Sir John Major, the former prime minister, said the other day that if Britain left the EU it would be disastrous for the economy. Sage words, one might think, from a man who's sat in the top circle of government and who might be expected to know things like this from experience.
Hang on though. This John Major is the same John Major who, nearly twenty two years ago, signed the Maastricht Treaty which allowed the EEC to transform itself in the the present cleptocratic, morally and financially corrupt EU. This is an achievement he's always seemed rather proud of. So perhaps he should have declared an interest before making his public prediction of calamity should the British People decide to declare that they never gave him a mandate to sign our sovereignty away in the first place.
It's not as if we were that comfortable about our membership of the EEC in the first place. Ah yes - the good old EEC, which started life as a free trade arrangement under the Marshal Plan in order to help rebuild the shattered economies of Europe after the Second World War. In its early days our own economy was fairly shattered and we probably would have benefitted from membership. But Charles de Gaulle saw to it that we didn't get in when it might have been useful to. The same ungrateful de Gaulle who had been sheltered and supported to the hilt by Britain during the very war the continent was recovering from. Luckily though, we still had the British Empire to trade with so after a few hard years of austerity the British economy was rebuilt without the need to be part of the EEC. As the Empire transformed itself into the Commonwealth we continued to enjoy a healthy and mutually beneficial trade with our established trading partners and things seemed very healthy.
Some of our politicians were still mentally living in the late 1940s though. MacMillan was a keen devotee of EEC membership and so of course was Ted Heath. Mac got knocked back but was still able to point to the economy and remind us that times had never been so good. By the time Ted Heath was in the hot seat the world was changing and the time when it would have benefitted us to join the EEC was probably already past. Heath hadn't noticed though. Whether it was his love of sailing, his penchant for conducting orchestras while the economy sank, or the wretched business of trying half heartedly to confront the militant unions who Wilson had allowed to become over mighty, who is to know. But his rosy spectacled view of the EEC ensured that while everything fell down around him, he lost none of his avowed Europhilia.
As soon as the opportunity allowed, Heath railroaded his country into membership of his long desired dancing partner. The EEC promptly imposed quotas to dictate who Britain could trade with and by what factor. Cheers in Downing St were matched a thousandfold by anger around the Commonwealth, where countries like Australia and New Zealand saw their export trade slashed by as much as a third. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for a severe anti-British backlash to take root in many parts of the world which had once been coloured pink on the map. The desperate search for new markets in the years following 1973 meant many of our best friends in the world turned to look away from us. The painful memory of being kicked in the teeth and needing to find new friends has imprinted itself on the collective minds of many in the Commonwealth and is one of the strongest root causes of the anti-British attitudes that many people in those countries now espouse, along with the alternative views on our shared history which have accompanied this souring of attitudes.
Back in Britain, shorn of friends in the world and presented with new partners who looked down their noses at us as we all felt the heat of the oil shocks, the voting public grudgingly said 'yes' in a referendum on what was in any case a fait accompli (and which was widely rumoured to have been rigged, as well). The youngest person to have had that dubious honour is now 56.
A little like John Major and Maastricht, Ted Heath was enormously proud of having chained us to the continent. But then, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he thought of himself as a great man, so I suppose it was only natural for him to feel that everything he did was wonderful. I wonder if Pope Paul VI agreed with Mr Heath's assessment of himself when he was presented with a signed photo of the prime minister as a official gift during a state visit.
Whatever the supposed merits of Ted Heath's tenure of 10 Downing Street, it remains the case that no-one under the age of 56 has ever has a say on whether they wish to remain part of the EU. It is also the case that the EU of today is an entirely different beast to the EEC of 1975 in both name and nature.
John Major may look back on his years as prime minister with a sense of nostalgia, if not achievement, but that does not give him the right to make patently false claims in public. On one hand, the percentage of our trade with non-EU markets (including many of our old friends in the Commonwealth) grows steadily year on year, and on the other, why on Earth would manufacturers and farmers within the EU wish to deny themselves business by refusing to trade with their established market in an independent Britain? In his prophesies of doom, Mr Major is as deluded as Mr Heath was in the 1970s. Leaving the EU will not bring us low as we were forced to bring our friends low under Heath. It would give us our independence back and millions of people want to be able to say so. Who is John Major to deny them that right?
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