by Ranjit Sidhu
If we are really honest, the United Kingdom has never fully bought into the EU. Like the sulking teenager on a family holiday, we have been sitting there, slightly away from the others, looking in the opposite direction and when asked our opinion mumbled something unintelligible or shouted back “You all do what you want, just leave me alone” (see any EU treaty since inception).
This position has led to the EU institutions being shaped by others so as to appear completely foreign to the eyes of the UK general public.
This refusal to get fully involved has also lead to the UK pursuing policies on Europe that have evolved into reasons for leaving.
It is often forgotten that the expansion of the EU to encompass the Eastern European states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Poland was a policy pushed hard by the Eurosceptics.
It was a policy that John Major used to provide some semblance of unity for his Government in making Europe “wider rather than deeper”, i.e. enlarging the Union to prevent the great fear of the Eurosceptics in the 1990s: a Franco/German/Benelux political union.
That it was a Eurosceptic policy that has led inevitably to budget flows from the rich Western European countries to the development of the poorer Eastern European countries and the inevitable flow of workers in the opposite direction is ironic, but also instructive; if we do not fully get involved in the decision-making at the heart of the European project our policies will come back to haunt us.
Another forgotten detail of European history is that when Margaret Thatcher made her famous “No, No, No” speech in Parliament, it was in part against the suggestion of the then European Commission president, Jacques Delores, of making the European Parliament more central to the decision-making process in Europe.
