One question often asked about Brexit is why Britain is the only member ever seriously to contemplate leaving the eu (though Greenland, a former Danish colony, set a precedent by walking out in 1985). Among several books that try to answer it is this one from 2020 by a former British permanent representative to the eu and later adviser to Tony Blair. Sir Stephen explains how, from 1945 onwards, Britain was unique in Europe in being suspicious of the European project, standing aside when it began in 1950 and joining only with some reluctance in 1973. Margaret Thatcher’s premiership then set the stage for an antagonistic relationship that culminated in the 2016 referendum. Sir Stephen is also the official historian of two earlier books on Britain and the European Community, from which this book draws extensively. There was the whole debate about whether or not Parliament should vote on enacting Article 50. And the judges said, ‘Yes they have to.’ And the Daily Mail ran a column calling the judges enemies of the people, which is incredibly inflammatory. But this is how it works. We have always, for centuries, vested our sovereignty in parliament. You vote in your MP and they go and represent you. So Parliament, in lots of people’s minds, is both the repository of sovereignty and the enemy as well. Let’s move on to the final book The British General Election of 2019 by Robert Ford, Paula Surridge, Will Jennings and Tim Bale.

So lastly on your list we have Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response. What is certain, though, is that just as with pharmaceuticals, the thing that will change is that decisions will be made without our input. We’ll still have emission standards made in Brussels but without our voice or vote. Alternatively, we could have emissions standards made in the UK. In that case, are we going to stop exporting cars to the rest of Europe? That’s not a particularly attractive outcome for the UK car industry. It’s about the ins and outs of the politics of Brexit, isn’t it? He calls it “an unashamedly elitist history”.I want to emphasise that I was neutral, during the campaign, between Remain and Leave. I have very strong views on some of the economic aspects, particularly relating to free movement and immigration. But I do think that there are arguments on both sides. I try to be as objective as I can in weighing them up. He seems to be very exercised about the EU’s ban on some vitamins and herbal remedies. It comes up twice in the book. I thought it was quite funny, in terms of the bigger picture, that this should be viewed as a key issue.

This is important: the number of people on either side of the argument who actually understand the EU and what it does is pretty minimal. I include Remainers in that quite as much as Leavers. It’s wonderfully written and it does capture this atmosphere of a society not in chaos but unsure of itself, not clear where it’s going—and of a young woman who feels disorientated by what our society is doing or doing to itself, and trying to work out where she’s going. Also, Maggie Thatcher has been assassinated. All that stuff, about dark EU forces, tapped into fears people had. And that’s what satire does; it takes existing fears and amplifies them. Look at 1984. At the time, although very powerful and prescient, it also must have seemed ludicrous because only by being ludicrous can you get across the message. Now, of course, it seems like the greatest work of prophecy ever written. I make no claims like that for The Aachen Memorandum. It’s a curiosity, if nothing else. But I did like the fact that it was trying to take down the EU by all means, which predates, but was also very much a part of, the referendum campaign. There’s also a lot of inherent animosity to a project that people don’t understand. I don’t mean they don’t understand the benefits, they just don’t understand the rationale behind it. My own belief, and this may be entirely wrong, is that most British people would have been happy with the EU as it was originally, the Common Market, which was a trading bloc. The moment you start to overlay politics on that, then it starts to become very different. Which are the best books to get a better understanding of Brexit? For an economic perspective, we asked economics professor Jonathan Portes for his book recommendations in early 2017, less than a year after Britain's momentous decision. For more of a political/historical perspective, we turned to novelist Boris Starling, author of The Bluffer's Guide to Brexit.Our most recent interview on books to read about Brexit is with Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at Kings College London and Director of the UK in a Changing Europe project.It’s not clear what exactly we’ve gained. We haven’t become less regulated. We’ve just accepted that we don’t have a say in the regulations that apply to us. And AstraZeneca and other pharmaceutical companies want regulatory approval. They might not like what the regulators do but they need regulators. They’ll tell you that. You’re an economist. According to one MORI poll—conducted before the referendum—just under 90 percent of UK economists think that Brexit will be bad for the economy. Given how hard it is to predict the future, how can economists be so sure that it’s a bad move?

Should the MPs have a vote on the final deal? To mind, of course they should. That’s their job. Noel Gallagher puts it a lot more trenchantly than I do, which is one of my favourite quotes and I fought very hard to keep it in the book. The other thing—and I’ll be interested to see what Matt’s book says about this—is that these economic factors also overlap very considerably with people’s social attitudes. As well as people being more likely to vote Leave if they were poorer, or lived in areas that were left behind, people were also much more likely to vote Leave if they had socially conservative attitudes—including on issues that have nothing to do with Brexit, like gay marriage and the death penalty. The EU itself came about as a direct response to the Second World War and German militarism, the idea that we Europeans can’t control Germany except as part of a larger bloc. The Germans believed in that and wholeheartedly signed up, so did the French. Of the original six countries in the EU in 1957, five of them had been invaded by Germany and the other one was Germany. The UK hadn’t. It sounds facile, but it’s not. We’ve always had that, ‘we are apart, we are different.’ That has informed attitudes towards the EU on an emotional level very, very deeply. There is, moreover, an underlying tension in the idea of “the people” in an explicitly multinational state like the UK. Tombs gets over it (as he gets over other problems for the idea of exclusive sovereignty, like the climate crisis) by refusing to recognise it. Even his most basic term of reference is evasive. His title speaks of an “isle”, singular. In the text, this slips awkwardly into “our islands”. But by “our”, he really means England’s: all his key points of reference are English. John Major, to his credit, did mention it as well. The other thing of course is that Northern Ireland like Scotland voted to stay in. And yet England and Wales voted to leave. But right from the start it was, ‘You all go or you all stay.’Leave were very, very good at pushing emotional buttons because people do vote emotionally. No one’s got the time to sit down and look through political manifestos, unless they’ve really got nothing else to do. People do vote with their hearts. He understood this. One of the things I struggle with, in terms of the split over Brexit and people being cross with people who voted the other way, is that we do all want the same things. We want a prosperous country and a good relationship with our neighbours. No one wants another war in Europe. So why is it so divisive when the goal is the same? I was up in London a couple of weeks before the referendum, having a meeting, and I remember saying to the person I was meeting, ‘You know there’s a big groundswell out of cities who are going to vote Leave.’ And they just wouldn’t have it. People have sat in their bubbles. And you can see the same thing in America with the presidential election: the rural areas overwhelmingly voted Republican and urban areas overwhelmingly voted Democrat.

Excellent. Let’s move on to the book you wrote with Geoffrey Evans, Brexit and British Politics. Why did you write it and what does it say about Brexit? The authors of one of a clutch of new books by academics on the fa That’s one of the problems that Brexit threw up, that the consensus for so long had been fundamentally a liberal elite consensus that people felt marginalized. Had other parties had some kind of seat at the table, they could have said, ‘Well you know what my constituents in X Y Z, think this.’ If you have a coalition government that can bring different viewpoints to the table.

It is almost a truism, certainly among economists, that the big structural problems in the UK—to do with the labour market position of the low-skilled, the education system and the housing market—actually have little or nothing to do with the UK’s membership of the EU one way or the other. The EU has not messed up our housing market, we did that for ourselves. And, equally, leaving the EU won’t solve it. There are a bunch of problems with this. First of all, it’s going to take a while. It’s going to be expensive and messy, and it’s not something you can do overnight. The number of people on either side of the argument who actually understand the EU and what it does is pretty minimal. I include Remainers in that quite as much as Leavers.” Brexit and Beyond provides a fascinating (and comprehensive) analysis on the how and why the UK has found itself on the path to exiting the European Union. The talented cast of academic contributors is drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and areas of expertise and this provides a breadth and depth to the analysis of Brexit that is unrivalled. The volume also provides large amounts of expert-informed speculation on the future of both the EU and UK and which is both stimulating and anxiety-inducing.'