Between two such mastiffs, each convinced of the justice of their cause, a clash was inevitable. On 6 July 1988, Delors delivered a speech in which he predicted that 80 per cent of the Community’s economy and much of its social and political policy would be determined at European rather than national level. He added, two weeks later, that the ‘germ’ of a European government was now laid. These statements alone would have been enough to irritate and even dismay the British prime minister, but Delors then committed a more serious offence. On 8 September, he took his case for federalism to the British TUC.
Under Michael Foot, the Labour party had been almost implacably hostile to Britain’s membership of the EEC. The European project was a capitalist cartel that had compromised Britain’s sovereignty and would render nearly impossible the implementation of a truly socialist programme in Britain. By 1987, with the more pragmatic Neil Kinnock as leader, the party had softened its stance. Speaking quietly, Delors appeared to promise the unions a restoration of the rights they had assumed in the Seventies. ‘Dear friends,’ he said in valediction. ‘We need you.’ Almost to a member, the congress rose in enraptured applause. It says much for his powers of persuasion that even Michael Foot, seeing his beloved unions wooed, now began to support the EEC.
Not only had Delors placed himself in the vanguard of a vision that Thatcher could never accept, he was now appealing to her oldest and greatest enemies in its defence. An opportunity to make her feelings known came quickly when, in September 1988, she was invited to address the College of Europe in Bruges. Her speech began innocuously enough, as she hastened to root Britain firmly within Europe, its traditions and values. Then the tone changed: ‘But we British have in a special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom … Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice.’
Up to this point, the speech had been well judged, with references to British help for Europe balanced by praise for Belgian courage. Now she directed the conference’s attention to the east. ‘The European Community is one manifestation of … European identity, but it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.’ The message was plain: Europe must look beyond Western Europe. But the vision, though expansive, was incomplete. Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Russia, having nothing in the way of a capitalist tradition, simply did not count. ‘Europe,’ she continued, ‘will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity.’ The nation state, not the Commission, should be at the heart of Europe. That this ran counter to at least some of the reforms established by the Single European Act was an irony lost on her. Nonetheless, Thatcher’s understanding of a Europe run by European nations was thoroughly of a piece with her support for British membership in 1973. The term ‘Eurosceptics’ was not yet in currency, but even if it had been, the Bruges speech furnishes no evidence that Thatcher was of their number.
Later in the speech, she made the assertion for which the speech will always be remembered. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ Perhaps she imagined that this would go down well in Bruges, a rival Belgian city, but it seems improbable. Ironically enough, the expression ‘superstate’ was one of the few with which none in her party, or in the Foreign Office, took issue at the time.
The free movement of peoples was all very well, she suggested, but border controls were needed if the citizen was to be protected from crime, drugs or illegal immigrants. The speech trumpeted NATO, though with a warning that member states of the union should begin to pay their share. She also invoked her bête noire, protectionism. ‘We have a responsibility,’ she said, ‘to give a lead on this, a responsibility which is particularly directed towards the less developed countries. They need not only aid; more than anything they need improved trading opportunities if they are to gain the dignity of growing economic strength and independence.’
It was a point that was also to be raised by many on the left, for whom the European Community was an overfed giant that squatted on the smaller economies, crushing all breath from them. It was altogether a remarkable affair, but none foresaw how deeply it would alter Thatcher’s reputation and her dealings with those in Europe. Howe was forthright when he read the first draft, remarking that ‘there are some plain and fundamental errors in the draft and … it tends to view the world as though we had not adhered to any of the treaties.’ It was a just point, but then Howe went further. While he agreed that ‘a stronger Europe does not mean the creation of a superstate’, he re-emphasized the unpalatable fact that it ‘does and will require the sacrifice of political independence and the rights of national parliaments. That is inherent in the treaties.’
This Thatcher could never accept, yet Howe was right. Clause Eleven of the Treaty of Accession had made it quite clear that the laws of the European Community would supersede those of the English parliament. Thatcher’s curious doublethink on the matter ended in what Howe was later to call her ‘defection’ from the party. Whatever the intention may have been, the speech achieved precisely the opposite of what many had hoped. Thatcher could not but intrude her own vision in a speech conceived to celebrate AngloEuropean unity. Now, however inadvertently, she had opened a fissure between herself and her colleagues in the cabinet, in the party and in Europe.
55
Money, money, money
The Conservatives had been elected on a promise of economic salvation, reelected when recession turned into a boom, and elected again because enough of the populace had become wealthy. New wealth had created new types – along with the ‘yuppie’ was the ‘wide boy’, immortalized by the comedian Harry Enfield and his catchphrase ‘I’ve got loadsa money!’ This figure marked a revolution. There had been only a few epochs in English history in which ‘conspicuous consumption’ was not a matter for shame; this decade was one such epoch, but with a difference. The arrivistes of the Tudor or Victorian periods had attempted to array themselves in the ermine of pedigree, but the newly rich of the Eighties had no such anxieties. They did not seek to hide their origins or to emulate the accents of the upper class. They had ‘made good’ and that was enough.
In tandem with the wide boys strode the Sloane Rangers, a type made famous by The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The ‘Sloanes’ were rich, conservative and rural in sympathy if not always in location; they dressed in tweeds and ‘ate jelly with a fork’. In many respects they were thought to represent the last hurrah of old money, but this was erroneous. By the end of the decade, those who had inherited wealth still accounted for the top 57 per cent of the wealthy. ‘Popular capitalism’ was the term Thatcher adopted to encapsulate her vision of a property-owning democracy, an expression that had little resonance and less charm for many of the poorest.