What Thatcher would do today about ... Europe, April 15 2013
If in power today, the former Prime Minister would look at the evidence around the EU and vote for getting out, out, out
When speculating on what Margaret Thatcher would do if she was in power today, it is essential to remember that she was a scientist. Not a theoretical scientist but a real one — a research chemist who wass no stranger to the laboratory.
Everything in her politics was underpinned by the scientific method: the formulation, testing and modification of hypotheses. And when evidence proved received wisdom wrong, Mrs Thatcher was not afraid to change her mind.
So it was with her opinion on the Common Market and its evolution into the EU. Just go to the Thatcher Foundation website and search "Common Market"€�: her dismissal of concerns about the loss of sovereignty in the late 1960s and 1970s make her sound like Peter Mandelson today. Her belief in the conventional wisdom culminated in that infamous picture of her wearing her Joseph jumper of many flags, as she campaigned hard for a British “Yesâ€� vote in the 1975 referendum about whether to stay in.
The difference between 1975 and now is that the hypothesis that Britain is better off in the EU has been tested to destruction, refuted by bitter experience. So what would Mrs Thatcher do about Britain'€™s relationship with the EU if she was in power now?
Her position would be very simple: she would want out. The workings of the EU made it quite apparent to her that not only was it going down the wrong track, but that it would be unreformable.
When she was in No 10 and began seriously to question the route that the UK had set and she had followed, the "Brussels irregulars"€� in her own party, as Norman Tebbit has so pithily called them, blocked her. Nonetheless, out of office she was president of the Bruges Group, an organisation now dedicated to Britain'€™s withdrawal from the EU and her last book, Statecraft (2003), made some sharp observations about the dangers of the European project: "What we should grasp from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom . . ."€�
The UK certainly wouldn'€™t be in this current mess if she were in charge. Not only would our negotiations on countless directives small and large have been very different, we would never have signed up to the slew of post-Thatcher treaties as they stood. Simply put, she would never have allowed it. She, unlike the smaller men who have followed her, had the generosity of spirit to believe that the people of this country are quite capable of setting their own course. She, unlike today's hidebound elite, trusted the British people, their instincts and their drive. Her whole career was about proving that the man in Whitehall does not know best.
I was asked last week if UKIP would have been necessary if Mrs Thatcher had not been overthrown before the Maastricht treaty. Had she still been in power in 1992 there would have been a referendum on that treaty, and the need for UKIP would probably never have arisen.
What would she do today? She would trust the people and give them a say over the heads of the Establishment. So she would offer an in/out referendum now— and campaign hard for an "€œout€� vote" to ascertain the will of the people.
There would be two practical options open to her in the event of a vote for leaving. Either she would ask Parliament to repeal the European Communities Act, or she would comply with Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union and make clear the intention of British withdrawal before negotiating the details of exit. That is, after all, what European law demands —and she understood the law. She would have no truck with the deception being practised by the current Government, in which both consulting the people and the withdrawal option are afterthoughts.
Mrs Thatcher would follow the logic of what she knew to be true. As another scientist once said while pointing to the evidence, "and yet it moves"€�.
Nigel Farage is the leader of the UK Independence Party - Times
Posts
