It was a speech by the "razor sharp" Enoch Powell that converted him to Euroscepticism, and Wilson was forever after convinced that "the structures and ambitions of the EU were incompatible with my idea of a sovereign Parliament and nation."
It was the rhetoric of Britain's foremost racist that did the trick, apparently.
Eliot Wilson was once a House of Commons clerk, including on the Defence Committee and Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee and is a contributing editor at Defence On The Brink and senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity. I calculate he must be in his late forties, so born around the time of the 1975 referendum or just after. He has spent his entire life inside the EU.
His piece is titled: Brexiteers are losing the argument
Let's give him credit for recognising the blindingly obvious. The sub-title is, "We must make a rational and cool-headed case for why Britain is better off outside the EU." And that is where his problems start, and end.
Wilson is worried that Labour is leading Britain, handcuffed, back into the EU. He quotes Ian Duncan Smith (and Mark Francois!), a man you could never accuse of thinking things through, about the recent agreement with Spain to pull Gibraltar into Schengen:
"They’re using Gibraltar as a lever to get themselves back closer to Europe. He [Starmer] wants to undo Brexit. The whole plan of this Labour Government, who hated Brexit, is that over a period of time it will become impossible for us not to rejoin."
I'll save you the trouble of reading the whole article, but that's his argument. Britain is on its way back into Europe quietly via the tradesman's entrance. So, what's his "rational and cool-headed case" for Brexit? It comes in the penultimate paragraph:
"We cannot be dragged back into the EU; if we return it will be by consent. For those of us who think that would be a mistake, we have to develop a clear and credible alternative. We are a sovereign nation and Parliament but we must also exploit our unique combination of advantages — language, commercial culture, global networks, geography, strength in financial services, education and research — to remake a prosperous economy built on free trade, innovation and self-confidence."
That’s it, by the way. Nothing else. No firm, detailed ideas. No plan. No magic bullet.
We had what Mr Wilson outlines - the language, commercial culture, global networks, geography (not sure what that means), strength in financial services, education and research - for decades well before we joined the EEC and couldn't succeed. We were the world’s richest and most powerful country for most of the 19th century.
Our decline from the heights has taken two world wars and about a century.
It was that noticeable decline, and the Europeans overtaking us in prosperity, that prompted Britain (both major parties) to join the EEC in the first place, for heaven’s sake.
In the 1950s, we were more globally connected than we are now, and couldn’t "exploit" it. We ran India and half the world, but now even our former colonies buy German, Japanese and Korean goods in preference to ours. What did he think was going to happen?
It’s the arrogance that frustrates me. The equivalent of watching an oik from the Home Counties smelling of mothballs and shouting ever-louder at the foreign waiter because he can't understand English. Look at us, we're British, and we deserve to have everything we want, when we want it.
He seems to think all we need to do is tell customers that in Britain we speak English (everybody in the world does nowadays) and have a commercial culture, to have them beating a path to us, order book in hand. Do. Me. A. Favour. It is absolutely infuriating.
Having lived in an EU member state for the whole of his life, Wilson (and Hannan and others) are slowly discovering what we boomers realised in 1973. Life outside the EU is not easy. And that was in a world where we could rely on the Americans, and China was a sleeping giant nobody thought would ever wake up.
I don't think we need to worry. After nine long years this is the best argument one of the better-educated supporters of Brexit can come up with. Wilson is standing over the corpse of Brexit looking for a defibrillator that isn't there.
He'll get the message eventually.
