Brexit explained: the real story behind the vote and its fallout

I have a habit of promising myself I’ll remember what I read—and then promptly forgetting. When editors ask for summer or winter reading lists, my mind goes blank. So when I started Tom McTague’s new history, Between the Waves, I made a vow to write about it at once, while the book’s sharp scenes and arguments were still crisp in my head.

McTague traces Britain’s uneasy, half-embracing relationship with continental Europe from 1943 to the present. His narrative moves from wartime strategy rooms to Westminster corridors, following the leaders, thinkers and public figures who tried—and repeatedly failed—to settle what kind of European Britain would be part of. The result is a political history that reads like a succession of negotiations, misreadings and compromises.

A pivotal moment in Algiers: four figures who shaped postwar Europe

McTague opens his account in Algiers on New Year’s Day 1943, where a quartet of personalities converged and cast long shadows over later events. They are:

• Jean Monnet — the French technocrat who came to be seen as one of the architects of European integration.
• Charles de Gaulle — the forceful French leader with a vision of national grandeur and independence.
• Harold Macmillan — the British politician who would become a central figure in postwar Tory politics.
• Enoch Powell — the vociferous critic of closer ties with Europe and an early spearhead of British Euroscepticism.

Using that meeting as a hinge, McTague shows how these men’s ambitions and anxieties—over empire, sovereignty and security—informed the institutions and grudges that followed. Rather than a purely institutional history, the book treats ideas and personalities as engines of change, bringing political theory and biography into close focus.

Power beyond titles: why thinkers and journalists matter

One of McTague’s recurring points is that formal office doesn’t always equal influence. Philosophers, columnists, businessmen and university society figures often nudged policy in ways that prime ministers and foreign secretaries could not. The book maps a wider ecosystem of influence:

• academics and pamphleteers who provided the language of integration or withdrawal;
• media voices that shaped public appetite and political pressure;
• younger activists inside parties who carried ideas between generations.

By following those less-visible actors, McTague captures how political currents build momentum long before they reach the ballot box. Euroscepticism, for example, did not spring fully formed from an electoral campaign; it was cultivated in essays, party meetings and student unions.

Why Britain stayed semi‑detached from Europe

McTague’s central diagnosis is blunt: Britain repeatedly misread the nature of European integration. Geography and the imperial past made British elites feel distinct from continental neighbors; the shared trauma of two world wars also led Europeans to embrace varying degrees of federal thinking that Britain, steeped in a global empire, found harder to accept.

Key reasons for British hesitation

• Imperial legacy: institutions and global ties that pulled London outward rather than inward.
• Different war experiences: the UK’s island status and wartime role shaped a different political imagination.
• Miscalculations about federalism: many in Britain treated integration as a practical economic collaboration rather than a project with political unity at its core.

The British instinct, McTague argues, was often to seek special arrangements—opt-outs, rebates, bilateral deals—that preserved sovereignty while enjoying the benefits of cooperation. That approach left the UK always partly inside and partly out: an uneasy compromise between national autonomy and continental membership.

Enoch Powell and the question of national identity

No figure in McTague’s story embodies Britain’s internal struggle over Europe better than Enoch Powell. His intellectual trajectory—and the reluctance of many on the Right to acknowledge his influence after his most controversial moments—remains central to the book.

McTague shows how Powell’s arguments about nationhood, empire and identity echoed through later debates. Whether supporters admitted it or not, his shadow shaped the language and focus of British Euroscepticism. For some voters and politicians, the stakes were never only about trade or regulation but about what it meant to be British in a post‑imperial world.

Shifting fault lines: from Europe to immigration and Covid

While earlier generations of Conservatives were radicalized by fears of a European superstate, McTague observes that the newest right‑leaning cohort has a different set of drivers. The political shocks of the last decade—especially the Covid pandemic and the subsequent migration episodes—reoriented their priorities.

• Old fight: European federalism and sovereignty.
• New focus: immigration control, national borders and pandemic responses.

That shift doesn’t erase the history of the UK’s relationship with the EU, but it changes which issues animate activists and which arguments gain traction in public debate. Europe is no longer the sole prism through which British politics is defined.

Negotiation as a national habit: the future of UK‑EU ties

McTague leaves readers with an image of Britain trapped in a long habit of bargaining—never fully committed to European federal projects, never entirely isolated either. Contemporary politics reflects that pattern: talks, partial alignments and periodic attempts to reset the relationship.

Even with Brexit largely behind us as the daily political headline, the mechanics of interaction—trade deals, regulatory alignment, legal questions—remain unsettled. McTague’s narrative suggests that British politics will continue to oscillate between pragmatism and identity politics as new crises and new leaders reshape priorities. Where earlier generations argued mostly about membership, today’s debates are often about access, cooperation and how sovereignty is practiced in a complex world.

William Atkinson originally reviewed Tom McTague’s Between the Waves for The Spectator; his reflections formed the basis for this reworked account.

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Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson is a dedicated columnist focusing on political and social debates. With twelve years in editorial writing, he provides nuanced, well‑argued perspectives. His commentaries invite you to form your own views and engage in critical issues.