Thursday, 21 March 2024

Britain and the Common Market

This is a post about a highly informative Twitter thread that was also fascinating for other reasons too.  The similarities between Trump and his MAGA supporters and Boris Johnson and Brexit have been commented on many times before. In their own ways, they are both cults of a sort. The way that people are convinced a myth or a lie is true in the face of incontrovertible evidence that it isn’t is interesting to me and probably needs to be better understood. MAGAs are absolutely sure that Trump is a genius businessman despite multiple bankruptcies, with a reputation for ‘stiffing’ (not paying) contractors. They also think Barack Obama is still running America, wasn’t born in the USA, and is a Muslim.  None of which is true, of course.

But Brexit has plenty of myths of its own.  One of the more enduring is that voters in 1970 and 1975 were never told joining the EEC (as it then was) involved a political dimension, if not explicitly a union.  The use of the phrase 'Common Market' as shorthand for the EEC was exploited much later by Brexiteers like Farage to persuade people they and their predecessors were misled, when they were not. At least I wasn't.

A tweet on Monday showed how deeply fixated this idea has become among the diminishing cabal of Brexit supporters. It began when Nick Reeves, an anti-Brexit campaigner with 70,000 followers, posted something on Sunday about the UK being the sick man of Europe and this got a response from a Twitter user with the handle Minarchist@MinarchistUK and the requisite Union Jack alongside his name.

This is it:

Mr Minarchist is not only utterly certain that the British public was kept in the dark about anything other than matters of trade, but he also claims that the PM who originally took us in, Edward Heath, has admitted doing the misleading!

This was quickly followed up by Steve Analyst (I’ve mentioned him before on this blog, I assume this is a pseudonym and not his real name) who posted a two-minute video compilation showing various politicians and commentators from the seventies talking openly about a European political union on national TV. This is when we had just three channels and Panorama was regularly watched by ten million viewers.

Most people would have shut up but not Minarchist.

He (again I’m perhaps making assumptions here, it might be a woman but somehow I don’t think it is) came back claiming the clips had been doctored to "fool the weak of mind" and came from after the 1975 referendum.

So, Steve responded with another compilation, this time going back to the fifties and sixties including televised contributions from The Duke of Edinburgh, Harold MacMillan, and Edward Heath as well as various opponents of the EEC, all talking about political union and the future 'United States of Europe'. He also included screenshots of mainstream British national newspapers and finished with a statement made by Heath in 1962 to the West European Ministerial Council and presented to parliament in May 1962.

This obviously didn't do the trick. Minarchist responded with his own clip of the pro-Brexit historian Andrew Roberts on YouTube repeating the myth that Heath had ‘misled’ the British people about the political side, something he apparently had to do, otherwise he wouldn’t have got the legislation through parliament.

This seemed to trigger something in Steve Analyst because he then posted a screenshot of a Guardian article from 14 October 1971 where Heath is quoted saying joining the EEC meant, "political union not in our children's time but in our time."

Minachist rejected the evidence and as usual with this sort of argument when confronted with facts, he resorted to insults:

We were then treated to a veritable barrage of screenshots of newspaper headlines and political announcements (with dates) all of which spoke of political union. It is a remarkable list (and well worth reading) but still not enough for Minarchist who retorts:

Quite how Minarchist was unable to "corroborate" all the dozens of newspaper reports is amazing.

Undeterred, Steve provides yet more evidence, this time a press conference and an interview with Heath carried by both BBC and ITV plus an announcement to parliament.  He, rightly in my opinion, says if voters "didn't realise that was political union after being told for 15 years, they need to see a doctor."

Minarchist didn't reply.  Perhaps one day someone will study the whole phenomenon to really understand what's going on.

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