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Victory or Death
Feb. 17th, 2019 11:17 amBook Review: Half In, Half Out - Prime Ministers on Europe, edited by Andrew Adonis
I picked this up in the work book sale last year, and it seemed about time to read it, before it is too late. It's a collection of essays by various authors, one on each post-war British Prime Minister from Churchill to May. As such it sometimes suffers from a lack of a coherent point of view, and has some repetition across chapters, but on the whole that doesn't detract much from the book.
Churchill is a logical starting point, although one might debate whether he counts as the "first" post-war Prime Minister. Unfortunately this proves to be a slightly wobbly start, as much of the chapter is written in a counterfactual style, suggesting Churchill won the 1945 general election. Given the state of knowledge of some of our elected representatives, this perhaps needs to be made clearer. In the climate of fake news, it could also have done to clarify the background around some misquotes to strengthen its evidence for Churchill's post-war position on Europe.
My overall impression from the book is that Britain has had four post-war pro-Europe Prime Ministers, out of fourteen: Churchill, Macmillan, Heath and Blair. Attlee and Eden are the most obvious Eurosceptics, both seemingly out of a fondness for Britain's imperial past, an attitude that unhelpfully persists to this day. Wilson, it appears, was downright opportunistic, opposing and supporting as it suited him for domestic politics; but the prevailing position has been acquiescence, with most ultimately trying to make Europe work better for Britain, and in general, constructively with their EU counterparts. Adonis' own essay on Tony Blair poses the interesting what-if? of how things would have been different had Blair taken the UK into the Euro and stayed out of Iraq, partly a butterfly effect from 9/11 and Blair's own thrall to George W Bush, but also partly a legacy from Labour maintaining stronger links with the US Democrats than with the various Social Democratic parties in European countries. It was a critical timidity on Blair's part, failing to recognise that there was a window of opportunity to join the leading members of the EU that would pass, instead following Britain's policy of letting others take the lead in the hope of joining them later, if successful. Another decision, plainly flawed with hindsight though probably made with good intention, was to depart from the policy chosen by other states to constrain migration from Eastern European following the accession of those states in 2004. Ivan Rogers chooses to focus on technicalities in his essay on David Cameron, which results in a rather anaemic product of civil service neutrality. Neither Brown nor May come away with good marks; both failed to understand the European mindset and process (in May's case, not helped by the self-inflicted action of purging almost anyone in the previous regime who knew about Europe). It seems unwise to rule out any possible outcomes, but the balance of probability right now seems to be that things won't go well.
I picked this up in the work book sale last year, and it seemed about time to read it, before it is too late. It's a collection of essays by various authors, one on each post-war British Prime Minister from Churchill to May. As such it sometimes suffers from a lack of a coherent point of view, and has some repetition across chapters, but on the whole that doesn't detract much from the book.
Churchill is a logical starting point, although one might debate whether he counts as the "first" post-war Prime Minister. Unfortunately this proves to be a slightly wobbly start, as much of the chapter is written in a counterfactual style, suggesting Churchill won the 1945 general election. Given the state of knowledge of some of our elected representatives, this perhaps needs to be made clearer. In the climate of fake news, it could also have done to clarify the background around some misquotes to strengthen its evidence for Churchill's post-war position on Europe.
My overall impression from the book is that Britain has had four post-war pro-Europe Prime Ministers, out of fourteen: Churchill, Macmillan, Heath and Blair. Attlee and Eden are the most obvious Eurosceptics, both seemingly out of a fondness for Britain's imperial past, an attitude that unhelpfully persists to this day. Wilson, it appears, was downright opportunistic, opposing and supporting as it suited him for domestic politics; but the prevailing position has been acquiescence, with most ultimately trying to make Europe work better for Britain, and in general, constructively with their EU counterparts. Adonis' own essay on Tony Blair poses the interesting what-if? of how things would have been different had Blair taken the UK into the Euro and stayed out of Iraq, partly a butterfly effect from 9/11 and Blair's own thrall to George W Bush, but also partly a legacy from Labour maintaining stronger links with the US Democrats than with the various Social Democratic parties in European countries. It was a critical timidity on Blair's part, failing to recognise that there was a window of opportunity to join the leading members of the EU that would pass, instead following Britain's policy of letting others take the lead in the hope of joining them later, if successful. Another decision, plainly flawed with hindsight though probably made with good intention, was to depart from the policy chosen by other states to constrain migration from Eastern European following the accession of those states in 2004. Ivan Rogers chooses to focus on technicalities in his essay on David Cameron, which results in a rather anaemic product of civil service neutrality. Neither Brown nor May come away with good marks; both failed to understand the European mindset and process (in May's case, not helped by the self-inflicted action of purging almost anyone in the previous regime who knew about Europe). It seems unwise to rule out any possible outcomes, but the balance of probability right now seems to be that things won't go well.