Despite being amid another post‐Brexit ‘difficulty’ in debates over the Northern Ireland protocol, the consensus is that we should now leave it behind us for the most part. Future policy should assume that the UK will not re-join the bloc anytime soon and the country must figure out its own course. Now a reflection on Brexit should be a priority, ensuring that we understand why it occurred and what can be done to improve the circumstances surrounding it. The European Research Group (ERG) remains one of the most reasons that Brexit occurred and revealed that Euroscepticism was a longer-term issue in British politics that should have been considered more seriously. It was not until it was given the opportunity to rear its ugly head by David Cameron, holding a referendum to satisfy personal motives.
The ERG is one of the most influential pressure groups in contemporary British political history. A causal and insider pressure group, it is made up of Eurosceptic MPs with a focus on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Of course, we now know that this was a successful endeavour and that the group was integral to this success. Yet before this, it had a long history, being founded in 1993 by the Conservative Party MP Sir Michael Spicer. It has many influential politicians related to it including Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Sajid Javid, and was particularly associated with the idea of a hard Brexit, removing Britain from the ‘shackles’ of the European Union without a withdrawal agreement. So, why did the ERG become such an integral part of the Brexit movement and the Conservative Party as a whole - being called a ‘Party within a party’ by many critics.
To understand the ERG, we need to understand Daniel Hannan. At the end of his history degree at Oriel College Oxford, Hannan wrote to 22 Conservative MPs who had rebelled against the government’s support of the Maastricht Treaty - the foundational treaty of the European Union - in an analogous way to ERG members’ later rebellion against Theresa May’s Brexit deal. In these letters, Hannan offered his services as a researcher. Around a dozen MPs replied and so the ERG was created, with Daniel Hannan as its first secretary. Even before this Hannan had been agitating against European integration. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher - one of the most revered figures in Conservative politics - made her famous Bruges speech. In it, she warned of ‘a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’ Her Eurosceptic turn in 1988 influenced the young Hannan to found the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain in 1990, 3 years before the European Union was even created. Ironically, Hannan saw this as a radical and anti-establishment movement despite his archetypal Oxford public school boy credentials. ‘It went with being against big corporations and big government, and the establishment. It was for the people, against the elites.’ Hannan said in a later interview with the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell.
So, now the ERG had been formed with Hannan at the helm. And for the time being, he continued fomenting, protesting, strategising, undermining, authoring books, writing speeches, and then delivering them to promote the idea of Brexit. However, Hannan left the group in 1999 to become an MEP, hoping to ‘take the institutions down from the inside’ as Edward McMillan-Scott - a former Conservative MEP - said of him. Meanwhile, the ERG continuously chugged along, as it had done, with its members meeting regularly to discuss European affairs at breakfast meetings in the Attlee Room in the House of Commons. However with Hannan gone, the ERG languished in obscurity while Eurosceptics struggled to get attention as politics was dominated by the pro-EU Labour party under Tony Blair.
However, the ERG and other Tory Eurosceptics had one success during this period. They were able to convince David Cameron to hold a Brexit referendum. This would prompt a transformation of the ERG from a group that had ‘breakfast once a month and heard from Robert Broadhurst and making up our own minds’ to a group that campaigned for Brexit seriously, but still behind the scenes. Hannan also had a hand in Brexit campaigning as well. He convinced Matthew Elliott, the founder of the Taxpayers’ Alliance - a low tax pressure group, to set up the Vote Leave campaign group.
After the shocking result of the referendum, the ERG changed even further. This change occurred under the premiership of conservative MP Steve Baker. He had become ERG chairman in 2016 and reformed the group into the ‘party within a party’ that it became. The conclusive aim of the ERG was now to: ‘ensure a hard, clean Brexit with minimal or no payments to Brussels, minimal reliance on EU judgments, and maximum flexibility to deregulate the British economy and sign free trade deals around the world.’ The chance for the ERG to profoundly influence the Conservative government came in 2017. Theresa May lost her majority and decided to pacify the ERG by integrating it into her government. However, this only emboldened the members and they continued to oppose May’s withdrawal agreement, leading to her resignation.
With a hard-Brexiteer in government (Boris Johnson), the ERG had largely completed its project and became part of the conservative mainstream. Its members still have an incredibly influential place in modern British politics. However, with the failure or infeasibility of its economic vision, the group no longer has as influential a place as it once had. Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss was part of the group, although many of their cabinets contained members associated with it. Their ideology has become a norm of the Conservative Party and time will tell whether the British public is still interested in what it promises. The Tories may have to snap out of their low-tax, low-regulation fever dream and act pragmatically, especially since Truss’ disastrous mini budget. Now that it seems inevitable that the Tories will be voted out, with a significant amount of the public’s dissatisfaction with them based on ERG policy, perhaps a group akin to them is no longer tenable. Time will only tell
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