[eurofacts ( Vol 4 No 15) - 2nd May 1999]

To describe Hugo Young as a journalist verges on lèse-majesté. This observation was borne in on me when, while organising a recent anti-EMU meeting, I included him among the lobby correspondents who received our press release. He replied with a courteous hand-written note, informing me that he spent very little time in the press gallery these days, and providing me with his address. I felt as though I had committed some graceless and blundering faux-pas. How could I have written to such an Olympian figure - editor-in-chief of the Guardian, three times columnist of the year, most revered of all liberal pundits - as though he were a mere hack?

The history of Britain in Europe is a suitably lofty theme for such a man. But the first thing that strikes the reader about This Blessed Plot is the strength of its primary research. Hugo Young is apparently not too grand to trawl through piles of Government documents and interview dozens of retired civil servants. Here is a work with genuine scholarly value, but written with an easy journalistic fluency.

This Blessed Plot traces the history of Britain's unhappy entanglements with the EEC from the end of the War to the present Government. Although he manages to keep it separate from his narrative, the author does not seek to disguise his own point of view. Young is attracted to that favourite of Europhile analyses, namely that Britain always hangs around until too late, and is thus forced to accept structures which others have erected in their own interests.

This thesis is not entirely without foundation. Had the United Kingdom been prepared to join the Common Market at Messina, it might have secured a better deal on farming and the Commonwealth. But - and Young makes no effort to disguise this - a more positive British attitude would not have diverted Europe away from the goal of federal union. It was, after all, on precisely this issue that the Macmillan and Wilson applications broke down. Nothing is more misleading than the idea that earlier British participation would have brought about something called "a Europe of nations". On the contrary, Britain was finally allowed to join in 1973 only because Edward Heath, unlike his predecessors, was prepared to accept the so called finalité politique.

In his enthusiasm to sustain the idea that Britain was damaged by its initially stand-offish attitude, Young overlooks this country's massive commitment to the post-war reconstruction of Europe: its pivotal position in NATO, its support for the OEEC, its leading role in the Council of Europe, its contribution to the defence of the Continent through the British Army of the Rhine. With a certain Whiggery, he takes for granted Britain's eventual adherence to the EEC, scarcely bothering to look at whether the concept of a wider free trade area might have been made to work.

When writing of the Euro-sceptics, Young has a tendency to praise them individually but damn them collectively. He has taken the trouble to understand the views of the more prominent anti-federalist politicians, and uses their critique as a continuing counterpoint to his own. But when writing of them as a bloc, all the old prejudices come out: Euro-sceptics are blinkered, nostalgic, xenophobic and so on. It does not seem to occur to him that this view sits oddly with his own portrayals of Anthony Eden, Enoch Powell, John Biffen and the other leading opponents of federalism. So appealing is the image of the sceptic Blimp that even the more intelligent Europhiles evidently find it hard to relinquish.

Surveying the period as a whole, two conclusions in particular jump out at the reader. First, the economic balance sheet of EEC membership has almost always been negative. Whenever the Treasury has been asked for a cost/benefit analysis, it has concluded that the penalties of membership - principally the inflationary impact of higher prices and the damage to Britain's trade balance - outweigh any gains. Successive Governments have tended to take the view that these disadvantages ought to be set against the increased diplomatic clout that EEC membership supposedly brings. So it is interesting that, for over thirty years, the general public have been encouraged to see the European debate in precisely opposite terms: as a series of political costs outweighed by economic gains.

Second, the European project really has been a conspiracy - or, more properly, what H.G. Wells once called an open conspiracy. Its true villains (or, in Hugo Young's terms, heroes) are the Europhile civil servants who gradually took over the FCO during the 1960s: John Robinson, Roger Makins, Michael Palliser. These men, whose names are barely known outside Whitehall and Brussels, managed to sustain a constant pro-EEC policy regardless of the comings and goings of their ministers. "The interests of their country and their careers coincided", writes Young. "It was an appealing symbiosis".

Interestingly enough, Young now regrets the stealthy way in which federalism has been pursued. Ardent European though he is, he blames the political class of the 1960s and 1970s for failing to prepare Britain intellectually for the redefinition of their country that EEC membership would mean. But all that, he concludes, could be about to change. For the United Kingdom, at last, has a Prime Minister with a truly European vision and the authority to carry the country with him.

This final conclusion is chillingly plausible. The only cause for which Tony Blair has displayed any real enthusiasm is the Continentalisation of Britain. There is a consistency to New Labour's programme. The abolition of the House of Lords, the establishment of devolved assemblies, the retreat from Anglo-Saxon economics, the attack on first-past-the-post voting, the incorporation of the European Convention on human rights: taken together, these changes add up to a conscious attempt to redefine Britain, to iron out the peculiarities that have made us different from Europe. Political union would be the culmination and vindication of New Labour's project. Little now stands in its way.