A decade in crisis

‘I voted to stay in a common market. No one ever mentioned a political union.’ It is the complaint of an entire generation — the generation, by and large, that switched its vote between 1975 and 2016. It is also, as Robert Saunders shows in this eloquent history of the earlier poll, based on a false memory. Anti-Marketeers in 1975, especially Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, constantly talked about ‘our right to rule ourselves’. Supporters of the EEC, for their part, were never happier than when lecturing voters about the benefits of swapping theoretical sovereignty for actual power.

But the voters — empirical, practical, Anglo-Saxon — wanted examples. Abstract nouns like ‘sovereignty’ left them cold. What did sovereignty mean? Both sides found that, in order to connect, they had to talk about day-to-day consequences, such as Commonwealth trade and food prices. This is what voters took away from the whole exercise, and what they remember still.

Forty-one years later, Vote Leave was similarly actuated by the desire to take back national independence and, like its predecessor campaign, found that voters preferred practical instances to academic theories. So it talked about money, laws and borders. Once again, many commentators took away the examples rather than the underlying theme they had been chosen to illustrate. It has become an article of faith among Remainers that the 2016 poll was ‘all about immigration’, even though a mountain of polling data shows that the top issue for Leavers was indeed self-government.

It would be easy to write a book about such parallels. Easy and dull. It would be marginally less dull to write a book about the odd mirror images. In 1975, it was Labour that split while the Tories were largely pro-European — though their new leader was excoriated for keeping too low a profile (the famous photograph of Margaret Thatcher in that hideous jumper made up of the nine EEC flags gives a false impression: she was far more reluctant than we now recall).