Why Europe? Peace. That's why

The Brexit debate in Britain has been bogged down in bad-tempered arguments about tariffs and the terms of trade. But Europe is a much bigger question than that

Ever since the Brexit referendum campaign began in early 2016, we’ve been bombarded with economic arguments from both sides. Neither has convinced the other. Leavers cling to their belief that Britain can simply trade on World Trade Organization terms, although they rarely understand what that really implies. Remain campaigners, meanwhile, have continued to hit voters with facts and figures that in the abstract mean little, and have failed to have impact. Remainers have needed to come up with a better story.

Arriving to sign the Treaty of Trianon, June 1920

We have one: the European Union has kept the peace in Europe. This is quite an achievement. After all, its people have been butchering each other with grim enthusiasm ever since the first hairy hominids quarreled over who should paint the bison on the cave wall. And it's not ancient history. I can remember a conversation with my field director in Sudan about the ghastly war being waged in the south of the country. He had no doubt of its brutality. “But don’t forget,” he added, “Europeans were deporting people to death camps just 40 years ago.” 

It was a fair point, and one also made by a much-loved Israeli writer, the late Amos Oz, in his essay Between Right and Right. Don’t wag your fingers at us Israelis and Arabs for our cruelty and stupidity, he wrote; when we finally make peace, we’ll come together much faster than you did. “Our conflict in the Middle East is indeed painful and bloody and cruel and stupid, but it’s not going to take us a thousand years to produce our equivalent of the Euro,” he wrote. “Our bloody history is going to be shorter than your bloody history.”

The European Union was founded to stop this bloody history, and by and large it has. It’s an argument not much used by Remainers, who prefer to drone on about tariffs and the regulatory framework. When it does get raised, one is often told, “No, the EU has not kept the peace; NATO has done that.” But NATO is an organisation that has no sanction except a mutual agreement to use force, and such pacts did not keep the peace between the world wars; indeed they did not prevent the first one. The EU can, and the reason for that lies in the nature of the nation-state itself.

The concept of the nation-state is quite new. I suppose one could, if one wished, argue that the England of Elizabeth was the first. For the most part, though, the modern country based on ethnic or linguistic identity only really goes back to 1848, when those identities became a liberal rallying-cry for freedom from traditional power structures. Even then, there were few such countries until 1919. Then the break-up of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire meant there were, quite suddenly, a number of states that were ethnically defined. By reorganising the continent along these lines, the Paris peace conference profoundly altered its character in much the same way that decolonisation would affect Africa some 40 years later.

But ethnic and linguistic boundaries are rarely clear-cut. After the Paris conference, countries emerged whose territory did not always match their ethnic base, leaving their own people outside their frontiers and enfolding those of other states within their own. Few realise the scale on which this happened in 1919. Perhaps a third of Hungarians wound up living in Slovakia, Transylvania or Yugoslavia, plus a few in what became Austria. Meanwhile many thousands of Slovenians found themselves in Austria instead of the new Yugoslavia, which itself went to war with Italy over Trieste. Neither was this confined to continental Europe. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks fled from western Turkey. Millions of people suddenly found an international frontier between themselves and the local tobacconist. In some cases, family members even became different nationalities by accident of birth (the writer Stefan Zweig was Austrian, but his elder brother had been born in Bohemia so assumed Czechoslovak nationality). The legacy of Versailles, the Treaty of Trianon (which defined the borders of Hungary), and other decisions at Paris was that millions of people owed allegiance to countries other than those in which they lived, and almost no country fully accepted the borders it had been given.

All of these potential conflicts festered, and destabilised Europe. What could have helped, with more support, was the League of Nations, which did try to mediate disputes (in one case, the Åland Islands, very successfully). But the only real answer was some way of organising the continent so that people could just wander across frontiers if they wanted to, and there was some sort of overarching structure that protected everyone and prevented conflict – both of which had been the case under Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, for all their faults.

Portugal, 1976: Mário Soares takes over (Hans Peters/Anefo)

That was the idea behind the EU. It started with the Iron and Steel Community, the purpose of which was to bind together the Western European economies so that the countries could not fight each other, and provide an area of mutual prosperity that would be worth belonging to rather than fighting your neighbours. Although initially it was just north-west Europe and Italy, in my lifetime it has twice expanded to stabilise regions in a time of rapid change, and steer them towards democracy. When I was in my teens, Spain and Portugal still had their prewar fascist dictatorships, and Greece had a foul military government. When these collapsed, the prospect of EU membership was an incentive to replace them with something less nasty. Better to be part of a modern, prosperous, peaceful bloc than stay in isolation and move backwards.

This was also what happened in Eastern Europe after the Wall came down. In this latter case, political scientist Laurence Whitehead has written of “the wish for modernity”. In a 1996 essay, Three International Dimensions of Democratization, he put it thus: “An almost universal wish to imitate a way of life associated with the liberal capitalist democracies of the core regions (the wish for modernity) may undermine the social and institutional foundations of any regime perceived as incompatible with these aspirations. ...[This] will also serve to generate the consistent and broad-based support needed to bolster fragile new democracies.” This was important. It was absolutely not pre-ordained that these countries would become stable democracies; in fact in the late 1970s Spain seemed very unstable, while in the 1990s the Eastern European states looked as if they might fall into the hands of people like Slovakia's Vladimír Mečiar. The prospect of joining a prosperous, strong alliance was their incentive not to.

Better still, today tens of potential ethnic conflicts are defused because everyone is part of a larger polity that protects them, and if they want to visit relatives or work in the next village and it happens to be in another country, that's not a problem. Ireland is one of the best examples of this, but there are others. The region of Cieszyn Silesia or Těšín Silesia was formerly the Austro-Hungarian region of Teschen; in 1919 the border between the new states of Czechoslovakia and Poland went straight through it, separating communities and causing a shooting war between the two states. Today that border is a benign one between two democracies. Elsewhere, the accession of Slovenia to the EU means that a Slovene who happens to live in Klagenfurt can drive to Ljubljana in two or three hours and should not feel cut off from the “mother state”. That is not to say that s/he will have no grievances, or that an Irish Republican living in the Six Counties will not. But the cause of conflict – a border that separates one from one’s fellows – is substantially defused.

Ireland: Sinn Féin protest against a hard border

Conversely, the re-emergence of borders will revive such conflicts, not least because it would provide a fertile breeding-ground for populism. This is because of the nature of populism itself, and its inherent connection to identity politics. There is no agreed definition of populism, but in his 2016 book What is Populism? Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Politics at Princetown University, says a populist is someone who claims to identify with “the people”. S/he rejects everyone else. How “the people” are defined is left conveniently vague, but it is made clear that everyone not fitting that description is an outlier, a deviant, or, worse of all, part of an unresponsive “elite” against which s/he is leading a popular rebellion. 

If the populist says to you, “I represent you. You, the people,” you have come home. You have an identity, and have no need to share it with those with whom you do not identify, whether they be Slovenes, German speakers, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, perceived welfare scroungers, Goths or gays. Even more important in this context, you do not need to share your identity with those who speak another language or are ethnically related to the folks across the border. They are not “the people”. But you are. If someone lives (say) on the wrong side the Polish-Czech border, or the Irish border, you will find them a useful scapegoat. If that border has no real substance, and everyone crosses it daily to shop or to visit friends or relatives, it will be much harder to manipulate people in this way. If on the other hand we return to a world in which power-structures are defined solely by language or heritage, we will walk straight into the populists' trap. 

To weaken European unity is to go backwards towards the 1930s. It is to abandon multilateralism and go back to a fractured world of quarrelling, paranoid countries that can be manipulated by the strong, just as Hitler manipulated them in the 1930s – for example by promising Poland the disputed territory of Teschen in 1938 so it didn't oppose his plans for Czechoslovakia, telling Hungary he'd help get them Transylvania back from Romania, and encouraging Romania to join the Axis powers so that it would get Bessarabia (now mostly in Moldova) back from the USSR. It worked like a charm.

To be sure, leaving the EU would make us poorer, but that is only part of it, and it is not even the most important part. The real point is that Europe is an instrument of peace. NATO can only promise to revisit conflict on those who seek it. European unity, however, can remove its causes. It has achieved much in 60 years, but as the British philosopher John Gray has pointed out, history is not an automatic progression towards something better; it can go into reverse. That is why Brexit is an historic blunder. If it weakens the EU, as some on the right (and a few on the left) would like it to do, we will see a vicious lurch backwards through history.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

 

Thinking of voting Leave? I'd have done, once

A post for Brits: Are you thinking of voting to leave the EU? For years I wanted a chance to do the same. But I have been thinking hard

As I write this (on June 12), the latest polls show the voters swinging backwards and forwards on Brexit.  The BBC quotes a poll from June 10 that puts Brexiteers at 55%. Other polls disagree but right now it looks like Leave.

If anyone wants to know why so many Brits are itching to get out of the EU, they needn’t bother looking at the spurious tripe and specious data shoved out by the Remain and Leave campaigns. No-one believes any of it. The real reason Brexit has so much support can be gleaned from a statement made by actress Emma Thompson at the Berlin Film Festival back in February.  She was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Britain was “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island”, that she “just felt European”. These are the elite attitudes that are driving British, and especially English, votes into the Brexit camp, and reading that was nearly enough to make me vote “Leave” as well. Many voters wish the liberal middle class would just take themselves off to Tuscany, then, if that’s where they’d rather be. It’s part of the same “culture wars” that are leading voters towards Trump in the US.

Harold Wilson, instigator of the 1975 referendum (Vivienne)

But this is dangerous.  As Owen Jones said in a typically intelligent piece, also in The Guardian, on June 10: “When presented with a vote on the status quo, it is no surprise that those with the least stake in it vote to abandon it... Threats of economic Armageddon resonate little with people living in communities that feel ignored, marginalised and belittled.”  The Leave campaign, says Jones, is much the same as Trump’s, “powerful vested interests ...masquerading as the praetorian guard of an anti-establishment insurgency.” He is so right. If some of the polls are to be believed, on June 23 millions of Brits will traipse into polling booths to vote against their own interests. In voting against their perceived enemies in the ‘liberal’ elite, people will be voting for their real enemies. And reading statements like Emma Thompson’s one understands, with horrible clarity, how this has happened.

I voted to stay in Europe in 1975. Later I regretted it. For years I wanted a chance to vote the other way. But I shan’t. I am voting to stay in the EU, and I think my fellow-Brits should too. Some will have to swallow some bile to do so. This post explains why I think they should.

Let’s start with the last referendum, 42 years ago.

Another country

The past is another country and in 1975, Britain certainly was. I worked in a bookshop and when I prepared an invoice, I did it on an ancient Remington manual typewriter, keeping carbons for the file. When I sold a book, I handwrote the amount on a paper till roll; the till itself was made of wood and the tray slid out with a pleasant kerching. Much of the country’s heat and light was still from coal – even the trains had run on it less than 10 years before, and the stations were blackened by smoke.  A long coal strike in early 1974, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, had damaged the economy badly. Inflation was, by modern standards, very high, and in June, the month of the referendum, it went over 26%.  I remember that in early 1975 my wages were raised from £845 a year to £1,495, to reflect this. It was not unusual.

Yet if the country was different, the politics of the referendum were oddly similar. Labour had returned to power in February 1974 in the wake of the miners’ strike, and had pledged to renegotiate the terms under which Britain had entered the European Economic Community the year before. This was popular, as the previous Tory government had broken a 1970 promise to hold a referendum before entry. Labour’s renegotiation did not, as I recall, change the terms that much, but Prime Minister Harold Wilson advocated a Yes (remain) vote; at the same time, however, he allowed members of his government to campaign on either side, to prevent a disastrous split in his party. Does this sound familiar?

But the quality of the debate was much higher. There are no giants like Barbara Castle and Denis Healey around today. And some of the issues, too, were different. Many Leave voters were incensed by the way we seemed to have turned our back on the Commonwealth by joining Europe; we had, they said, kicked our allies in teeth for the sake of our enemies. The war in Europe had ended barely 30 years earlier; it was not yet really history, and feelings still ran high. There was also a huge economic risk in the reduction of tariff barriers with Europe. Britain was still a major industrial power, but was slipping badly; its goods were declining in quality. French and German cars, for example, were better assembled – British ones could be maddeningly unreliable. Some wondered if British industry would survive the competition. It was a pertinent point; over the course of 1975, unemployment rose from 3.3% to 5.1%.

I was aware of this and especially of the Commonwealth dimension, and I seem to remember I thought quite hard, or as hard as I ever did back then (I was 18). But in the end I voted to stay in the EEC, at least partly because I felt that most European countries were more modern and democratic, and would be a good influence on us.

A grandiose dream?

It was a long time before I changed my mind. I can remember being angered when all our petrol pumps had to be converted to litres. British people didn’t use these to measure fuel consumption, and still don’t, so this was pointless (though it would likely not happen now).  Then I started to feel very uneasy after Maastricht, which seemed to presage a European state. Such a superstate would have been an artificial creation that would eventually have cracked apart, almost certainly with violence. It was a grandiose and vainglorious notion dreamed up by a  rootless elite who felt more comfortable with each other than with their own people.

The Berlaymont - grandiose? (Anderson Pecorone)

And yet the driving dream behind the EU – peace and stability in Europe, after centuries of war – was always a noble one; something that many in the UK never really understood. To many Brits, Maastricht was as much an attempt to destroy us as 1940 had been.  Many have seen the EU as little more than a French plot against Britain. I never approved of “ever-closer union”. But I never saw it as the evil plot that many of my parents’ generation did. So I felt torn about Europe.

What fixed my opinions was two and a half years in Brussels. I went there as a long-term consultant on an EU-funded programme for technical assistance to the former Soviet Union. This programme did some good things but pushed an economic model that most Russians probably did not want. I also did not feel comfortable in Brussels. The city itself is pleasant enough, and Belgium in general deserves a better press. Yet I always sensed an attitude to foreigners; it was not quite hostility, more a quiet non-acceptance.  Also, it rained a lot. And the EU establishment depressed me – the bureaucrats detached from civil and diplomatic services who saw Brussels as a step up, or in some cases as a refuge; the ‘stagiaires’, or interns, screaming acronyms at each other in noisy pubs; the huge self-important buildings, especially the Berlaymont, then wrapped in sheeting for asbestos removal – grandiosity again; and the endless paperwork before anything got done.  Then in 2001 I got a chance to move to Rome, as a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. I jumped at it, and will never forget emerging into the bright Roman sunshine and giving thanks. For the next decade I remained a firm Brexiteer.

I’m not any more. For one thing, Cameron’s renegotiation exempted the UK from “ever-closer union” – but this was not, in truth, a big concession; the European super-state has been dead in the water for some time. No-one ever really wanted it, and the Euro crises of recent years, culminating in the bitter humiliation of Greece, have killed it off for good. But there are several other reasons for my re-think.

Movement of people

The first reason why I’ve changed my mind is the enormous exchange of population between Britain and the rest of the EU. It can’t be reversed. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are nearly 800,000 people of Polish descent in Britain now (not all because of the EU; in the early 1950s there were already some 150,000, most of whom had arrived during or after the war). There are also hundreds of thousands of French nationals in England – the French think it is up to 400,000, mostly in London. According to the 2011 Census, there were about 2.68 million people in Britain who had been born elsewhere in the EU. Meanwhile about 1.3 million UK nationals live elsewhere in the EU – about half in Spain, to which many retire.

Even if free movement is abrogated completely, it is inconceivable that all these people could or should be repatriated; it would involve forced mass migrations last seen in Europe in 1945-46 (and those were not something one would wish to repeat). Moreover our economy would collapse. So the immigration argument for Brexit holds little water; yes, we have had a huge net inward migration from the EU, but those people aren’t going anywhere. They will have to be given residence permits. It is not even clear that the UK could prevent further free movement, as it might be a condition of continued access to the EU single market.  Attempting to restrict it could also threaten the Irish peace process, a threat that Ireland does not deserve – and a reminder that this referendum isn’t just about us.

There is one immigration-related argument with which I have some sympathy. People are understandably unimpressed that Romanians and Bulgars with no links to Britain can move there, whereas an architect in Brisbane or a database designer in Hyderabad cannot, even if they have family in Britain. But Brexit would not change this. First, Australia and India do not permit free movement of UK citizens, and it’s unlikely the UK would make a non-reciprocal deal. Second, as stated above, to keep access to EU markets we’ll need to accept free movement to some extent. In that context, no UK government is likely to permit freer entry of Commonwealth citizens as well. In any case, the right-wingers who will be in charge after Brexit are unlikely to be sympathetic to any non-white immigration. More family members from the subcontinent? Forget it.

So much for immigration. It is something many British people care about deeply, having seen their communities, their high streets and their workplaces change with lightning speed, and without their consent. But Brexit will do little to change any of this.

European security

Meanwhile, a grave argument against Brexit is security and stability. The Leave camp insists that this is a matter for NATO, not the EU, and that it is therefore irrelevant. It is not.

First, NATO has historically been driven by the US, and today it is at least as interested in Asia. As I write this, the State Department’s attention is probably more on the Spratly Islands than Ukraine. A British exit will send a dangerous message to Moscow.

Franco with his Prime Minister shortly before his death in 1975

This will be even more dangerous if Britain’s departure leads to an unravelling of the EU in general, as some (including, it is said, Angela Merkel) believe it might. Besides exposing Europe to external threats, it could reverse the peace within Europe that it has enjoyed for most of my lifetime. Not because France and Germany would be at each other’s throats (they wouldn’t), but because the EU has been the driver for a wholesale growth in democracy in Europe. It is easy to forget that in 1975, Spain was still under the dictatorship of General Franco – he was to die that November – and Greece and Portugal had thrown off authoritarian regimes only the previous year.  The prospect of EU membership was an incentive for these countries to adopt democratic regimes and they have retained them. Even more important, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989-91 left a vacuum that could easily have been filled by the type of semi-fascist governments that dominated the region before 1939. Again, the prospect of EU membership came, for many in the east, to symbolise the drive for modernity and an escape from the past.

Do we wish to reverse that? The far right has reappeared in Europe and the EU is a bulwark against it. Again, it is a reminder of something that many in Britain either forget, or willfully ignore: This referendum is not just about us.

A democratic deficit?

We also need to stop believing that leaving the EU will be some sort of liberation from an oppressive bureaucracy. Let’s start with the supposed democratic deficit in Brussels.

The Fall of the Wall: An EU peace in Eastern Europe? (Lear 21)

To be sure, the European Commission is not properly elected and sometimes seems unaccountable. But in theory, at least, its members must be approved by the European Parliament. Moreover, while the Parliament can’t dismiss individual Commissioners once they’re in office, it can dismiss the Commission as a whole. So when one Commissioner, Édith Cresson, refused to resign in January 1999 following a corruption scandal, the Parliament threatened to throw out the entire Commission (which resigned en masse before that could happen).  

The European Parliament is properly elected under a proportional system. The Westminster Parliament is not. The current UK government has the votes of only 24% of the electorate – and only about 37% of the votes actually cast. “Out” voters may want to ponder the fact that UKIP got one Westminster seat for its 3.9 million votes, while the Tories got a seat for every 44,000 votes and Labour one seat per 34,000 votes. Worse, the government drawn from this “elected” parliament has complete authority; as long as it retains a majority, it will not be dismissed, and is virtually unaccountable. Moreover it can do pretty much what it likes; there is an unelected Lords that can delay but not prevent its legislation, and a Head of State who by convention does neither. Britain is, in fact, marginal for being called a democracy, and anyone wishing to address the “democratic deficit” had best start at home.

An independent, influential UK?

The last serious argument against Brexit, for me, is the global dimension.The Brexit camp would have you believe that, out of Europe, Britain could pick up its pre-EU threads and continue to influence world events at the top table. This is deluded.

First, the EU as a bloc is a bigger and more important entity than the UK. Assuming it survives Brexit, the great powers will talk to it or to its prime mover, Germany – not to us. Ah, the Leave campaign will say, but we’re still the world’s fifth largest economy, a nuclear power and a member of the UN Security Council. They’ll talk to us as well.

Let’s examine this.

One of the first things that will happen if Britain votes “Leave” is that the Scottish Nationalists will attempt to hold a new independence referendum. This won’t automatically happen, as the SNP lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament in May 2016. However, it is only two seats short, and if any one of the other parties were to support it in this matter, it could prevail. Even if they did not do so, it is not hard to imagine one or two renegades from the other parties supporting the motion. The 2014 vote against independence, though clear, was not a landslide. A Leave vote in the UK as a whole would probably make many Scots think again – especially if, as seems likely, Scotland votes Remain.

There would be two consequences. First, the UK would be diminished. Only about 10% of the population would be lost, but the permanence of the UK as an entity would be cast into doubt. Second, the UK nuclear deterrent would have to leave its current base at Faslane. This would raise the cost of renewing Trident, already put at about £100 billion (though this is a lifetime cost; the initial outlay would be smaller). Given the economic uncertainty that would follow Brexit, the government of the truncated UK would have to think hard about this – and about the political cost of imposing a nuclear submarine base on some new location, possibly Plymouth.

A smaller country, without a nuclear deterrent. The case for retaining our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, already shaky, might now be untenable – especially as other member states could argue that the UK was no longer the country to which the seat was allocated in 1945 (a thin argument, but it will be used). Out of Europe. Off the Security Council. No longer of significance in Washington. Let us hope Argentina does not then invade the Falklands, for there will be few to support us if they do.

What are we left with, after Brexit? At home, we will have an inbuilt Conservative majority at Westminster. It isn’t hard to see why right-wing interests are so keen on Brexit. Boris Johnson or (more likely) Michael Gove would become Prime Minister, and the loss of the Scottish electorate and the rigged electoral system will keep him there. Social welfare will come to an end and the NHS will be put out to tender. 

Millions of ordinary English voters, affronted by remarks such as Emma Thompson’s, will march into the booths on the 23rd and mark the cross for Leave, thinking they are voting against the likes of her. But they won’t be. They will be voting for their real enemies. Meanwhile, a rump country, diminished in the world, will watch its remaining influence slip away and realize, too late, that the Leave vote has brought the long post-imperial twilight to an end.

This piece is also on the VoxEurop site, here.

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Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

Cameron’s next five years: A rubbish prospect - for Cameron?

Thursday’s British election results are a genuine achievement for British Prime Minister David Cameron. Expected to lose, or at best be forced into a coalition, he has instead won a small but workable majority. But he may yet regret it.  Here are my cut-out-and-keep predictions for the next five years. Look at them in 2020 and see if they’ve come true

On April 8 1992, I sat in a friend’s Volkswagen Golf, touring through the streets of London’s Lambeth. We’d chosen it because it had a sunroof; if it was open, you could clip a loudspeaker to its edge, if it wasn’t raining (it wasn’t; it was a delightful spring evening). We toured the estates south of Vauxhall Cross and The Oval, pouring out our message. My friend was driving; as a former traffic broadcaster with a very deep voice, I had the mike. I can’t remember exactly what I was saying. But I do remember cruising down the South Lambeth Road on the way home and emitting some banal remark or other along the lines of “Vote Labour”. As we approached the Stockwell Clock Tower, someone on the pavement yelled back: “Vote Labour, pay later, you arseholes”, or something similar – ah, the language of Shakespeare, Mill and Milton. We pulled into my friend’s street, one of those to the south of Clapham High Street where nice terrace houses were just starting to fetch a fortune. As I walked through his hall with an armful of PA equipment, I noticed his wife was watching that night’s feature film BBC1; Scandal, about the 1963 Profumo affair (about which more in a moment).

I didn’t take an active part in last night’s election, as I’m abroad (though I did vote). But I see striking parallels between last night’s events and those of April 1992.

One is the victory of a Tory leader who was expected to lose by a country mile. In 1992 John Major fought an unexpectedly vigorous campaign and earned my reluctant, but real, respect. He was always far too easy to dismiss. The son of a music-hall performer, he went into banking (someone once called him “the only man ever to run away from the circus to become an accountant”).  In office he was to give an impression of pragmatism and decency at the head of the Tory Party; a genial baboon attempting to save a shrill troupe of hyenas from self-destruction. Cameron isn’t quite the same. He is from a background of privilege, and embodies a sense of entitlement to leadership that Major never claimed for himself, or would have accepted in others. The parallels are strong nonetheless.

However, if I was David Cameron, I’d be wishing to God that I had not won this election. And not just because of the parallels with Major; there is more, much more. Here are six reasons why the next five years will be hell for the Tory party and why Cameron may eventually wish he’d been defeated.

II: Europe

The 1970 Conservative government took Britain into Europe without a referendum, which it had promised not to do. This undermined the project from the start. When Labour finally held one in 1975, British electors (including myself) voted yes to what we thought was a free-trade zone, little more. Since then there have been significant treaty revisions, yet our last chance to vote on the issue was so long ago that most of those who voted are dead. So there is an argument for this referendum. But it will be very dangerous for Britain. For Cameron, the referendum, and Europe in general, may prove lethal.

First, the failure of UKIP in the election means that a major outlet for anti-EU feeling on the Right has been removed. It will now be bottled up in the Tory party again. More than ever now, it will be torn apart by vicious internal arguments over Europe, just as it was under Major. This will lead to defections and backbench rebellions that a man with a small majority can’t afford. As Ken Clarke, one of the Tory party’s biggest Big Beasts, pointed out the  morning after the election, this was a small majority and could be whittled away. “It’s a great victory,” he said, but added: “It is tempting for factions to hold you to ransom. That is what happened to John Major.” 

The decision to hold a vote means it will be even worse for Cameron. There will be fractious, dangerous negotiations with Europe, and the Tory party will then divide on their results, with a large minority arguing that Cameron has brought too little back from Brussels. There will then be a referendum that results in the UK staying in the EU anyway but being far less influential in it than it was before. Its influence is already slipping away; it has taken little part in talks over Ukraine. In fact, this referendum is not so much Britain shooting itself in the foot, as blasting it with a howitzer. It will also seem perverse to our partners. Issues that need pan-European attention over the next five years will include a rising tide of desperate migrants, insecurity on Europe’s Eastern border, and periodic financial instability in the Eurozone. In this context, a  British attempt at renegotiation, and uncertainty over its membership, will be most unhelpful to everyone else. It’s likely they will tell us that, not politely.

III: Scotland

This election has demonstrated that partial federalisation doesn’t work, so Cameron will be the last PM of Britain as it is now; it will be dissolved on his watch, maybe altogether. 

The unexpected Tory majority means the Scottish question isn’t immediate.  In a hung parliament, the SNP would have had an effective veto over legislation that applied to the English and Welsh but not to its own electors (the so-called West Lothian question). This would have angered other British people and would have forced a constitutional response. The SNP won’t have this veto for now, and there are almost no other Scottish MPs; so for the moment, this question has been de-fanged. In fact the SNP members may be a positive presence at Westminster, bringing a fresh view to select and standing committees, and subjecting the government to lively scrutiny.

But if we go on with a Scotland that is partly devolved but still represented at Westminster, the West Lothian question will be back, and it’s not clear how it can be solved. Cameron promised “English votes for English people”; he will be held to this, and will find that he does not really know how to do it.  As long as Scotland stays in the UK, it is entitled to be represented in parliament. How, actually, do you decide what Scots MPs should and shouldn’t vote on, and who has the right to keep them out of the lobbies?  More immediately, the EU referendum in 2017 is not likely to take us out of Europe. But it might – a decision the Scots would not endorse. This could force a very sudden and messy separation.  

Even if this does not happen, Cameron’s government will face the growing desire of all people, including the English, for a clear identity in an era of globalisation. There is no sign that it has the imagination to see this. Yet it will be forced to confront it at some point in its term of office.

IV: A serious scandal

The Elm Guest House allegations have not yet been fully worked through, and there are serious allegations against a very senior former Tory cabinet minister. They have not been proved in court, and his friends strongly refute them.  Nonetheless, some of the rumours concerning both Elm House, and alleged sex parties and even killing connected with Dolphin Square, are very distressing. The smell of past sexual misconduct by senior figures is not going to go away.

For the moment, this is mostly rumour and allegation. But if it proves to be something more, it could undermine an administration already struggling with internal divisions over Europe and devolution. It would be seen by many as proof that Britain is run by a closed and corrupt clique.  

There are echoes of the  Profumo affair, which effectively brought down Tory PM Harold Macmillan in 1963, and helped cause his party’s defeat in the election of the following year.  It’s not quite the same, of course. Profumo had involved serious errors of judgement by a serving minister; the current allegations are historic, and do not involve Cameron’s own government in any way. On the other hand, the Profumo affair did not involve the alleged rape and possibly murder of children and its cover-up by the establishment.

V: The voting system

The Green Party got 400,000 more votes than the Scottish Nationalists on Thursday, but got one seat against the SNP’s 56. Put another way, the SNP got one seat per 26,000 votes, the Conservatives one per 34,500 votes, Labour one per 40,500 seats, the Liberal Democrats one per 295,000 votes, the Greens one seat for 1.1 million votes and UKIP one seat for 3.8 million votes. How can this possibly confer legitimacy upon the elected government?

To be sure, it's hard to say what the results would have been under PR. It depends on the type of PR system used; besides, the existence of such a system would itself change voting behaviour. However, the Mirror did a back-of-a-fag-packet estimate based on Thursday’s results and the outcome was a Tory-UKIP coalition, perhaps with the DUP. So be careful what you wish for.  Still, the current system is unjust, the question won’t go away in the next five years, and there will be great pressure for change.

VI: The excluded

I was in London through the London riots of 1981 and 1985, and was shocked by the riots of 2011. People heave bricks through windows when they feel they have no voice. (Also sometimes because they’re little sods who want new trainers; but they’re opportunists, not the people who start the trouble.)

There have been rumours for some weeks about a new tranche of welfare cuts that would have a direct impact on the poorest. According to the Guardian (May 5 2015), threats include increasing the bedroom tax, ending maternity benefit and even stricter tests for the unemployed sick before they can get benefits.  The latter will be especially controversial, given the number of alleged injustices that already take place. Everyone has heard the “dead man told to find work” stories; in 2013 the Public Accounts Committee reported that  38% - over a third –  of fitness-for-work decisions were being overturned on appeal, which strongly suggests that some of those stories are true.

Some of those hit by new cuts are unlikely to fight back, or at least to riot (carers, the disabled). Others will. The Guardian claims one of the proposals is to deny under-25s incapacity benefit or housing benefit. It’s not hard to imagine a more and more frustrated layer of young people forced to stay with families who no longer want them and cannot support them. This won’t be the proximate cause of disorder – it wasn’t in 2011, or 1985 – but it will pave the way. Prepare for bricks.

VI: A succession crisis?

No-one seems to have thought of this – after 63 years as head of state, the Queen may pass away during this parliament. That isn’t inevitable; she is 89 – her mother made 101. If it does happen, however, she will leave a huge vacuum, a succession crisis and constitutional turmoil.  Prince Charles is not disliked the way he was, and will probably succeed to the throne. But he will be less able to provide national cohesion than his remarkable mother. Moreover the passing of the Queen may show us the extent to which her personal popularity has protected an institution that is no longer as widely accepted as it was.  There will be a bitter, long-suppressed debate on the monarchy, its cost and its role, if any, in modern Britain.

It’s quite a list. Six potential nightmares: Europe, Scotland, historic sex abuse, a dysfunctional voting system, riots, and a sudden challenge to the monarchy. The first two of these are simply not avoidable. The next three probably aren’t, and the sixth is completely unpredictable.  

It would be wrong to say that I welcomed the Tory majority on Friday morning. I did not; it represented a dreadful lack of imagination and courage by the electorate. But maybe, just maybe, it’s Cameron who should regret this victory. After five years he will be left with a divided party, and a weakened and maybe truncated country that has little influence in Europe (or with the US, whose interests increasingly lie elsewhere). Meanwhile, those cheated by the electoral system will turn to forms of politics that lie outside it. Some of them will be negative and destructive. But others will not; watch the Greens. 

The Right did not, in the end, win last Thursday. What really happened was that the Ancien Regime missed its last chance to reform itself from within. The next five years are not going to be fun. What lies ahead is (to misquote W.G. Sebald) the creative history of destruction. What emerges from it will be a new and very different country, rediscovering its pre-imperial identity and finding a place for itself in a complex and changing world. But Cameron will be at best a deflated figure, rather as Major was in 1997. At worst, he will be reviled as a failure on the scale of Chamberlain and Lord North, and his party will be out of office for a generation.

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Mike Robbins’s latest book, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and other online retailers, and can also be ordered from your local bookshop. 

Requests for review copies should be sent to thirdrailbooks (at) gmail.com, via NetGalley, or to the author.