This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
This must be the place. Walking along a Georgian terrace in the West End of Edinburgh I have reached a brass plaque announcing the representative office of the European Commission. It is 1984. From their silos, Soviet SS20s have the coordinates to hit targets from Bari to Bonn. Our allies are in danger. And so, answering the call, I have turned up in uniform. School uniform.
At the door I explain my mission. I may be too young to fight, but I want to spread the truth about how the European Economic Community is a vital pillar of the Atlantic Alliance — cruise missiles may be our spear, but the Common Agricultural Policy is our shield.
But rather than invite me in, the keeper of the inner door mutely gestures to the low magazine stand in the vestibule where there’s a pamphlet explaining the role of each EEC institution and a booklet on how Brussels’s renewal of the Lomé Convention is ending poverty in Africa. I gather these brochures into my satchel and depart, somewhat deflated.
A decade later, this missed opportunity to become a young pioneer in the Monnet-Schuman battalion came back to my mind whilst lounging on the leather upholstery of the Reform Club’s library.
I was participating in an event for Cambridge Union committee members and alumni on the future of the re-minted European Union. And I had swapped sides. I no longer thought Western civilisation depended upon the unwavering application of the acquis communautaire.
The division I spotted amongst attendees that day seemed clearly defined. Many of those who had been Cambridge Union officeholders between the 1960s and early 1980s were almost Heathite in their commitment to “ever-closer union”.
They did not focus on why just-in-time supply chains need frictionless trade, as later Remainers did. The sum of their argument was that our world was getting smaller, and we would shrink too unless we embraced something bigger. The British project had failed. With luck the European project might rescue us.
Something enticed conservative young people away from the belief that Brussels was Britain’s only hope
By contrast, it was the Cambridge twentysomethings — those then studying at the university or its recent graduates — who had converted to Euroscepticism.
Something happened in the period between Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges Speech of 1988 and John Major’s negotiations at Maastricht in 1992 that enticed many well-educated conservative-minded young people away from the established belief cherished by their parents and predecessors that Brussels was Britain’s only hope. What was it?
In the early 1990s I had co-founded Cambridge University Students Against a Federal Europe (CU SAFE) as a forum to hear the case for government by national rather than supranational institutions.
By college butteries we put up posters proclaiming Bill Cash’s visit to share his views on the Maastricht Treaty. Such was the demand that we had to move the event to a considerably larger hall. Previously, Enoch Powell’s appearances at his alma mater had been greeted with protests — but in 1995 the Cambridge Union voted with him to say “No” to the EU.
The same was happening at Oxford, only more so. In 1990, Oriel history undergraduate Daniel Hannan founded the university branch of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIB). It quickly became Oxford’s second largest student political society.
Hundreds of its members eagerly piled into Peckwater Quad to hear Professor Norman Stone who, as the term card promised, “chooses the anniversary of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to discuss the future of Europe. Commonwealth wine will be provided”.
It was a milieu well suited to the sort of fresh-faced conservative that admissions tutors now try to weed out. Something of the flavour is provided in the lyrics of the Oxford CIB’s after-dinner group singalong to the tune of “The British Grenadiers”.
Some talk of Norman Tebbit
And some of Maggie T
And some of Nicky Ridley
And such fine men as he
But of all of England’s heroes
There are none so fine, say we
As the honest, loyal, anti-federalist
Oxford CIB
This age has passed. But it’s worth recalling because a large enough minority of politically attuned young people were attracted to Euroscepticism as the cause of their time. Some, like Hannan, played a leading role in subsequent events.
Looking back on that afternoon in the Reform Club library in the mid-1990s I now think I understand better why the older generation had such faith in “Europe”. They had grown up during a long period of managed national decline during which continental economies had almost invariably outperformed that of Britain.
By contrast, us impudent pups who disagreed with their conclusion had become politically conscious in the white heat of mid-to-late Thatcherism and believed that Britain had re-energised itself. Whilst the Europe emerging from years of Andreotti, Mitterrand and Kohl looked corporatist and tired, we thought Britain could make it.
That, perhaps, is the saddest part of the story.
