeking a new anchor for Britain’s geo-political interests after decolonisation and the fiasco of Suez, and despairing of the capacity of Britain’s post-war Keynesian economic settlement to solve its class conflicts, Conservative leaders orientated towards Europe’s successful social market models. The Labour Party went along with this reluctantly: for the most part, it remained Eurosceptic and wedded to the idea that the unitary British state was the vehicle for social progress. But by holding a referendum on Britain’s membership of the common market in 1975, it was able to paper over its internal divisions.
Both positions were upended by Thatcherism, which imposed a new political economic settlement on the UK that dispensed with the coordination of class interests, while shifting to a more aggressive Atlanticism in foreign policy. Europe was no longer a source of inspiration for economic policy, but instead an enlarged free market for British trade. Manufacturing declined – although foreign direct investment in key sectors like automotives was facilitated on the basis that the UK had access to the European market – and a new growth model was created, which had the finance sector, centred on the City, and consumption-led services, with a prominent role for the housing market, at its heart. In turn, this changed the terrain for the British left, which came to see Europe as a means for renewing social partnership in the economy, and as a post-national platform for revitalising the Keynesian project of full employment and investment-led growth in conditions of globalisation. Euroscepticism waned on the left, as it waxed on the right.
