From Europe: The Bane of the Conservative Party by Norman Tebbit (2004)
The European Union has always divided British politics. If the extent of its damage was known to the politicians when the European Steel and Coal Community was being started up, Churchill and Attlee would have roamed the nation and backbenches to force their men to promise that they would never try to join such an entity and Herbert Morrison's words would have become gospel rather then ignored. However, events have a strange way of acting and hindsight is no friend of economics and politics, much to the anger of many socialists who think they can declare what the future will be like, and Britain is now chained to the design of a bureaucratic, monolithic organisation that seeks mindless expansion and assimilation for nation states.
This was something that should have ended when Herbert Morrison was badgered by the press about this new idea being formulated on the continent and ceased it all with a simple response, "The Durham miners won't wear it," one of the few times that trade union power helped the country. Unfortunately, it only had the problem go to sleep and left it to Harold Macmillan, a Prime Minister who loved socialism more then Hugh Gaitskell, to make sure that the trouble went on as he dogmatically kept asking for membership in the Common Market. This was stopped, ironically, by Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, and it was only until he was gone and his successor was hoping that Britain would keep Europe from federalising any longer.
I know, this does all sound very strange. The new leaders of the Labour Party and Conservatives, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, were now determined to force Britain into the Common Market and were going to silence any person who tried to point out their goal of being part of a federal European state. They launched a large campaign filled with lies and deceit over only joining free trade and deriding opponents as 'little Englanders' and other names, even accusing Tony Benn and Enoch Powell of being the same type when Benn refused to be on the same podium as Powell. They gained their victory, at the cost of the trust of many backbenchers, and gained a forced consensus that thinking about leaving Europe would cause them to act in a petty manner and try to destroy us through trade.
One person noticed that frontiers were being established on a European level when they were now being destroyed on the British level, Margaret Thatcher was radically changing the country and was also attempting to remind the leaders of Europe that they still had to answer to their people as she dared to stand up for British interests. Some would like to claim that she was just as in love with federalisation as Ted Heath since she signed the Single European Act, when she had actually fought to keep it from endangering Britain's interest and now has chosen to regret such action. However, all good things must come to an end, as Margaret Thatcher was stabbed in the back by someone who hated that he was part of a dying faction, Michael Heseltine, using the unease over the Poll Tax to boost his credentials and forced her to resign. A great victory for those who strived to ignore the wishes of Britain.
John Major then defeated the upstart and became the compromise Prime Minister, winning the next election and certifying the dominance of the blindly movement for the Euro, another scheme by Brussels to kill sovereignty, only to find that he couldn't turn back the clock and saw that people like myself, Thatcher, Bill Cash and many others were not going to let this happen. Many movements were formed, the Anti-Federalist League was one such example, to fight against attempts to subvert the will of the public and Major had to deal with them more then once, to his displeasure, and it showed when he called them 'bastards' on the news.
We probably should have noticed something when Tony Blair, blatantly a supporter of the single currency, soon began to gain Labour a twenty percent poll lead against us, through copying the popular parts of Thatcherism and having no actual beliefs over then mindlessly obeying Brussels and trade unions. There was a worry as we looked divided, due to many cabinet ministers and older MPs refusing to listen to their voters and grass-roots, and economically incompetent after Black Wednesday had ruined our image, another present from Brussels.
There was still a hope left for those who were not content with abandoning the British identity and history for bureaucratic and inefficient rule from Brussels. A hope that came from one of the few politicians who could actually call themselves European without looking silly, Sir James Goldsmith, the Anglo-French son of a German, founder of the Referendum Party and someone who had Margaret Thatcher's admiration along with my own. He knew that having a referendum on casting away the chains of Brussels was one that not many could actually argue against and set up a party after Major proved to be too stubborn to persuade, something that I was thankful for.
As the 1997 election ended and others had their results, I was starting to be one of the few who still thought that.