An ambitious history of Britain’s volatile relationship with Europe, culminating in the 2016 referendum
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ext year marks a decade since Britain voted to leave the EU. A whole 10 years of turmoil, and still the country can’t seem to agree exactly why it happened or what should happen next, with both leavers and remainers increasingly united in frustration about what the referendum has delivered. How did we end up here?
In Between the Waves, New Statesman editor Tom McTague makes an ambitious attempt to answer that question by zooming out and putting Brexit in its broader historical context. The result is a great big entertaining sweep of a book, tracing the roots of Britain’s ambiguous relationship with its neighbours back to the end of the second world war, and will be joyfully inhaled by any reader who loves the kind of podcasts that invariably feature two men talking to each other. It charts the path from a time when membership was seen as an antidote to British decline – the chance for “a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent”, as the Sun put it in 1975 – to a time when it was singled out as the cause of it.
Somewhat more controversially, it reframes the referendum less as an angry backlash from the economically left-behind, and more as the intellectually coherent outcome of a relationship that was always fundamentally unstable.
