Before the EU

On Monday someone on Facebook had a total meltdown on someone else's page. I can't find it now, of course. There's no search facility on Facebook, which is just one of my many complaints about the platform: it's not the best social media site, more like the least worst. This man was in favour of the UK leaving the EU. He blamed the EU for everything that has gone wrong for the last 50 years: the collapse of British industry, the skills deficit, rampant bureaucracy, immigration, etc.

Sometimes I feel like the hero of one of those terrible afternoon movies on the Syfy channel: I'm the last person alive with a memory of what life was like before the EU when everyone else's memory has been destroyed by zombies or an asteroid.

This man gave the impression that the UK pre-EU was an urban and rural paradise ruined by Johnny Foreigner. I suspect the guy is young. If he was older, he would remember the UK before it joined the Common Market, as I do.

So the situation before the UK applied to join the Common Market/European Community/European Union was, as I remember it:

Industry was not competitive: the UK was a basket case economically and had been going downhill since the end of the second World War. UK workers were less productive than workers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and, heaven help us, even Italy. Management of industry was atrocious. It's hard to explain the complacency, the sense of entitlement, the sheer laziness of business-owners and managers. Too many owners were intent on taking money out of their businesses. They didn't re-invest. They had no interest in the future. Their workers' productivity was low at least in part because they were using old-fashioned machinery and outdated working methods. Managers were too often under- or un-trained.

Industry was often downright dangerous: everyone could tell stories in the 60s of people who went to work and never came home. We had a neighbour who worked on the docks in Glasgow and fell between the dockside and the ship he was helping to unload and that was that, but it was so common it wasn't even reported in the press much.

Workers went on strike. A lot. Strikes are now made out to be the work of the devil. In fact, workers often went on strike because inflation was out of control throughout the 60s and 70s and wages couldn't keep up with constant rises in the price of food, utilities, travel, etc. Some workers struck to protest at unsafe working conditions and low pay. Quite a few (in the building trade, for example) lost their jobs and were blacklisted as a result. Ask Ricky Tomlinson.

Inflation wasn't the responsibility of either workers or management. That had to do with incompetent politicians who refused to deal with the matter in any serious way. I remember my parents watching Sir Alec Douglas Home, the then prime minister, using matchsticks to explain the British economy on TV. I can't write in a public forum what my parents' reaction was but their gales of laughter said it all. There was constant talk of 'the balance of payments': the UK didn't earn enough to cover its debts (especially its war debts to the USA) and imported far more than it exported. The UK government was constantly forced to go cap in hand to the World Bank for support.

Some industries were kept going by government intervention - shipbuilding, coal, steel, car manufacturing - when they should have been run down or closed down altogether. Others like the cotton mills just dwindled away, defeated by countries like Turkey and India where costs could be beaten down .

The UK's place in the world was undermined not just by its lack of status as a wealth-maker: the colonies of the British Empire were given independence, sometimes long before they were financially able to manage on their own. 'Granting' independence sometimes meant the law of unintended consequences came into play: when Uganda got independence, there was so much bad feeling towards Indian and Pakistani immigrants who had helped build the country that they were forced to leave. They had dual Ugandan-British nationality, and a wave of immigration into the UK from Africa then followed the earlier wave of immigration from the West Indies. Not everyone in the UK was happy about that.

And then came Thatcher in 1979. She was to be prime minister until 1990. The damage her government did to communities all over the UK can't be stressed enough. Whole industries disappeared: in Scotland, we used to make steel, cars, tractors. That all vanished. Whole regions of the UK were left devastated, abandoned to 'wither away,' as her henchman Heseltine said of Liverpool, when people there tried to fight against the decline of their city and their region. The wealth of the country was sold off: British Gas was the first to go. Then BT. Then the trains. Even council housing stock went (and we're paying for it now). Nationalisation became a dirty word. Funny to see it back on the agenda.

The UK went over to a service-based industry. The skills that had previously been cherished in joiners, plumbers and plasterers among others were despised. It became impossible to get an apprenticeship (we're paying for that too at the moment). Youth unemployment rates were huge.

EU membership came along just in time. It saved the UK.

It's one of life's ironies for someone like me that farmers and fishermen voted to leave the EU. The EU has shown more dedication to local produce than any of its individual governments. There would, frankly, be no Scotch beef or lamb and no Scottish fish if the EU hadn't protected these. EU bureaucracy didn't (as was claimed by the likes of the Daily Mail, the Express and the Sun) demand we only eat straight bananas. But it did protect artisanal produce long before we knew what artisanal meant.

So what happened? Two things.

The UK press decided the EU was bad news and only printed bad news stories about it.

But the EU also expanded far too fast. This was part of what can only be described as a 'power grab' by politicians within the EU who could see the way they could build an empire. Ironically, this was the very thing the EU had been set up to avoid.

So what to do? You can stay inside the EU and work to reform it. Or you can leave and watch your country go arse over tip trying to find ways to compensate for losing access to the biggest free trade market in the world, where 75% of what the UK produces goes.

Guess what the UK has decided to do.