The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR): Politics, parties and policies 9781526139153

Citation preview

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)

Series editor Richard Hayton

The study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interest and importance, and is also of great significance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for a variety of reasons the study of conservatism and conservative politics was traditionally regarded as something of a poor relation in comparison to the intellectual interest in ‘the Left’. In the British context this changed with the emergence of Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party and its ideology, and a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. New Perspectives on the Right aims to build on this legacy by establishing a series identity for work in this field. It will publish the best and most innovative titles drawn from the fields of sociology, history, cultural studies and political science and hopes to stimulate debate and interest across disciplinary boundaries. New Perspectives is not limited in its historical coverage or geographical scope, but is united by its concern to critically interrogate and better understand the history, development, intellectual basis and impact of the Right. Nor is the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original research from a plurality of perspectives. Consequently, the series will act as a voice and forum for work by scholars engaging with the politics of the Right in new and imaginative ways. Reconstructing conservatism? The Conservative Party in opposition, 1997–2010 Richard Hayton Conservative orators: From Baldwin to Cameron Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines The Conservative Party and the nation: Union, England and Europe Arthur Aughey The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales Alan Convery David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation? Edited by Gillian Peele and John Francis Rethinking right-wing women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present Edited by Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider still and wider Ben Wellings Cameronism: The politics of modernisation and manipulation Timothy Heppell

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Politics, parties and policies Martin Steven

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Martin Steven 2020 The right of Martin Steven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3914 6 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

COVER IMAGE: Syed Kamall MEP, Leader of the ECR, during a conference on Islam and Women in November 2017 at the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. © Wiktor Dabkowski / dpa / Alamy Live News Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For Nina and Luba

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 The European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group

page viii ix x xi 1

2 The British Conservative Party and the development of ECR

21

3 Euro-realism: the new conservative politics of ECR

40

4 Member parties of the European Conservatives and Reformists

59

5 ECR politicians and leadership structures

78

6 ECR policy activities in the European Parliament

98

7 Conclusions: conservatives and European reform

116

Bibliography Index

134 144

List of figures

1.1 Number of MEPs by party in the eighth European Parliament (April 2019) 4.1 ODS vote share in Czech European parliamentary elections (%) 4.2 PiS vote share in Polish European parliamentary elections (%) 5.1 David Cameron (centre left) and Jan Zahradil (right) attend an ECR group meeting (Brussels, March 2014) 5.2 Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party 5.3 Syed Kamall MEP, ECR group leader in the European Parliament 2014–19, speaking in a Strasbourg plenary 5.4 Helga Stevens MEP, New Flemish Alliance

page 5 69 73 88 88 89 89

List of tables

1.1 ECR member state parties, European parliamentary term 2014–19 2.1 How would you vote in a referendum on EU membership? (%) 2.2 Predicting British political party identification 3.1 Christian democratic, conservative and right-wing European parliamentary group policy positions 3.2 Political ideology of main ECR member parties 4.1 Percentage of MEPs from CEECs by parliamentary group 5.1 Leaders of ECR parliamentary group, 2009–19 5.2 ECR group bureau leadership, 2014–19 6.1 ECR policy priorities and ‘ideas for reform’ in EP8 6.2 Participation levels in European Parliament by group, 2014–19

page 4 32 33 51 53 64 80 92 103 114

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Members of the European Parliament who agreed to be interviewed by me for the purposes of researching this book. I am also grateful to Jonathan de Peyer, Robert Byron and Tony Mason at Manchester University Press, and Richard Hayton, University of Leeds, for all their guidance and support with the process of preparing and finishing the manuscript, along with the anonymous reviewers. I have presented papers on the European Conservatives and Reformists at academic conferences and research seminars in Cork, Hull, Philadelphia, Glasgow, Kraków and Manchester, and received very useful feedback and views in the process. Thanks as well to my department and faculty at Lancaster University for providing me with funding to make research visits to Brussels and Strasbourg related to the European Union, and for generally providing a creative place to teach and research EU politics. Finally, I am grateful to Taylor & Francis for allowing me to reproduce material from my 2016 article in the journal Representation, 52(1), and to both the European Conservatives and Reformists and Polish Parliament for the reproduction of the photographs contained in Chapter 5. Martin Steven Lancaster University October 2019

List of abbreviations

ACRE Af D AK Parti ALDE CDU CEECs DF DI EC ECR ED EEC EFA EFDD ENF EP EPP ERG ESM EU FdI FDP FN FvD GUE/NGL ID IDU IMF

Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe Alternative for Germany/Alternative für Deutschland Justice and Development Party/Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Christian Democratic Union/Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands Central and Eastern European Countries Danish People’s Party/Dansk Folkeparti Direction Italy/Direzione Italia European Community European Conservatives and Reformists European Democrats European Economic Community Greens/European Free Alliance Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Europe of Nations and Freedom/Europe des nations et des libertés European Parliament European People’s Party European Research Group European Social Model European Union Brothers of Italy/Fratelli d’Italia Free Democratic Party/Freie Demokratische Partei National Front/Front national Forum for Democracy/Forum voor Democratie European United Left/Nordic Green Left/Gauche unitaire européenne/Gauche verte nordique Identity and Democracy/Identité et démocratie International Democrat Union International Monetary Fund

xii LKR MEP N-VA ODS OECD PES PiS PO PS PVV Renue RN S&D SD SNP UKIP VVD

List of abbreviations Liberal Conservative Reformers/Liberal-Konservative Reformer Member of the European Parliament New Flemish Alliance/Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie Civic Democratic Party/Občanská demokratická strana Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Party of European Socialists Law and Justice/Prawo i Sprawiedliwość Civic Platform/Platforma Obywatelska Finns Party/Perussuomalaiset Party for Freedom/Partij voor de Vrijheid Renew Europe National Rally/Rassemblement national Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats Sweden Democrats/Sverigedemokraterna Scottish National Party/Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba/Scots National Pairtie United Kingdom Independence Party People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy/Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie

1

The European Conservatives and Reformists parliamentary group

No matter from which direction it is analysed, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament (EP) defies neat categorisation. It has only recently completed its first full parliamentary term, yet has ownership of one of the oldest and most recognisable political ideologies in the world – conservatism. Its leaders claim to be part of ‘Europe’s fastest growing political movement’ (Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe 2019), yet their ranks are made up of a rather eclectic mixture of solitary Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). It has as yet few concrete policy achievements to its name in European affairs, but has also unquestionably played a role in helping to disrupt the grand coalition between the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Its origins and development can be linked back to the start of Brexit – Britain exiting the European Union (EU) – yet have been largely ignored by British political scientists. Even ECR’s very name could be interpreted as a contradiction in terms – conservative yet reforming. This monograph is the first in-depth academic study of ECR. The group has been broadly dismissed by political scientists as merely a short-term strategy by the British Conservatives, fuelled ultimately by Euroscepticism and nationalism (Bale 2006; Whitaker and Lynch 2014), with the resulting scholarly literature extremely limited. The study provides an overview of the group’s history, member parties and policy activities, especially in the eighth session of the European Parliament – 2014 to 2019 – when its MEPs held the potential to act as ‘kingmakers’ due to their increased numbers as the third largest grouping. What type of factors were involved in ECR being set up? Who are the key actors in relation to the way it functions? And how successful are its politicians with regard to achieving their key aims and objectives? A detailed understanding of ECR is useful for many reasons: the group is the most visible vehicle for the values of conservatism in the European Union and represents a substantial cross-section of right-of-centre public opinion in European countries. As different parts of this book will outline, it is too simplistic to characterise the European Conservatives and Reformists as merely another right-wing Eurosceptic party, broadly comparable with the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group led by Nigel Farage, the prominent UK Independence Party MEP,

2

The European Conservatives and Reformists

in cooperation with Italian Five Star Movement politicians. ECR’s conservatism may be inextricably linked to its aim of reforming the EU, but many ECR politicians would be disappointed with the premise of their grouping being discussed solely in relation to Euroscepticism, nationalism or populism. Instead, they prefer the term ‘Euro-realist’, and protest that they merely want to improve the European Union for the better, not abandon it or reject it altogether. As ECR’s formal summary on the European Parliament introductory web page puts it, ‘ECR believes that the EU has a role to play in the twenty-first century but it should focus on delivering cooperation between its member countries, and finding practical solutions to problems and challenges of the 2050s, not of the 1950s’ (European Parliament 2017). ECR’s claim to be a type of ‘honest friend’ to the EU may require a bit of testing, and it can also be conceded that Euro-realism is, at the very least, a variant of ‘soft’ Euroscepticism (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Steven 2016). Nevertheless, the group’s wider political activities point to it having longer-term ambitions that go beyond merely acting as a vehicle for disaffected right-wing British Eurosceptics. In particular, it can be argued that ECR’s conservative political identity – in favour of free-market economics and a small state – is actually its overarching raison d’être, enabling it to have a truly distinctive voice in the European Parliament for a decade. According to ECR, the EU ‘needs new policies to modernise the economy so its industries and business can be competitive in the global marketplace. It needs reform so it is able to generate jobs and prosperity in the century ahead’ (European Conservatives and Reformists 2018a). Moreover, the differences between ‘Anglosphere’ or ‘Atlanticist’ conservatism and Western European Christian democracy in everyday party politics have been significantly magnified by the creation of ECR, making some of the older theoretical discussions surrounding the conservative nature of Christian democracy perhaps now in need of some updating (Mair and Mudde 1998). It has been said that the first stage of understanding something is to label it correctly, and in the case of political scientists this can be applied directly to political parties. Ultimately, this monograph is an attempt to provide an accurate and original analysis of the historic development and key contemporary activities of the European Conservatives and Reformists, taking into account the methodological difficulties associated with doing so. After all, political ideologies can become blurred at the edges, and political parties can span different value systems. A Green politician’s left-of-centre approach to government essentially arises out his or her environmental concerns – only governments can truly prevent big business and industry from causing widespread pollution, it is argued – and there can be said to be a similar relationship between conservatives and the cause of European reform (Green Party 2019). Broadly, an ECR politician’s conservatism motivates him or her to call for a looser association of European states free to trade with each other, and move away from a large, centralised European state based in Brussels. This

The ECR parliamentary group

3

is an intellectually consistent position to adopt, but it also allows ECR to place a distinctive emphasis on different parts of its policy programme, depending on the context. Leaving ideological ambiguities aside for one moment, the European Conservatives and Reformists’ success at building a sustainable coalition between political parties from across the EU also ought to be discussed in more depth by European political scientists. Correctly locating ECR on a ‘Left–Right’ or ‘pro-European–Eurosceptic’ spectrum is important, but recognising the group’s influence in parliamentary policymaking is also a central objective of the book. In particular, the way ECR grew after being created in 2009 to overtaking long-standing mid-sized groups like the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) in 2014 is impressive. ALDE, for example, was founded in 1976 in Stuttgart and has played an important role since then in cooperating closely with EPP and S&D in Strasbourg. At the very least, then, ECR’s growth demonstrates an ability to reach out to quite a diverse range of European parties and politicians after votes in the European Parliament elections are counted. The 2014 European Parliament elections had been the first to involve party candidates representing ECR since the group was established after the previous elections in 2009. As has already been mentioned, ECR performed strongly in 2014, going on after talks to become the third largest EP group behind EPP and S&D – and ahead of ALDE and EFA. With seventy-seven Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the Brussels and Strasbourg hemicycles, ECR is now a political party with which both EPP and S&D have cooperated extensively in the 2014–19 parliamentary term. ALDE was the ‘kingmaker’ of the seventh European Parliament (EP7) as the third largest group, and ECR potentially held the same influence in the eighth Parliament (EP8) given the number of MEPs which now represented it. Indeed, some leading ECR politicians even claim to have gone further in some ways than ALDE and helped to achieve a reconfiguration of the long-standing grand coalition between EPP and S&D (Kamall 2017; Zahradil 2017). By the end of the 2014–19 parliamentary session the group was made up of twenty-six parties from eighteen different EU member states. Many of these came from Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) where, as in the United Kingdom, Christian democracy has tended to have had less of a presence in government. Meanwhile its larger registered transnational party federation, or ‘Europarty’, the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE),1 counted as its members parties from countries outside the European Union such as Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. Formal links were also established with partner parties further afield such as the Australian Liberals, the Canadian Conservatives, and the Republicans in the United States. Many of ECR’s member parties have been at the heart of prominent aspects of EU affairs for some time, from the attempts by Law and Justice (PiS) to ‘reform’ the Polish political system to the efforts by the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) to cope with terrorist threats in Belgium and beyond. Alternative for Germany

The European Conservatives and Reformists

4

Table 1.1  ECR member state parties, European parliamentary term 2014–19 Conservatives Law and Justice Liberal Conservative Reformers New Flemish Alliance Brothers of Italy Danish People’s Party Independent Civic Democratic Party Finns Party Direction Italy Sweden Democrats Reload Bulgaria Bulgarian National Movement Croatian Conservatives Solidarity Movement Christians for Germany Independent Independent National Alliance Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania Christian Union Reformed Political Party Right Wing of the Republic M10 Pro Romania Party Freedom and Solidarity New Majority Ordinary People Ulster Unionists

UK Poland Germany Belgium Italy Denmark Poland Czech Republic Finland Italy Sweden Bulgaria Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Germany Greece Ireland Latvia Lithuania Netherlands Netherlands Poland Romania Romania Slovakia Slovakia Slovakia UK

18 14 5 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

(Af D) was also a member party before being expelled for moving towards a radical right position. As Table 1.1 shows, the British Conservatives had the largest number of MEPs in ECR from 2014 to 2019 with eighteen out of seventy-seven seats, and had been the foundation for the party since David Cameron formally promised to leave EPP in 2005 during his leadership campaign (Lynch and Whitaker 2007). Law and Justice – the governing party of Poland between 2005 and 2007, and once more since October 2015 – had fourteen seats, while the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) from the Czech Republic, led in the past by former President Václav Klaus, only had two MEPs, but were central in the past to articulating the concept of Euro-realism. In particular, Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, the ECR Party President and spitzenkandidat for the 2019 elections, is credited with having written on the subject from 2001 onwards when ODS enjoyed greater electoral success (Hanley 2007).

The ECR parliamentary group

5

The four MEPs from N-VA, the biggest party in Belgium, had previously been aligned solely to the Greens/EFA on the basis of its ‘civic’ nationalist policies for the Flanders region, and continue to have ties to the larger EFA Europarty as well as to ACRE, showing the at times fluid nature of the groupings in the Parliament and their deeper party families. Other ECR members included the Finns Party (PS), serving in a governing coalition in Helsinki from April 2015 until the summer of 2017, when the party split, and the equally controversial Danish People’s Party (DF), along with many individual MEPs from different countries in the EU. Perhaps the most significant addition to ECR since the start of the new parliamentary session came in the form of Af D; by choosing to align its seven2 MEPs with ECR, the group overtook ALDE as the third largest parliamentary party for EP8. During EP7, ECR had only fifty-five MEPs, so the results of the 2014 elections and subsequent negotiations surrounding group membership can be considered highly positive for the group in this sense (McElroy and Benoit 2010). Figure 1.1 shows the number of MEPs each group had in EP8 prior to the 2019 elections. The two largest European party families continue to hold the most seats: the Christian Democrat vehicle, EPP, had 217 seats, while the European Socialists had 186. Nevertheless, it was EPP and S&D who had their vote squeezed most in 2014, while parties promoting Eurosceptic positions increased their representation. The Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy faction (EFDD) won forty-one seats, dominated by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Italy’s Five Star Movement, while the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group had thirty-seven MEPs, including politicians from the National Front (FN) in France and Party for

250 217 200

186

150 100

77

68

50 0

EPP

S&D

ECR

ALDE

52

52

Greens

Le

41

37

EFDD

ENF

1.1  Number of MEPs by party in the eighth European Parliament (April 2019)

6

The European Conservatives and Reformists

Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands. In some EU member states, Eurosceptic parties performed especially well, often winning the elections in terms of seats and vote share. In France, FN emerged as the largest party with 25 per cent of the vote, the left-wing SYRIZA won in Greece with 27 per cent of the vote, while UKIP won 28 per cent of the vote and twenty-four seats. Generally, scholars who study the activities and workings of the European Parliament have been observing these developments since 2014 with great interest as, to an extent, they represent a realignment of the way political parties function and operate in Brussels and Strasbourg (Hobolt 2015). Much more of a balance has developed between MEPs who are pro-European and Eurosceptic MEPs, even if the two largest parties remain EPP and S&D. Reforming the European Union The European Conservatives and Reformists are therefore a growing parliamentary grouping in Brussels and Strasbourg. Through a combination of electoral success in member states and adroit negotiating activities after the votes have been counted, ECR has become a central presence in the European Parliament. As Chapter 4 will cover in more detail, the British Conservative Party has been successful at attracting other parties from across Europe to join its cause of trying to make the EU less ‘federal’ and more of a looser association of countries trading with each other in the single market, without pushing for ‘ever closer union’. Like-minded free-market and ‘liberal’ politicians from Germany, Belgium and the Czech Republic have taken the chance to be part of a group that is centre-right without necessarily being ‘slavishly’ pro-European. Meanwhile, more overtly Eurosceptic parties from Poland, Denmark and Finland have found the prospect of sitting next to British Conservatives in the Parliament advantageous to their electoral cause domestically as well (McDonnell and Werner 2018). Yet the fact that the third largest party grouping in the European Parliament is now one that is described by many (whether its own politicians like it or not) as at least partly Eurosceptic says much about the state of the European Union at present. Always an inherently incremental process, the way that twenty-eight different countries cooperate and indeed integrate with one another is perhaps facing its biggest continuous challenge since the 1950s: in fact, the challenge is effectively a series of crises which are ongoing and multifaceted. First, the financial crisis that began in 2008 before sparking a worldwide recession and global downturn hit the eurozone especially hard in 2010. While the euro continues to be the second most used reserve currency after the US dollar, it nevertheless has experienced extreme pressure in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis and the inability of governments such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland to meet their financial obligations independently without the help of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Commission. Far from being an isolated banking crisis, all of this goes to the very heart of many of the structural problems related to European affairs which

The ECR parliamentary group

7

ECR politicians like to consistently criticise. Essentially a political rather than an economic project, the EU sought to harmonise monetary policy without first sorting fiscal policy, and the results at times have been extremely worrying. Unemployment rates – especially among the young – have soared in a region of the world that prides itself on upholding the highest standards of welfare and social security (Eurostat 2018). Monetary union is the type of policy that the ECR group would criticise as having been a step too far for Europe; European countries should have their own currency, not be tied together in a contrived way under the euro which, it argues, has led to ‘bubbles, more indebtedness and lost competitiveness in the countries of southern Europe’ (European Conservatives and Reformists 2018b). Yet the euro continues to show signs of resilience and even growth, and since the Brexit vote in 2016 (Britain exiting the European Union) it has also been performing more consistently than the British pound, which has experienced instability (European Commission 2018). The ECR vision of independent European countries working together – but not joined together – is very much in the tradition of a British Conservative’s view of international relations, but it also demonstrates how British Conservatives do not concur with the premise of monetary union in Europe being as much about political symbolism as it is about hard economics. Monetary union may well have been a difficult policy for EU leaders to pursue, but it continues to have an emotional appeal with newer member states such as Estonia and Lithuania adopting the euro in recent years. Europe’s second crisis has emerged from outside its borders, and in the view of some, through no fault of its own. Nevertheless, it has had a huge impact on another of the EU’s founding principles – that of free movement of people across borders. The 2015 migrant crisis has hit deeply held notions of free movement negatively, in the same way as the eurozone crisis has affected profound beliefs surrounding ‘ever closer union’. Fleeing conflict in countries such Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, refugees have entered European borders via the Mediterranean, in countries already badly affected by economic hardship and unemployment – such as Greece and Italy – before making their way through newer EU member states such as Hungary and Slovakia, en route to Germany, Sweden and the UK. The scale of the crisis has subsided a little since its high point in the summer of 2015, but by the early summer of 2019 many people were still making the journey, and, tragically, many were dying in the process. The sensitive nature of the refugee crisis makes it less partisan than the problems related to the eurozone, but the associated security implications of where borders start and stop are also relevant to ECR’s vision of a less centralised EU. ECR has been critical of the lack of flexibility shown by the European Commission when it came to countries such as Poland (run by leading ECR group member Law and Justice) and Hungary not wanting to cooperate with the EU’s compulsory fixed quota scheme. According to Syed Kamall, the group’s co-chair, ‘more support needs to be offered to individual EU countries to strengthen reception and processing capacities, speed up the decision-making process and the return of failed asylum

8

The European Conservatives and Reformists

applicants. The EU should also focus  more on tackling irregular migration at its sources, and by combatting traffickers who exploit refugees and economic migrants into making dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean’ (European Conservatives and Reformists 2017a). Yet EU leaders argue in response that countries such as Poland and Hungary have benefited from being part of the EU, and indeed part of a freedom of movement strategy, that has seen borders between EU countries become less hard than in the past, so they ought not to unilaterally pursue their own policy at times of great crisis for the wider European Union (European Commission 2018). ECR’s relentless pursuit of ‘less Europe’ while advocating a strong EU leaves itself open to criticism by leading figures in Brussels that the group wants to pick and choose elements of European integration that it likes, without investing completely in the whole project. Europe’s third crisis also has its origins externally, yet unlike the migrant crisis the EU itself can perhaps assume some level of responsibility for it, at least in part via specific policy decisions. The war in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed rebels and the Ukrainian Government in Kiev is not simply about territory in that particular area of Donbass, but also about wider geopolitics and EU–Russian relations. For some time, the Putin Government has felt that NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) and the EU have impinged on its ‘sphere of influence’, with missiles being housed in Poland and the Baltic states, as well as eastern enlargement in 2004 and 2007, meaning that the EU borders Russia directly. When protesters in Kiev overthrew the corrupt Ukrainian government and president, Moscow intervened and annexed Crimea. Ukraine’s links with Russia are deep and cultural – and inseparable in the context of Orthodox Christianity – so Ukrainian membership of the EU cannot be countenanced by the Kremlin, or at least not at any cost. Again, while the high point of the conflict perhaps passed in 2014, relations between Brussels and Moscow have reached a new low point. The ECR group is by far the most passionate advocate in the European Parliament of the role of NATO, and indeed the USA, in European peacekeeping, and is frequently critical of the prospect of a unified EU army favoured by French President Emmanuel Macron (European Conservatives and Reformists 2018b). With Ukraine, the war has lost the high levels of media coverage it attracted at the height of the conflict in 2014, and has since become something of a false conflict with soldiers on each side fighting undercover and without identification. The chances of Russia actually invading one of the Baltic states or Finland are small, but, as with the migrant crisis, there is symbolic importance that can be attached to Ukraine surrounding the higher purpose of European integration. The rhetoric deployed by some Law and Justice politicians in Poland, or by Finns Party representatives – that the EU does not respect the sovereignty of member countries – would surely pale into insignificance if Russia were to pursue an aggressive policy on shared EU borders in the Eastern Neighbourhood. ECR’s strongly Atlanticist group policy that NATO ought to be Europe’s main hard power strategy is consistent with wider support for

The ECR parliamentary group

9

what it sees as the positive role of the United States in international relations; it also, once again, places the group somewhat at odds with the inner core values of the EU and popular opinion in states such as Germany and France. All of which brings the focus of this discussion on to Europe’s latest crisis, and of course the one that is probably most consistently relevant to this book. On Wednesday 29 March 2017, the British Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, wrote a letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, informing him of the United Kingdom Government’s intention to withdraw from its membership of the EU, becoming the first country to do this in the entirety of the EU’s existence. The letter came some nine months after the referendum held in Britain to decide whether or not the UK ought to remain in or leave the EU, with a narrow majority voting in favour of Leave. It would have been naive, however, to regard this formal correspondence as the end of the matter, with Britain proceeding to cleanly leave the EU and gain complete ‘control’ in policymaking. In fact, even leaving to one side the various stages of negotiation that followed the triggering of Article 50, Theresa May’s letter has instead merely been a punctuation mark in the notoriously long-standing ‘awkward’ relationship between Britain and continental Europe (George 1998). The UK’s membership of the EU and its forerunners has always been somewhat half-hearted – a full member certainly, but not one fully signed up to the key aim of ‘ever closer union’, regardless of which party has been in power. British Prime Minister John Major famously negotiated an opt-out of the ‘Social Chapter’ on employment law in the 1980s, while in the 1990s, the British Government, along with the Republic of Ireland, chose not to be part of the Schengen Area of free movement. Meanwhile, by the early 2000s, it was clear that the UK, by now led by a Labour government, would not join the single currency – the eurozone – either. A referendum had been promised by all the main political parties to the British people since the 1990s on whether or not they approved of the ceding of sovereignty to a unique type of international organisation – one which formally attempts to build a political system complete with all the institutional architecture of a state. Once the Conservatives won a majority in the 2015 general election it was always a possibility, albeit initially regarded as unlikely, that many British voters might choose to back the case for leaving the EU in the referendum that was then held. Such a ‘realist’ interpretation of Britain’s membership of the European Union which attempts, difficult though it is, to analyse the issue and its consequences dispassionately would probably be one endorsed by the politicians that represent the European Conservatives and Reformists. ECR politicians advocate a Euro-realist approach to European integration which seeks to support the broad sentiment of European countries cooperating together, while also criticising the internal workings of the EU in Brussels, especially since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. In other words, international relations in Europe should be much more about hard-headed calculations and economics and less about emotion or outdated 1950s notions of

10

The European Conservatives and Reformists

peacekeeping, as ECR MEPs would see it. European integration for ECR should always be realistic, pragmatic and rooted in common sense; in other words, Britain should cooperate closely with her European allies, but that does not necessarily mean that it should be directly tied to them politically in one system. Nevertheless, it is still tempting to ask why May’s predecessor as prime minister, David Cameron, took such a risk in the first place – holding a referendum in a difficult area of policy, indeed an area of policy that in many ways transcends all other areas, when he ought to have known that it was a politically dangerous strategy with an unknown outcome. Referendums ultimately present a simple binary choice to an electorate that is often uninformed about what can be a complicated or even obscure matter. Those generic features of referendums very much materialised in Britain’s 2016 EU referendum; a dimension of international relations and political economy that seemed distant to the lives of many British voters was given a toxic injection of nationalist politics, and rapidly became – partly at least – about the consequences of immigration, as well as more generic questions concerning borders and sovereignty (Goodwin and Heath 2016). In his view, Cameron did not have much choice simply because of electoral challenges to his party from the then increasingly popular United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP); he was merely the British prime minister who had the misfortune to experience the referendum on his watch being held amid an unfavourable international context of crisis, economic downturn and the rise of populism across Europe. But this defence feels extremely weak and also contradictory to the premise that the Conservatives are a reliable, pragmatic party of government which does not easily bend to temporary currents of opinion. During the 2015 election, one of the party’s campaign strategies was to argue that a Labour government led by Ed Miliband would lead to chaos – a richly ironic strategy, given the complete breakdown of government at Whitehall and Westminster that was to take place under May’s leadership in the winter of 2018 and spring of 2019 over reaching a deal with the EU (Conservative Party 2015). In this context, it was perhaps inevitable that an inherently anti-nationalist organisation such as the European Union would suffer this type of widespread resentment and criticism during a national referendum campaign. While it occupies the centre-right political mainstream, at leadership level at least, ECR is merely one of a number of political movements enjoying electoral success as a result of arguing that the EU needs, at the very least, to change and adapt. The other three crises did not help the Remain side during the UK referendum campaign; Europe looked beleaguered, and the EU itself looked at times powerless in the face of problems outside its control. As other passages in the book will explore, ECR’s supposedly common-sense, pragmatic Euro-realism treads a fine line between being a positive critical friend of the EU and actually contributing to some of its problems in the first place – for example, creating an institutional divide between politicians from Britain’s governing party and the European People’s Party, the EU’s self-proclaimed

The ECR parliamentary group

11

‘driving force’ and main centre-right grouping. In particular, the timing of the creation of ECR was hardly welcome from an EU perspective, nor did it strengthen Cameron’s hand in negotiating with EU heads of government over the summer and autumn of 2015 (Shipman 2017). At a high point of problems for Europe, Britain has chosen to leave, and parallels can be drawn with the Conservatives’ decision to leave EPP years earlier. It is likely that the vote for Brexit would not have happened had it not been for the creation of ECR. Had Cameron chosen to remain with the Christian democrat vehicle, EPP – an entirely sensible and uncontroversial proposition back in 2005 for the vast majority of Conservative Party supporters – he would have maintained regular meetings with key European politicians such as Angela Merkel, José Manuel Barroso, Herman Van Rompuy and Nicolas Sarkozy. It is unimaginable that they, especially the German Chancellor Merkel, would have allowed Cameron to become cut off from this most important of European networks so fatally, which is essentially what happened in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Indeed, for this to occur ahead of Cameron’s negotiations with key EU heads of government over the summer and autumn of 2015 was especially unfortunate for those who had hoped that a more meaningful renegotiation of Britain’s position within the EU might have been possible. Creating ECR was therefore a watershed moment; Cameron, an open-minded, modernising politician – and not really a true Eurosceptic (Hayton 2018) – had chosen to try to placate the more nationalistic wing of his party, but instead merely annoyed and antagonised the most important political elite in Brussels who took great offence at the Conservatives leaving to set up a rival faction. Unlike the European People’s Party, the European Conservatives and Reformists have as their central aim the reform of the EU, and are by far the largest party grouping in the European Parliament to openly criticise European integration on a number of fronts. Problems related to monetary union, freedom of movement and enlargement are not merely minor issues to be swept under the carpet on the road to ‘ever closer union’, as EPP leaders might argue, but instead represent fundamental design flaws in the whole EU. Yet as Brexit negotiations developed apace, it became clear that European leaders were determined to move forward and press ahead with the European project – reformed or not, and with or without the involvement of the United Kingdom. By the spring of 2019, it had become clear that leading figures such as French President, Emmanuel Macron, were determined that Brexit would not continue to dominate European Council summits and distract from other equally important EU matters. It also became clear that the mess caused by the 2016 UK referendum has given the remaining EU 27 a sense of unity that for years has been lacking, with populist politicians such as Marine Le Pen of National Rally in France and Matteo Salvini of Lega Nord in Italy stopping short of advocating that their member states follow the UK and actually leave the EU (Euronews 2020). The parameters of the debate over the merits of European integration have shifted to how to make the Union work

12

The European Conservatives and Reformists

better, and both of these nationalist parties have also started to experience political difficulties. ECR’s second largest national delegation – Poland’s Law and Justice – may give the EU a constant headache in Central Europe with its nationalistic rhetoric, yet equally the election of Macron as President of France in the spring of 2017 has given Brussels a much-needed fillip and renewed momentum. ECR owes its status as the third largest group in the European Parliament partly to the fact that it champions European reform; the current EU model is broken, it is argued, and needs to be renewed with greater emphasis on trade and the nation state. Yet while the context of crisis in Europe has given strength to groups such as ECR to call for a new direction to be taken, it remains far from clear whether or not Europe will choose to take that path. Euro-realism is concerned with keeping the so-called good elements of European cooperation while dispensing with what ECR politicians regard as unnecessary interference into the domestic politics of member states, but that would require an entirely different approach to European integration to be taken by Christian Democrat, Social Democrat, Liberal and Green politicians, and there is little sign that they have any appetite to do this. Even the term ‘conservative’ has very little traction in continental Europe and is viewed with some suspicion in France as being a set of values associated with the English-speaking world and America (Drake 2008; Kuhn 2017). After the 2014 elections the British Conservatives were successful in establishing an alliance with parties from across Europe who agreed that the EU required reforming, yet as will be explained in the next section a study of ECR can be first and foremost considered to be a study of the wider conservative movement in the European Union. As a consequence, one early conclusion is that there is unlikely to ever be a coming together of opinion between ECR and EPP on European integration as, ultimately, they come from different political traditions with distinct visions for the role of government in society and the role of EU institutions in Europe itself – one continental Western European and Christian Democratic, one Conservative and Atlanticist. Conservatism in European party politics Electoral matters, public opinion and party politics are intertwined in EU affairs in a relatively unusual way with international relations, globalisation and political economy. Scholarly research examining the relationship between electoral politics and international relations is comparatively thin; they are often regarded as inhabiting completely different worlds, yet Britain’s membership of the EU is an excellent case study in how foreign policy can often be extremely partisan. Since the EU has gradually developed over time from its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, so too has the role of parties and elections in the European integration process. In particular, much research has been conducted into the role of the European Parliament, and the party groupings within its chambers in Brussels and Strasbourg (McElroy and Benoit 2010; Hertner 2018; Alemanno 2018). It is especially interesting

The ECR parliamentary group

13

to look at how the well-established party families of Europe – the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the Greens, for example – function and operate in the context of the EU itself as it offers insights into major trends in European public opinion, both with regard to different nations and comparatively with other regions of the world. Ultimately, this book’s academic field can be considered to lie in EU studies and comparative European politics; overlapping areas include research that has been conducted on the European Parliament itself, European integration, as well as broader themes related to political economy and political science. Do parties that are used to holding power in national parliaments cooperate well together at an EU level? Does the European Parliament contain representatives of the full ideological spread of ideas across different European countries, or is the emphasis more on whether parties are pro-European or Eurosceptic? In other words, can a truly European party system be identified or, ultimately, does electoral politics remain firmly rooted in individual member states? Moreover, with their origins in much older political parties such as the Christian Democrats or the Socialists, these party groupings provide important networks and channels of communication across different European countries between ‘sister parties’. For example, the Labour Party in Britain, the French Socialists and the German Social Democrats all benefit from being included under the same umbrella organisation, the Party of European Socialists (PES), and the S&D grouping itself in the European Parliament (Hertner 2011). So how does ECR compare with EPP and S&D in terms of how it functions and operates? Also – and of equal interest – how do the British Conservatives compare with Law and Justice in Poland within the umbrella of ECR itself? How do parties like the New Flemish Alliance fit into the wider ideology of ECR given that it itself promotes a unique combination of Flemish nationalism and right-of-centre free-market economics? Is it reasonable to say that the Liberal Conservative Reformers (LKR) from Germany and the ODS from the Czech Republic are different types of political parties from the Danish People’s Party or the Finns Party? Through comparative study of the Europarties and European parliamentary groups, much can be learned about party systems and party organisations across European countries. ECR, on the face of it, is the conservative party family uploaded on to a European level; but is it as simple as that when it clearly now involves a lot of different national delegations? What exactly is the difference between conservatism and Christian democracy, in a practical sense, when it comes to everyday policy decisions? In this discussion of political party families, it can be asked: ‘What exactly is a ‘conservative’? The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom stands primarily for free-market economics with its policy agenda focusing on keeping the size of the state relatively small to allow growth in business and trade activities; its main electoral rival, Labour, would regard this as ultimately misguided and would advocate instead greater government intervention in society and its institutions via taxation and social security benefits. One way of summing this up is that a left-of-centre politician regards government as the solution, while a conservative regards government as the

14

The European Conservatives and Reformists

problem. The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek is perhaps most associated with right-of-centre ideas, while the British economist John Maynard Keynes is primarily associated with ideas on the Left. Perhaps for this reason the term ‘conservative’ has much less traction in some Western European countries, especially France, where it is associated with America, capitalism, and the worst elements of the market (Knapp and Wright 2006). There is another strand to conservatism, however, which focuses much more on outcomes rather than ideas; indeed, this theme in conservatism would perhaps even object to trying to define itself as an ideology at all. In this context, a conservative’s preference for practical activity over theoretical speculation can itself be regarded as a characteristic feature of his or her politics. For a conservative, not even the most attractive statement of principles can rival the importance of practical success; in other words, the establishment of ‘governing competence’. In post-war liberal democracies the key measure of success has been economic prosperity. John Stuart Mill labelled the Tories the ‘stupidest party’, and while he did not really mean it as any type of compliment, he was also implying that it was not a party that thought intellectually about issues but was instead pragmatic and realistic (Mill 1859). Edmund Burke, meanwhile, is often regarded as the ‘founder’ of modern conservatism (Garnett 2018). His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) included passages on the importance of moderate ‘reform’ (see also Norman 2014) over revolution, and it is not hard to see why the ECR group awards an annual Edmund Burke prize as a consequence. Being informed by a respect for tradition is also highly characteristic of conservatives. As a consequence, conservative parties often contain within them activists who are highly respectful of the role of religion in society and perhaps also cautious about high levels of immigration. Within reason, this can be both positive and negative: positive, in that it can see a broad respect for the Church in society, and explain why Christian democratic confessional parties in Europe tend to come from the Right; negative, in that it can provoke a reactionary and xenophobic type of attitude towards foreigners. Although Christian democracy itself is still highly influential in many European countries, its fortunes have faltered since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Yet even in relative decline it demands close attention, and much more from British academics than has previously been the case – especially in relation to its relationship with the wider conservative party family. Arguably, the various challenges it has recently faced (Duncan 2013) make this type of assessment of Christian democracy more important than ever, since they exemplify more general dilemmas faced by mainstream political parties in liberal democracies, amid a strong and rising tide of discontent among activists and voters who are attracted by radical alternatives. Any original study of Christian democracy, conservatism and related ideologies in the context of party families calls for a re-examination of familiar questions, as well as a serious attempt to address emerging dilemmas around a rise in Euroscepticism.

The ECR parliamentary group

15

What exactly were the founding principles of Christian democracy, how have the ideas of Christian democrats changed over the years, and how does this have a relevance to the subsequent growth of the European Conservatives and Reformists in the 2000s? What are the common themes that make it plausible to identify a Christian democratic tradition in Europe, and how far, and in what respects, have varying political cultures affected the ideas and approaches of different national parties across the whole of Europe – for example, in countries in Central and Eastern Europe that have no real Christian democratic tradition? To what extent are the future prospects of Christian democratic parties still tied to the persistence, or otherwise, of religious faith, given their name? Is it still possible to identify clear ideological distinctions between the Christian Democrats and their main European rivals, the Social Democrats, and if not, can this be linked to both parties’ decline and a rise in support for populists? Within ECR, doubts can also be raised about whether or not all its national delegations are signed up to the group’s broadly Anglo-American or Anglosphere Thatcherite free-market approach to public policy (Wellings 2019). Some ECR politicians – especially those from Poland – unquestionably like the idea of the EU being reformed and pinned back, but not necessarily in a free-market direction. Parties such as Law and Justice are challenging to categorise in and of themselves, without even taking into account their relationship with the wider ECR at the European Parliament. Their politicians promote issues and causes which transcend socio-economic factors, Left or Right, and instead focus on the importance of the ‘nation’. The literature on nationalism is wide and rich, but even now questions remain about how best to define it. Why does nationalism often have negative connotations in the context of Europe when it has also historically been a concept related to enlightenment and progress – for example, in France (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983)? Where does the line in politics fall between nationalism and patriotism – the latter considered to be a more inclusive and constructive sentiment on the whole. Linked to this is the distinction between politicians looking after the territorial national interest of their country and politicians defining the features and values of that country in the first place. Far-right politicians do not call themselves ‘farright politicians’; instead they tend to present themselves as being ‘on the side of ordinary people’ and speaking up for them against political elites, and this is also the sign of more generic ‘populist’ politicians who often even reject the label of ‘politician’. ECR is not a nationalist political group, but it does contain within it politicians and parties that could be categorised as such – for example, Poland’s Law and Justice. ECR is not a far-right party grouping either, founded as it was primarily by the British Conservatives, yet it has had among its members parties that could be described as on the far right, such as the Danish People’s Party and the Sweden Democrats (SD). The question of how much influence these parties have in the wider ECR in relation to policy proposals and voting outcomes is obviously relevant to the study.

16

The European Conservatives and Reformists

More specifically, a number of books and scholarly articles have been written about the Conservative Party and Europe (for example, see Crowson 2006; Aughey 2018), but much less has been researched about the way the British Conservatives, under the then still fresh leadership of David Cameron, removed themselves from the inner sanctums of Brussels diplomacy and set up their own party group in the European Parliament: the European Conservatives and Reformists. Joined at first back in 2009 by an eclectic collection of individual politicians and parties from Central and Eastern Europe where Christian democracy has substantially less traction, ECR nevertheless was plainly a political vehicle for the British Conservatives first and foremost to escape what it regarded as the relentlessly pro-European Christian democratic vehicle, the European People’s Party. The distance in difference of opinion between the two parties on the scope and speed of European integration had apparently simply become too great to overcome, especially if domestic public opinion was to be factored into account back in the United Kingdom (Cowley and Kavanagh 2016). Yet despite the size of its parliamentary group and the novelty of its ‘Euro-realist’ conservative concept, ECR remains a severely underresearched political movement, certainly compared to those which can be aligned with other longer established European party families. The tendency to simply dismiss ECR politicians as Eurosceptics perhaps contributes to the absence of any extensive body of scholarly literature on the party. Bale wrote an article on the start of the new group back in 2006 noting the term ‘Euro-realist’ for the first time, and followed it with another piece with Hanley and Szczerbiak (Bale et al. 2010). The second article noted the widespread criticism of the whole enterprise, in particular some of the more colourful national delegations from across Europe. Whitaker and Lynch (2014) have also focused on the group, although very much starting from the perspective that it is a project dominated by the British Conservative Party; that is unquestionably true, but the extent to which this is still the case also forms another strand of research into the size and success of ECR. More recently, Leruth has written about the way ECR has grown and developed, notably in a book chapter (2016); in this piece he suggests that Euro-realism could be the ‘new’ Euroscepticism and rightly criticises the extant analysis regarding the group. An article by the Turkish scholar Sertan Akbaba published in the Baltic Journal of European Studies (2014) provides a useful introduction to the group, but again places the emphasis very much on Euroscepticism. The scholarly literature on Christian democracy, meanwhile, emphasises a theme of decline and is also dominated by scholars from continental Europe, as might be expected. There is a well-regarded volume by David Hanley from 1994, with contributions from a large number of Europe-based political scientists. The Dutch political scientist Kees van Kersbergen is an authority on Christian democratic ideas and the welfare state specifically, while the Belgian scholar Steven Van Hecke has been active more recently (Van Hecke and Gerard 2004) with his useful edited volume focusing on individual Christian democratic parties. Along with Thomas Jansen, Van Hecke’s other 2011 study of EPP (At Europe’s Service: The Origins and Evolution of the European

The ECR parliamentary group

17

People’s Party) is very insightful, focusing as it does on the Christian democrats in the European Parliament. These studies go some way to explaining the mixed fortunes and even the decline of Christian democrats as an electoral force in recent years. They also provide a plausible explanation for why the British Conservatives felt able to break away from them after the 2009 European elections, knowing that they were not exactly leaving a party that was in the ascendancy. An analysis of Christian democracy as a panEuropean movement enables scholars to draw continuous comparisons between its development and electoral fortunes in different contexts; is it still really appropriate to identify Christian democracy as a distinctive approach to government which has transcended national boundaries (and indeed played a key role in the development of the transnational EU), or is ‘Christian democrat’ now merely a convenient label adopted by political parties to reflect the diverse traditions of individual European states? If so, has this led to it being increasingly marginalised or side-lined in the contemporary EU? A related question in this book is the extent to which Euro-realism can actually be considered a genuinely influential idea in international relations and one which can be compared with, for example, ‘realism’ itself in international relations (a discussion developed in Chapter 3). If realism ultimately argues that states pursue self-interest in international relations (Waltz 1979), Euro-realism is a reasonably effective way of summing up the United Kingdom’s approach to European integration, especially the approach consistently taken by the British Conservative Party. It is not clear whether ECR leaders understand that Euro-realism has connotations with realism in international relations theory (interview with ECR senior staff member, Brussels, 5 November 2018), but what is certain is that they understand that it sends out the right sort of signal to Conservative voters that they are pragmatic and realistic about European integration. Some of the more methodological aspects of the research are not totally straightforward as ECR is something of a ‘moving target’ – member parties in European parliamentary groups come and go to some extent, some split up, many have changed their names, and there is also the important difference between the ideology of individual member parties and the group itself in the context of multi-level governance. What the party states about a given policy at one point is not necessarily indicative of the groups more fundamental ideology and philosophy at home. Even the name of the umbrella organisation, AECR (Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists), changed to ACRE, and then again to ECR Party in the time devoted for the research, while the German delegation has had three different acronyms in the same period – AfD, ALFA (Alliance for Progress and Renewal/Aktion Lebensrecht für Alle, and LKR. The way EP party groupings essentially re-emerge every five years makes capturing what they do a different type of exercise from when trying to do the same with a political party from one European country with a deeper rooted history in society. Nevertheless, an account of ECR provides a very good insight

18

The European Conservatives and Reformists

into the state of ‘conservatism’ as a political philosophy in Europe at present, regardless of the names or labels of some of its delegations; as Chapter 5 will outline, ultimately the group’s leadership does attempt to portray ECR as the party of centre-right ‘common sense’ in Brussels and is relaxed about any internal ‘dissent’ interfering with that messaging. The book’s research combines quantitative and qualitative methods, using both election results and social survey statistics, along with more detailed interviews with key ECR actors and leaders. In particular, the book draws on a wide range of interviews with leading figures in ECR, providing the first real analysis of the inner workings of the party grouping and its MEPs since it was founded in 2009. A literature review has been conducted with books and articles on parties and European affairs, including political science and political economy more widely, consulted at length. Reputable news sources have also been useful when coming to analyse and assess up-to-date news events and current affairs – an important dimension given the ever-changing picture of European affairs. A period of time was also spent focusing on archival research at Churchill College, Cambridge, with a view to obtaining some background on the history of ECR, while government reports and policy papers have also been used extensively. Chapter 2 provides a history of the development of ECR, with a particular emphasis on the United Kingdom’s difficult relationship with the European Union. It is hard to escape the role of Britain in the EU when looking at the activities of ECR, regardless of whether ECR’s future now fully includes the British Conservatives. The chapter contains statistical analyses of voting behaviour from the period around the 2014 European Parliament elections in an attempt to uncover more about why David Cameron decided to set up the group in the first place. ECR, in its marketing, policies and staff, has for many years essentially been the British Conservative Party uploaded to the European level, and so any context setting must include a detailed account of the United Kingdom’s historically antipathetic relationship with Brussels. As has already been mentioned, this chapter also argues that Cameron’s decision to create ECR ahead of the 2009 elections was the central factor in starting the process of Brexit in the first place; it displayed a ‘tin ear’ on the part of the British Conservatives to the etiquette and sensitivities of how Brussels functions and the important role of the European People’s Party which transcended mere organisational party politics in Strasbourg. Chapter 3 moves on to analyse the core concept of Euro-realism and tries to locate it against the backdrop of the ideologies of other European party families. Is it merely a simple concept based on ‘common sense’, as ECR leaders would suggest, or is there more substance to it? How does it relate to nationalism? And does it intentionally also make allusions to realism in international relations? It is argued in the chapter that Euro-realism is, above all else, primarily a form of conservatism, and not simply another form of Euroscepticism, as the very limited literature on the party group has thus far claimed. Conservatives have been associated with the cause of European reform for many years, and Euro-realism articulates those activities on

The ECR parliamentary group

19

the centre-right quite effectively and in a new way, using vocabulary that is much more at home in English-speaking political systems such as the UK and US. Linked to this are question marks over the extent to which ECR can really be regarded as a type of ‘honest friend’ for the EU, which is sometimes implied. As a result, it is also not clear whether every single ECR member party is truly conservative, which the next chapter explores in more detail. Chapter 4 looks at important member parties of ECR, particularly the larger delegations from Poland, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Finland – excluding the British Conservatives, who ought to be categorised separately. Historically, Law and Justice (PiS) from Poland have provided large numbers of MEPs, while the Civic Democratic Party from the Czech Republic, though smaller in size, have been key to developing the Euro-realist concept. Both these parties have been around since the start of ECR’s development back in the early 2000s, although they too have changed and developed over this period. These Central and Eastern European politicians have been joined from 2014 onwards by New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), a civic nationalist party from Flanders who are somewhat difficult to categorise at times, and the Liberal Conservative Reformers from Germany (LKR), who started out as Alternative for Germany (AfD). Finally, the MEPs from the Finns Party (PS) and the Danish People’s Party (DF) are politicians that can be most easily classed as ‘radical right’, and there are interesting questions about the extent to which their views on immigration are considered not entirely outside the mainstream by fellow ECR MEPs, despite what they might say in public. Euro-realism may well be a respectable mainstream ideology, but there is no question that many ECR MEPs sit on the border of respectability. In one sense, this arguably constitutes the most important divide within the group – between those member parties that are free-market liberals and those that are essentially socially conservative – and also, by extension, nationalist. Chapter 5 discusses the leadership of ECR in Brussels and Strasbourg, and evaluates the framework and organisation of the group. How are policy decisions taken, and how does this compare with the other Europarties or transnational party federations linked to the Parliament? In particular, who are the key personalities in ECR, and how do they operate with reference to the arms of the party family, especially ACRE, the wider global conservative network, as well as New Direction: The Foundation for European Reform, the group’s increasingly active think tank? One crucial aspect to explore in greater depth is the extent to which the party leadership merely tolerates the more nationalistic sentiments of MEPs from Poland, Denmark and Finland, or whether it tacitly endorses some of those views? A unique feature of ECR is that it allows a considerable number of free votes in the Parliament – formally in order to reflect its respect for member state independence – but this can seem convenient at times. Chapter 6 looks at policy activities and policy achievements in EP7 and EP8. How successful have ECR MEPs been in delivering on their election promises, particularly with regard to the three freedoms they promote – free countries, free

20

The European Conservatives and Reformists

markets and free people? Analysis of participation rates, roll-call voting and other measures of influence and engagement will hopefully shed some light on how united the group is in the Parliament itself, which can be crucial when distinguishing between the nominal power of parties and their so-called ‘real power’ in votes based on actual attendance. Key policy areas include reform of the EU, as one might expect, trade and business, but also family values and issues surrounding the concept of social capital, which ECR sometimes promotes. Important too is the sincere stance that the group takes in foreign policy on cooperation with the USA, NATO and other transatlantic organisations and institutions. These areas will provide an analysis of how ECR operates and functions when it comes to the practicalities of Brussels politics, which its MEPs claim to dislike so much. However, a caveat may be added that ECR believes in ‘governance before policy’ – that is to say, they argue that the EU ought to be reformed above all else, so being able to point to hard policy achievements that can be attributed to the work of ECR MEPs is not always entirely without complications. Chapter 7 concludes, attempting to sum up this first scholarly account of the European Conservatives and Reformists. The book aims to be an accessible but fine-grained introduction to ECR, the European Parliament’s most prominent critical voice. Political science research looking into the way politicians – in this case, conservative politicians in Europe – try to influence political processes and achieve policy results can be useful for many reasons. Single case studies of this kind can rigorously test the electoral claims made by parties in an evidence-based manner, and it is important academics do not dismiss parties in a two-dimensional way, which may have been the case up to this point with ECR. The archival work carried out at Churchill College is included to show that ECR’s activities are a continuation of British Conservatives’ attempts to reform the European integration process for decades; the cause of European reform has been synonymous with the Conservative Party since the 1970s. The chapter also looks to the future and analyses the prospects for the group in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections; a continuation in support for Poland’s Law and Justice is promising for the group, but that has to be set against the dramatic decline in representation of the British Conservative MEPs. The 2019 results show the group’s determination to continue to function and operate in the European Parliament in the long term, despite many predictions of its demise, but its political philosophy is also clearly becoming less conservative and more nationalist due to a shift in balance of party membership. Notes 1 Over the summer of 2019, the name of ACRE was formally changed to the ECR Party. 2 In July 2015, Af D split, with former leader Bernd Lucke establishing a new party, Alliance for Progress and Renewal (ALFA), subsequently renamed the Liberal Conservative Reformers (LKR). However, the five MEPs who left, including Lucke, all remained in ECR.

2

The British Conservative Party and the development of ECR

In more ways than one, an analysis of the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament is a discussion of Britain’s political relationship with continental Europe. From its historic origins in the mid-2000s through its main voter base, to its leadership structures and ultimately its political ideology, it is a party grouping that seeks to upload recognisably Anglosphere or Atlanticist free-market values on to the European Union and European affairs. Euro-realism may well be the concept that the group uses to convey its core values – reforming the European Union using practical common-sense ideas (European Conservatives and Reformists 2018a) – but that is underpinned by a quintessentially British political economic model that promotes trade, enterprise and business activities. Moreover, that Eurorealist approach clearly constitutes a variant of British Conservatism which can be contrasted with both Western European Christian democracy and nationalist or populist Euroscepticism. It has been well-documented that the political relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union has never been especially smooth or easy. Rather aptly, the United Kingdom has been called Europe’s ‘awkward partner’ by Stephen George of the University of Sheffield (1998), and since the June 2016 referendum it has become clear that this is a partnership likely to be pursued even more distantly one way or the other. That, in and of itself, can be considered something of an unintended consequence which arose due to the internal machinations of the British Conservatives, where its leadership under the broadly centrist and moderate Oxfordshire MP, David Cameron, was persuaded to hold a referendum by backbench colleagues at Westminster worried by the rise in electoral support for the UK Independence Party. ‘Soft’-Euroscepticism (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008), and indeed Euro-realism itself, ultimately brought about the potential for a much harder type of Brexit – something which many in the Conservative Party, not least Cameron, must profoundly regret, given how they campaigned for a Remain vote. It is difficult to escape the fact that ECR institutionally represents the awkwardness that many British voters, especially in more provincial parts of England, and therefore by extension many British governments, feel towards European integration and the institutions of the European Union. It is also difficult to see how ECR would exist

22

The European Conservatives and Reformists

in the first place if had not been driven and developed by leading figures in the British Conservative Party during the 2000s. The group may have developed into a faction in the European Parliament with MEPs from across the EU, but its backbone has unquestionably remained the British Conservatives. This chapter provides an overview of the development of ECR, simultaneously charting key aspects of Britain’s membership of the EU and, in part, its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC); this is vital in order to place the research on ECR into some sort of context and wider analytical framework. This book aims to analyse what ECR is – what it stands for, who represents it, and what its main policy successes and failures have been – and the key route to achieving these aims is to start by explaining how and why British voters have never felt part of the Christian Democratic European integration project, as well as linking this to the internal party politics of the British Conservatives. The Conservative Party’s difficult relationship with Europe has been analysed before, but not quite in this way; the importance of the role of the party at a European level via its MEPs and wider organisational presence in Brussels is frequently overlooked as peripheral or second order, but deserves much greater attention. In the same way that the European People’s Party is much more than simply a faction in the European Parliament, British Conservative MEPs act as a conduit between London and Brussels; and given that they tend, on the whole, to be more pro-European than their Westminster colleagues (Hayton 2012), this can be extremely useful with regard to negotiations and diplomacy. Important decisions taken in European Council summits are often discussed beforehand in EPP group meetings with MEPs acting as a link between member state politicians and the EU institutions. MEPs such as Charles Tannock, Julie Girling and Richard Ashworth belong to a European-orientated wing of the Conservatives that understands and respects the way decisions are taken in Brussels, rather than being inherently suspicious of them. Indeed, in 2018, Girling and Ashworth chose to leave the group and sit with EPP due to growing disillusionment over Brexit negotiations. From 1979 to 1992, Conservative MEPs in the European Parliament had been members of the European Democrats (ED) group. ED was something of a forerunner to ECR as it was more right wing in its socio-economic policies than the Christian Democratic EPP, and also less pro-European, although labelling it openly Eurosceptic would perhaps have been an exaggeration. However, unlike ECR, the ability for the Conservatives to make alliances in the Parliament in this period was more limited, primarily due to the size of the European Community (EC) in the days before Maastricht and Eastern enlargement. They relied on support primarily from the Danish Conservatives (DKF) – not to be confused with present-day ECR members, the Danish People’s Party – and while their MEP numbers were relatively strong in 1979 and 1984, they often found themselves marginalised. Despite the fact that ECR has also been dominated by the British Conservatives and Poland’s Law and Justice, it nevertheless has a much broader range of MEPs from states such as the

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

23

Czech Republic, Germany and Belgium, and is also working in a significantly bigger Parliament. In 1979, there were only 410 MEPs (compared with the 750 that are now elected), and the power of the Parliament itself as an institution within the EU law-making process was not as large. This meant that while the European Democrats were a recognisable and significant enough group in the EP during this period, their ability to affect legislation and policy debates – what could be described as their ‘real power’ in what was the EEC – was relatively small and uneven. By 1989 the ED group had only 34 out of 518 MEPs, and its MEPs reluctantly conceded that any political leverage it once enjoyed had dissipated. As Chapter 1 has already indicated, it is argued in this book that ECR represents more than simply a temporary faction in the European Parliament, but rather the larger ideology of Anglosphere Conservatism in European politics. In that sense, this is a book as much about the nature of contemporary conservative ideology in Europe as it is about the activities of MEPs in Strasbourg. With that in mind, it is important to recognise that, up to a point, ECR represents a type of continuity to the existence of the European Democrats in the 1980s, but equally there can be little doubt that the growth and influence of ECR is substantially more profound than anything achieved before this by the ED group in the days of the EEC. When the British Conservatives did sit on the EPP benches in 1999 (albeit retaining formally in name a little of their autonomy) – reluctantly conceding that they probably needed to be part of the largest European centre-right party – they appeared to be happy with the arrangements overall. In fact, it is widely acknowledged that the then crop of Conservative MEPs did not like the proposals emanating from central office in London that this set-up was to be reviewed in the mid-2000s. Indeed, most of the 2014–19 group (twelve out of nineteen MEPs) publicly backed Remain during the 2016 referendum campaign, compared with seven backing Leave, and two undeclared (Rankin 2016). The fact that ECR leader Syed Kamall came out in support of Leave was considered so newsworthy that it was covered in the media, and he was heavily criticised by Remain-supporting colleagues such as his fellow London MEP Charles Tannock (Palmeri 2016). During his leadership of the British Conservatives from 1997 to 2001, the Yorkshire MP William Hague tried, via the Malaga Declaration, to protect the independence of his MEPs in the enlarged EPP group by allowing them different voting rights, but ultimately he did not seek to resist the move to join with the larger Christian Democrats (Lynch and Whitaker 2007; Hayton 2012). This chapter will cover in detail the 2005 British Conservative Party leadership contest, the 2014 European Parliament elections, and the 2016 European Union referendum in the United Kingdom as the three key points in time that punctuate the development of ECR, and which have also helped to define the United Kingdom’s somewhat fraught membership of the European Union in recent years. An internal party contest, a national general election, and an advisory and highly divisive referendum have all come together to help shape this aspect of international relations in

24

The European Conservatives and Reformists

Europe, and the development of the European Conservatives and Reformists has featured alongside these polls – effectively, public opinion driving party development and vice versa. ECR unquestionably has its origins in British Conservative Euroscepticism; one of the most important arguments advanced in this study may be that today there is more to the group than simply Euroscepticism, but the ongoing influence of British Conservative thinking with regard to European reform is undeniably fundamental to the way ECR continues to function. Euro-realism is, first and foremost, an Anglosphere centre-right reaction against Christian democracy, rather than simply a populist or nationalist-based Euroscepticism. This is not to argue that the European Conservatives and Reformists is not a Eurosceptic grouping at all, but that it is more than simply a Eurosceptic grouping. It is probably not completely sufficient, then, for Chapter 1 merely to define ‘conservatism’, although this was undeniably important; there is also a need for this chapter to set out why exactly ECR’s ideology is not Christian democratic. The creation of the ECR group has ultimately been an Anglosphere challenge to Western European Christian democratic parties and politicians who support the marketplace, but only with a large amount of state regulation and in the context of European integration. The European Conservatives and Reformists essentially take that idea on and critique it, arguing that it is possible to be on the centre-right in politics but not believe that the European Union ought to be forever expanded and more integrated. Socialist and Green politicians are obvious political opponents of ECR as well, but what is more nuanced in the context of this study is the way conservatives from the Englishspeaking world, along with those who support them, so strongly criticise the hybrid social market economy model promoted by its parent group in Strasbourg, the European People’s Party. Chapter 1 defined conservatism as the party family to which Euro-realism ultimately belongs, and included a discussion of what it means to be a ‘conservative’ politically, including making the point that the term ‘conservative’ has much less currency in countries like France or Germany. Even ECR’s name is something of an ‘Anglo’ irritant to many in Brussels who do not use this type of vocabulary to describe their political aspirations (Knapp and Wright 2006). The most central theme around which this book is orientated, then, can be considered the relationship between conservatism and Christian democracy. To be pro-European and in favour of ‘ever closer union’ is almost what has come to define Christian democratic politics in countries such as Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium. By leaving EPP in 2009, the British Conservatives were obviously making a Eurosceptic move; that perhaps was regrettable for many, but in one sense at least they were also making a conservative move, and one which actually was ideologically consistent. For that reason, it is also as important to define Christian democracy as it is to define conservatism and the latter’s reaction against it. Christian democracy has been the most significant force in the post-war politics of many European states, with Christian Democratic politicians continuing to hold power in Germany, Austria

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

25

and Belgium, enjoying a resurgence in the Netherlands, and dominating the European Parliament itself since 1994 through EPP. From the outset, Christian democrats have also been prominent advocates of the cause of European integration, and key contemporary figures in the European Union; the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker are leading Christian democrats. Yet even in its heyday, Christian democracy received less academic attention from British-based scholars than its importance merited, reflecting an apparent lack of interest in the United Kingdom and even the wider English-speaking world. It is very likely that Britons with a keen interest in politics at home and abroad will feel more familiar with European social democratic parties than with Christian democrats. British Conservatives are unfamiliar with Christian democracy, but Labour Party activists are social democrats, and this also goes some way to explaining why Labour has, overall, been more consistently pro-EU than the Conservatives since the 1970s, something Cameron unsuccessfully tried to address. The 2005 Conservative Party leadership contest Back in 2005, a still youthful David Cameron was a strong candidate to replace the experienced Michael Howard as party leader. Howard, a former Home Secretary, had essentially been acting as a stopgap caretaker from 2003, after Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) resigned. Yet though he led the party into the 2005 general election, and had been elected unopposed by MPs who had signalled a desire for stability, at 64 he was not really seen as a long-term solution to Labour’s continued popularity under Tony Blair. On the other hand, Cameron had been talked about as a future leader for some time – good with presentation and speeches, well-educated, and moderate in his views (Bale et al. 2010). Had his party been in government around this time, he would likely have served in the Cabinet and probably been promoted quite rapidly. As it was, he had served in the Treasury as a special adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, while still in his twenties. In opposition, he had very much been seen as the leadership candidate who could build up momentum over a number of years ahead of the 2010 general election. In particular, he cleverly sought to emulate Tony Blair’s electoral success for Labour in the late 1990s and early 2000s by placing his party more centrally on the political spectrum. The fact that general elections tend to be won on the centre-ground in Britain would be his main proposition to the party, not facing inwards and obsessing over policy areas with narrow electoral appeal – European integration, for example. The challenges associated with achieving this is a familiar one for all parties, even those that regard themselves as populist – the art of compromising what are perhaps core beliefs with the wider objectives of governing the country. In a democracy, governments must try to accommodate the views of as many people as possible, and party leaders must try to do the same with members and elected representatives. After John Major left office in 1997, the Conservatives entered a prolonged period

26

The European Conservatives and Reformists

of introspection. The obvious candidate to succeed Major had been Kenneth Clarke, the likeable and experienced former Chancellor. Interestingly, it was not Clarke’s views on socio-economic policies that prevented him from being elected; he had, after all, been in charge of government departments in the areas of both health and education that had introduced internal markets and a business model to schools, universities and hospitals for the first time, putting him very much in the frontline of delivering Thatcherite economic policies. Rather, it was the fact his views were unashamedly pro-European that primarily appeared to stop him from taking the top job. William Hague, the former Secretary of State for Wales, became leader instead; a witty and intelligent politician, he was nonetheless considered too young and inexperienced by many at the time, and this proved to be the case in the 2001 general election campaign. Hague effectively turned the Conservative campaign in 2001 into a referendum on the UK joining the European single currency, even though this was unlikely to have happened in any case (Hayton 2012). In reality, it was an attempt to create a clear campaign message that would eat into the Labour Government’s enduring popularity under Tony Blair before it started to implode in the wake of the Iraq War. But Hague’s strategy failed quite badly – the party vote share and seats remained almost exactly the same as in 1997 – forcing the Conservatives to once more enter a period of reflection. This time, the party again rejected the prospect of Kenneth Clarke and elected Iain Duncan Smith, a right-wing Eurosceptic who had not even served as a Cabinet minister. His leadership was weak from the start, and he did not even survive long enough to fight the 2005 general election. Just as he had attempted to undermine Prime Minister John Major in the 1990s, he himself would be undermined by the party establishment at Westminster. IDS can be said to broadly embody a typical Eurosceptic politician produced by the British Conservative Party. Almost every political calculation taken by such an MP is seen through the prism of Europe and the premise that Britain’s centuries’ old sovereignty has been fatally undermined by European integration. Representing the seat of Chingford in Essex, and with a military background, IDS even chose to use his maiden speech in Parliament in 1992 to attack the Maastricht Treaty. His predecessor for the constituency was Norman Tebbit, a key confidante of Margaret Thatcher and widely recognised as influencing her increasingly Eurosceptic opinions while Prime Minister. An active Christian, IDS also holds socially conservative views on marriage, human sexuality and abortion. He owed his victory to support from local constituency activists, rather than the parliamentary party, an early but important sign of a developing split between the heavily Eurosceptic grassroots of the party and its MPs at Westminster, who on the whole were more moderate on the issue of Europe. Despite his short and unhappy time as party leader, IDS did nonetheless bequeath the Conservatives one hugely important legacy: it is he who is credited with cultivating the idea of setting up ECR in the early 2000s, and arguing that British Conservative

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

27

MEPs should not be sitting alongside ‘federalist’ Christian democrats from Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium in favour of ‘ever closer union’ (author interview with Jan Zahradil, Brussels, 2 March 2017; see also Lynch and Whitaker 2007). Together with politicians from the Civic Democratic Party, the Czech political party led by President Václav Klaus that modelled itself on a Thatcherite approach to free-market economics, IDS started this process by setting up talks, and even prematurely trying to get the new group ready for the European elections in 2004. While, at the time, it may have seemed an obscure cause to back, it is likely that IDS realised that removing MEPs from EPP would help, at the very least, in the process of embedding the more Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party. Perhaps even he, however, could not have foreseen the longer-term damage such a move would have on relations between future Conservative Party leaders and influential centre-right figures, such as the incoming German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was first elected in 2005. In his short tenure as leader, Michael Howard was much less keen than IDS on the idea of leaving the European People’s Party, and it is possible that, despite his Eurosceptic views, he appreciated some of the wider unintended consequences which might be released by such a move. The issue of European integration has featured prominently in every Conservative Party leadership contest since the 1970s. It can, however, also be acknowledged that these leadership contests were not always completely about Europe. Ken Clarke was an older candidate in the 2000s, and seen partly as a throwback to the Thatcher era of divisive public sector reform in the 1980s. William Hague, meanwhile, was primarily using Europe as an issue to create some policy space between his party and Labour – and, in his later career, was actually a supporter, during the referendum campaign, of the UK remaining in the EU. Michael Portillo, another Conservative Eurosceptic and former Defence Secretary, was no more successful than Ken Clarke in his leadership bids; at one time he was regarded as the party’s rising star and a future prime minister, but his moment for challenging for leader came and passed rapidly. He has since reinvented himself as a television presenter, enjoying popularity with his BBC series on European travel, Great Continental Railway Journeys – presumably partly to illustrate what he would regard as the distinction between ‘Europe’ and the ‘European Union’. Margaret Thatcher and John Major both suffered a decline in support towards the end of their time in Downing Street that had more to it than the ins and outs of European integration. In Thatcher’s case, it was linked to her increasing aloofness and distance from her own Cabinet colleagues, almost of all of whom were male, with a number drawn from an older upper class of British society. Over a decade in Number Ten was an immense achievement, but many Conservative MPs began to feel that the era of her electoral success had passed. John Major, a modest and quietly spoken politician, was not a natural media performer and looked increasingly tired in contrast with the then new and energetic young Labour leader, Tony Blair (Seldon and Baston 1997). Blair was able to appeal to the Middle England electorate by

28

The European Conservatives and Reformists

assuring it that his party had changed and was now ‘New’ Labour, while also managing to hold on to the traditional core sections of his party’s working-class support. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party has within it a core strand that is primarily concerned with foreign policy and international relations – survey evidence consistently shows how Conservative voters have more of an interest in economic affairs than voters of either Labour or the Liberal Democrats, with Labour supporters in particular more interested in domestic issues such as healthcare and education (Cowley and Kavanagh 2016; Tonge et al. 2017). It makes sense, therefore, that the Conservative Party has long attempted to define Britain’s role in the world more actively than the Labour Party; indeed, left-wing activism that focuses on international development is almost, by its very nature, the polar opposite of the Conservatives’ activity as it is inherently internationalist. Margaret Thatcher was as much interested in ‘statecraft’ abroad as she was in state reform at home; for the Conservatives to go from being the most enthusiastic supporters of the European Community in the 1970s to being its fiercest critic in the 1990s was, on one level, consistent overall, as European integration progressed and ‘ever closer union’ moved through the gears (Thatcher 2002). If Britain has always been seen as Europe’s awkward partner, it is the British Conservatives who have debated and deliberated over that awkwardness for many decades. Pride in promoting and protecting Britain’s place in the world has always been a pillar of British Conservatism, an ideological component complimenting other prominent features such as free-market economics and trade. So it was against this backdrop that David Cameron launched his leadership bid back in 2005, and it was clear from the outset that while he had support from the party’s ‘men in grey suits’, a coronation was far from assured. David Davis, a combative Yorkshire MP, who would in due course serve as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, was also a candidate: older, more experienced, and – crucially – widely seen as a firm Eurosceptic in comparison with Cameron. Indeed, Davis actually won the first round of the contest before the parliamentary party establishment began to regroup around Cameron, who they considered more electable. Cameron was already considered to be a talented politician, managing to combine an easy-going personality with a first-class intellect. As mentioned earlier, he had already worked in government as a Treasury adviser to Chancellor Norman Lamont from 1990 to 1993, and was by Lamont’s side throughout Black Wednesday when the UK was forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism due to speculation over the value of the pound. Cameron, then, had huge potential, but was perhaps not quite the finished article. He needed an eye-catching policy that would edge him over the finishing line and allow him to attract the support of Conservative MPs who were resolute in their Euroscepticism and committed to Davis. Cameron had never been a Euro-enthusiast like Ken Clarke, yet he was also not considered to be a true Eurosceptic either – ‘indifferent’ to the EU might be the most accurate description. He would later make a speech asking the party to stop ‘banging on about Europe’ (BBC News 2006) and

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

29

he also knew this was part of a wider modernisation process the party needed to undergo if it was to become electable again. Internal obsessions about some of the finer points of international relations in Europe and questions related to parliamentary sovereignty did not win elections, in Cameron’s view; indeed, the British electorate actually has a habit of punishing political parties that appear either divided or irrelevant. Cameron was, in many ways, the Tony Blair of the British Right – making the party less hostile to equalities and rights, more interested in green issues and the environment, while still trying to hang on to its core electoral base in rural counties across England. In essence, he was a metropolitan politician who wanted to take his party into the twenty-first century: ‘Conservative values in a modern setting’ was his oft-repeated mantra (BBC News 2006). According to the influential Conservative Home website at the time: a pledge to leave the EPP and a promise of a tax allowance for married couples was the loose change that bought David Cameron the support of the right. Leading lights of the three most important parliamentary right-wing groups endorsed him. John Hayes from Cornerstone. Gerald Howarth from the ’92 Group. John Redwood from No Turning Back. [But] will they stay loyal if the exit from the EPP is kicked into the long grass and the tax incentive for marriage ends up being paltry? (Conservative Home 2005)

By picking up and running with Iain Duncan Smith’s vision of what would ultimately become ECR was Cameron’s way of signalling that he was not entirely unsympathetic to Euroscepticism, without doing anything too drastic; or so he presumably thought. In committing to setting up ECR and making 2009 the first European elections in the lifetime of the EU when British Conservatives would not stand alongside Christian democrats, Cameron’s leadership was given a shot in the arm, and he won the leadership comfortably. Parliamentary support coalesced around him and his key ally, George Osborne, an equally outward-looking MP representing a Cheshire seat, and he ultimately won 68 per cent of the membership vote of party members. Leaving EPP was not then ‘kicked into the long grass’, as some Eurosceptic Conservatives feared. Cameron followed through on his promise, perhaps hoping that it would not amount to much in the long run given the generally low levels of awareness among the British electorate of European Parliamentary politics and transnational party federations. But in doing so he also sealed his own political fate, as well as the fate of the UK; the setting up of ECR would remove him from the EU’s most important networking arena, the European People’s Party, and place him in direct conflict with the EU’s most powerful leader, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, committing a sort of ‘original sin’ in the eyes of key Brussels figures (Shipman 2017). ECR would go on to contain MEPs from Alternative for Germany, a party that would challenge Merkel’s popularity domestically and force her to take uncomfortable policy positions on immigration and foreign affairs. Meanwhile, David Davis would return to serve in the Cabinet as Brexit Secretary after Cameron’s resignation

30

The European Conservatives and Reformists

as Prime Minister, leading the UK for a period in its negotiations with the European Commission. Cameron would only manage to win the 2010 general election by forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s most pro-European party. This luckily postponed another of his European commitments – to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership – until after 2015; but that day would eventually come. The 2014 European Parliament elections Ultimately, the 2014 European elections were significant in the United Kingdom because of the electoral performance of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Before May 2014 there had been signs that UKIP was on the rise, steadily gaining in popularity, vote share and seats in the European Parliament, election after election. But it took until 2014 for the party to actually win an election – in itself a tremendous achievement – but that needs to be seen in the context of a second-order ballot, where protest votes often feature, and a relatively low turnout (36 per cent). At this point UKIP still did not have any Members of Parliament at Westminster, but it did have a charismatic leader in former City of London commodities trader Nigel Farage, who performed well in the media and was able to appeal to voters disillusioned with mainstream politics and politicians (Ford and Goodwin 2013). UKIP was also able to ride the wave populism that was starting to reveal itself in different parts of Europe, and in that sense the election results in Britain were broadly in line with other European countries, as mentioned in Chapter 1. Mainstream parties of government were given a serious jolt by electorates annoyed by the economic downturn and high unemployment (Hobolt and Tilley 2014). Suddenly, many Conservative MPs in Britain were openly worried; they may have still held the view that UKIP was a different type of party from it, full of working-class voters, anti-immigrant members and activists hostile to other aspects of free trade and globalisation, but many were also looking over their shoulders at UKIP activists in their own areas, challenging them to be clearer and more consistent about their Euroscepticism. Some apparently reliable polling at the time suggested that UKIP were about to win between five and fifteen MPs at the 2015 general election (Helm and Boffey 2014), a significant number given the tightness of the polls more widely at the time between the Conservatives and Labour, then led by the Doncaster MP Ed Miliband. The spike in support for UKIP in the run-up to the 2014 European elections helped concentrate the minds of Conservative politicians that they needed to start making more Eurosceptic noises in order to connect with an increasingly disaffected electorate. Eurosceptics in the parliamentary party may well have been only a minority, but their wider influence was now beginning to grow expeditiously. Parallels can be drawn with the present-day European Research Group (ERG); they only constitute just under a third of the parliamentary party, but that is more than enough to throw legislation off course and generally cause huge problems over Europe for any Conservative prime minister.

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

31

In this context, the decision by David Cameron to remove Conservative MEPs from the European People’s Party seemed prescient, electorally at least. While in some ways the groups that parties join in Strasbourg can appear obscure to the average voter, political capital could have been made of this by opponents in UKIP. The accusation would have been that European elites cared little about the lives of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet, and that the Conservatives were on the side of those elites, especially those in the most elite party grouping of all – EPP. The creation of ECR removed that potential problem from the Conservatives, cutting off an avenue of attack for UKIP and Nigel Farage. Moreover, linked to this, the development of ECR also gave the emerging AfD a home in the European Parliament when otherwise its seven newly elected MEPs might have had to join forces with UKIP’s Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy faction. After the 2014 elections, EFDD was the largest ‘hard’ Eurosceptic political group, while Af D was still fundamentally a party concerned with economic policy and the way the eurozone was malfunctioning. In this sense, ECR delivered a type of double blow to UKIP in 2014, despite its electoral triumph, allowing the Conservatives to look a little more Eurosceptic than perhaps was the case in reality with regard to policy, while also limiting UKIP’s potential group coalition partners later that summer. One of the key aims of this book is to truly understand the political values of ECR more clearly, as well as to test whether or not those values have been transformed into policy outcomes; but in order to do this, it is important to examine voting behaviour as well as policy positions, especially during a period leading up to ECR emerging as the largest group in the European Parliament after EPP and S&D. Moderate Euro-realist concerns about European integration appear to be reflected in the political views of voters who support ECR parties – especially the British Conservatives – and the reasons for this can be scrutinised further. Conservative Party voters, if not Conservative Party MPs, are generally on the Eurosceptic wing of the political spectrum, and the policies of a party like UKIP are attractive to many of them. Yet equally, that is not quite the same as definitely wanting to leave the EU altogether. As a consequence of their parties’ increased representation across EU member states, the level of detail in survey data surrounding the political attitudes of Eurosceptic voters has also improved, and this type of research is also helpful when trying to understand the historic development of ECR during this key period. Party politics across many European countries has become more multipolar, including in the UK where ECR has its largest voter base in the Conservative Party. The Conservatives also provide the wider ECR/ACRE network with the bulk of its institutional leadership and support in Brussels, including its chair in Parliament, Syed Kamall MEP, Chief Executive Richard Milsom and Secretary General Daniel Hannan MEP. An analysis of data from this period taken from the 2013 British Social Attitudes survey (Park et al. 2013) shows how it is possible to quantifiably distinguish Conservative supporters from voters of other parties on many political issues related to Europe – especially UKIP. Yet equally, it is clearly UKIP that has

The European Conservatives and Reformists

32

Table 2.1  How would you vote in a referendum on EU membership? (%)

Conservative Labour Liberal Democrat UKIP

Remain in the EU

Leave the EU

Cannot choose

34 49 59 10

43 28 24 82

22 22 18 8

Source: British Social Attitudes survey 2013

been most overtly associated with the cause of Euroscepticism in British electoral politics, and this became even more apparent in the period leading up to 2014. This is useful when trying to understand how the development of ECR went from being a theoretical idea pushed by a minority of hard Eurosceptics in the British Conservative Party, to becoming a reality, with the group emerging after the 2014 elections to become the kingmakers of the eighth Parliament. As is widely known, in an attempt to provide voters with an opportunity to endorse membership of the European Union, the British Conservative Government legislated for an In–Out referendum to be held on 23 June 2016. This process also allowed the Conservatives to offer British voters an opportunity to democratically endorse EU membership for the first time since 1975. At the time of the BSA survey, in response to the question: ‘How would you vote in a referendum to decide whether Britain does or does not remain a member of the EU?’ Table 2.1 shows that Conservative voters were split over the issue of whether Britain ought to leave the EU altogether, with 34 per cent wishing to remain, while 82 per cent of UKIP voters were very much in favour of leaving. Meanwhile, both Labour and Liberal Democrat voters displayed greater enthusiasm for remaining in the EU than either Conservative or UKIP voters. In order to make a more controlled estimation for identifying British voters’ political attitudes towards Europe around this key period, the data taken from the British Social Attitudes survey were analysed further. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was used as an appropriate model for comparing party support between Conservatives and UKIP in particular, controlling for socio-economic characteristics and political attitudes related to European integration.1 To make the analysis clearer, the focus was only on the four main UK political parties, with the Conservative Party compared to the other three: Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP. Table 2.2 includes the results of analysing the differences in respondents’ voting preferences based on their attitudes towards issues related to Europe, as well as controlling for other socio-economic characteristics. The results show that characteristics such as age, gender and education, and attitudes such as appreciating the benefits of EU membership, are all significant variables for distinguishing between the party identification of respondents. As respondents get

The Conservative Party and development of ECR

33

Table 2.2  Predicting British political party identification (Parameter estimates and standard errors) Lab vs Con

Lib Dem vs Con

UKIP vs Con

Socio-economic characteristics Age Gender Marital status Education Occupation

−0.28 (0.06)*** −0.03 (0.19) 0.36 (0.20)* 0.71 (0.22)*** 0.34 (0.24)

−0.19 (0.11)* 0.28 (0.34) 0.46 (0.34) 0.59 (0.39)* −0.43 (0.46)

−0.42 (0.11) −0.87 (0.34)*** −0.25 (0.36) 0.16 (0.36) 0.60 (0.43)

Political attitudes Feeling European Benefits of EU membership Benefits of EU immigration Benefits of free trade

0.34 (0.30) 0.41 (0.11)*** 0.17 (0.08)** −0.29 (0.13)**

−0.97 (0.40)** 0.26 (0.18)* 0.14 (0.14) 0.49 (0.24)**

−0.16 (0.55) −0.91 (0.21)*** 0.85 (0.14) −0.25 (0.23)

Constant Nagelkerke R-Sq (N)

−0.58 0.24 (817)

−0.37

3.53

Notes: *, **, *** statistically significant at p