Title: The EU: so where did it all go wrong?
Headings: The EU: so where did it all go wrong?
The EU: so where did it all go wrong?
Content: European law did and does override British law, and more and more of it was coming down the tracks from Brussels. In the late 1980s came three pivotal developments that changed the debate dramatically. Until then, the main hostility to Europe had been on the Left, and the main support for it on the Right. On the tenth anniversary of Britain’s accession, in 1983, Thatcher wrote that “the unity of Europe is a goal for which I pledge my government to work”. Labour, meanwhile, fought the election that year on a platform of withdrawal from the EEC. The arrival of Jacques Delors, a French socialist, as president of the European Commission turned that upside down. Delors was deeply ambitious for a more federal Europe, including a single currency. At a famous speech to the TUC in 1988, Delors won over large parts of the British Left with the argument that they could use Europe as a back-door way of achieving the kind of social-democratic state that they had not managed to win via the British electorate. The Tories, the Right-wing press and the business world were horrified at Delors’ vision of a Europe where common social policies would be followed. As Thatcher put it in her famous Bruges speech, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”