At the heart of journalist Tom McTague’s sweeping new biography of modern British politics lies a simple question: Why did Britain join the European Union—or rather, its predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC)—in 1973 only to vote to leave it 43 years later?
Between the Waves: The History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, Tom McTague, Picador, 560 pp., £25, September 2025
McTague, the editor in chief of The New Statesman, crafts an intricate patchwork of explanations in Between the Waves: The History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, which follows the country from its gradual entry into the European political experiment through to its sudden exit. In the process, McTague also sheds light on the rise of Nigel Farage—Reform UK party leader, MAGA ally, and contender to become the next British prime minister.
Since Between the Waves was published last year to rave reviews in the British media, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has stumbled from one scandal to another. He now stands tainted by proximity to his former ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, who was recently arrested on suspicion of sharing confidential government information with Jeffrey Epstein.
Though betting odds on Farage entering Downing Street have dropped, recent polls give Reform a 10-point lead over both Labour and the Conservatives. The current parliamentary term has more than three years to run—and the country’s mood, nearly a decade on from the Brexit vote, remains convulsive.
McTague doesn’t have a single theory of Brexit, arguing that a few factors made a rupture between Britain and Europe likely as the 20th century drew to a close. One was the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union provided powerful unifying pressure in Britain, binding anti-communist conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher to the European cause. Thatcher was not sentimentally attached to Europe but viewed the alliance as strategic. When the Soviet Union fell, so did that pillar of Anglo-European support.
Germany’s post-reunification emergence in the 1990s as Europe’s strongest economy and largest nation-state posed another problem for Britain, a formal imperial giant and nuclear-armed member of the United Nations Security Council. As Berlin’s clout grew, London’s shrank, further eroding the logic of Britain’s EU membership. McTague neatly summarizes this as the “paradox of European integration.”
A group protests the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty outside a European Council meeting in Birmingham, England, on Oct. 16, 1992.Joel Robine/AFP via Getty Images
This paradox deepened at the turn of the millennium. The signing of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty—which pledged an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”—and the introduction of the European single currency in 2002 formalized Europe’s two-tier structure. Europe now had core states (such as Germany, France, and Italy) and peripheral ones, such as the United Kingdom. By the early 2000s, Britain’s integration into the EU was, for a growing number of British politicians and voters, beginning to reach “the limits of [its] tolerability,” McTague writes.
Then, in 2004, the EU embarked on the largest expansion in its history, supercharging the debate over Britain’s place in Europe. Ten new states joined and conferred on their citizens the right to live and work freely throughout the EU. For Britain, the social impact was immense: migration to the country on an unprecedented scale. Over the next seven years, the number of people born in the EU and living in the U.K. rose by more than 1 million. Ironically, the British economy attracted migrant workers because it was heavily deregulated and lay outside the Eurozone.
Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, a true believer in the European project, could have imposed temporary transition controls on new EU migrants moving into the British labor market, as France and Germany did, but chose not to. This decision “would prove one of the most consequential ever taken by a post-war British government,” McTague writes. “For many, this remains the key moment on the road to Brexit.”
European Common Market leader Jean Monnet (right) meets with U.S. President John F. Kennedy at the White House in Washington on March 26, 1962. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
McTague’s narrative features a remarkable cast of characters across the decades. But Jean Monnet, the visionary French statesman and effective founder of the EU, and Enoch Powell, the most influential British conservative of the postwar period next to Thatcher, stand out as the dominant personalities in Between the Waves.
Monnet and Powell held diametrically opposed worldviews. In 1943, Monnet, then in exile in Algeria and carefully mapping out Europe’s future, called for a pooling of European sovereignty after the war. “There will be no peace in Europe if the States are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty,” he wrote. “That was tried in 1919; we all know the result.”
Powell, meanwhile, was a British imperialist and then a romantic English nationalist who clung to organic notions of Anglo-Saxon liberty, rooted in the sovereign power of the Westminster parliamentary state. Born in 1912, he once dreamed of being viceroy of India but turned his back on the empire, bereft, after India gained independence from Britain in 1947.
In 1968, Powell—then a rebel Tory parliamentarian—delivered a politically seismic speech in Birmingham, an incendiary broadside against racial mixing in which he described immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain as the act of a nation “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Powell’s unapologetically racialized attack marked the moment that immigration became an obsession in British politics and a source of anxiety about Britain’s place in the world. “A sense of loss [guided] Powell’s conservatism,” McTague writes.
The architects of Brexit, the “revolution” of McTague’s title, understood this anxiety. As the 2016 EU referendum approached, Euroskeptic campaigners including Farage sought to stir the Powellite impulses in British political culture. The central premise of the Vote Leave campaign was that large numbers of white British voters felt the country had been altered in some negative, intangible way over the years; that immigration was to blame; and that EU membership was to blame for mass immigration. Its initial slogan was “Take Control,” soon updated to “Take Back Control.”
Polling conducted after the Brexit referendum showed how deeply anti-immigrant sentiment had influenced the outcome. According to IPSOS Mori, in July 2016, more than half the British electorate believed that it was more important for the U.K. government to exercise “total control” over the number of immigrants coming into Britain than it was for Britain to remain part of the European single market. Another poll showed that 73 percent of Brits who described themselves as “worried” about immigration voted Leave.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (left) poses at a news conference at a pub in London on Feb. 3.Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images
McTague places Powell and Farage in different intellectual leagues. However objectionable, Powell was a formidable scholar and orator and a serious figure in public life. He was a Cambridge classicist prior to World War II and an intelligence officer during it. Farage, by contrast, is a schoolboy provocateur-turned-commodities-trader, a political showman more at home in the pub than the debating hall. Yet for McTague, the two men share “powerful political instincts: a deep Englishness and a corresponding hostility to immigration and Europe.”
They seem to share something else: an understanding of the profoundly federal nature of the European project. McTague explains Britain’s initial turn toward Europe as a strategic gesture, consistent with Thatcher’s positioning. By the late 1960s, the British empire was gone, and political elites—Labour and Tory alike—began to see embracing Europe as an opportunity to repair Britain’s influence and pursue its interests on a manageable scale. In 1972, the U.K. House of Commons voted to join the EEC. Three years later, the majority of the British public endorsed the vote in a referendum.
Powell saw EEC membership as an assault on the fundamental principle of British constitutional democracy: the absolute sovereignty of the British Parliament. To an extent, he was right. Monnet’s grand plan was to pacify postwar Germany by embedding it deeper into the decision-making structures of European states, thus constraining its capacity to dominate its neighbors. To achieve this, Europe needed to fuse the interests not just of its states but also of its people. Monnet made no attempt to disguise the loftiness of his ambitions, nor did his successors.
In 1992, after the Maastricht Treaty was signed, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said the treaty was a “decisive step in the process of European integration that in a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamt of after the last war, a United States of Europe.” In 2013, French President François Hollande issued an ultimatum to British negotiators pressing for special opt-outs from EU legislation. “Europe has to be accepted as it is,” Hollande said. “[W]e cannot dismiss or diminish it under the pretext of proposing to stay in it.”
The architects of European integration had always been crystal clear about what membership of the EU would entail: the steady centralization of domestic political power into supranational European institutions.
Why, then, did British politicians ignore this fact between 1973 and the Brexit vote in 2016? McTague’s answer is that British elites suffered from a kind of willful blindness caused by the country’s faltering transition from a global imperial power before World War II to middling trans-Atlantic power after it. Britain wanted the strategic benefits of European partnership but not the federal compromises that such partnership entailed nor the sense of binding European identity of which Monnet dreamed.
This was a contradiction that Powell diagnosed with characteristic clarity—and that he knew couldn’t be sustained. “The nation has returned to haunt us,” he told an interviewer in 1996. Powell died in 1998, less than a year after Blair’s election as prime minister, at the age of 85.
Brexit supporters attend a Brexit Day Celebration Party in London on Jan. 31, 2020.Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
One of the many ironies of the Brexit story largely lost on observers outside the U.K. is that British Euroskepticism was never an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. In fact, for many years, the left led the defense of British sovereignty.
Future Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson argued in 1961 that Britain’s obligations to the Commonwealth outweighed its commitments to Europe. “[W]e are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematic and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Düsseldorf,” he said. In 1962, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell argued that joining the European Common Market would mean the “end of Britain as an independent nation-state.”
McTague attributes the left’s hostility toward Europe to a sovereigntist impulse. Between 1945 and 1951, Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government used parliamentary powers to extraordinary effect—creating over a single term a national health service, a heavily nationalized economy, and a welfare state. Absolute poverty levels fell and the government pursued full employment. Given these achievements, McTague writes, “it was hardly surprising that Labour did not want to hand over any of Parliament’s power to a [European authority].”
Remnants of this leftist nationalism carried into the 21st century and sometimes drifted into Powellite rhetoric on immigration. In 2007, shortly before he succeeded Blair as prime minister, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown—today exalted by his supporters as a paragon of progressive virtue—borrowed a slogan from the neo-fascist National Front: “British jobs for British workers.”
In May 2025, Starmer warned that mass immigration was turning the U.K. into an “an island of strangers” in an explicit echo of Powell’s 1968 speech. By amplifying public fears over multiculturalism, mainstream politicians on the center-left have made it easy for Farage to do the same thing.
Farage channels a crude form of Powellism to great effect. He flirts with far-right activists but never fully embraces them. He complains about immigrant kids speaking foreign languages. When one of his Reform colleagues is caught making a racist remark, as they frequently are, Farage disavows the remark but never the colleague. He has spent recent years raising panic about the so-called small boats crisis: the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees on the English south coast in makeshift dinghies and rafts.
Farage appeals to roughly one-third of the British electorate—enough, under the first-past-the-post system, to likely win a plurality in the House of Commons. If there was a general election in the U.K. tomorrow, Reform would almost certainly end up as the party with the most seats.
A Farage government would be a strange blend of nostalgic English nationalism and Donald Trump-style executive demagoguery. Farage wants to subject Britain’s public finances to an audit like that done by the U.S. quasi-agency “DOGE” (the Department of Government Efficiency) and conduct immigration raids in U.K. cities. Reform has attracted a handful of high-profile Tory defectors in recent months and may strike an electoral pact with the Conservatives ahead of the next general election in 2029—forming a single reactionary bloc born of the Euroskeptic movement.
Between the Waves is a brilliant and sprawling book, clever and clear-eyed in its analysis. McTague isn’t a Brexit partisan; he doesn’t argue for or against Britain’s decision to leave the EU. He sees Brexit not as a spasm of insularity, but as the culmination of a long-running conflict—the nearly inevitable end point of a clash between the traditions of English parliamentary sovereignty and the postwar dream of a European superstate.
The tides could turn again. Through the war in Ukraine, Starmer is beginning to reintegrate the U.K. back into Europe’s collective security arrangements. And as the economic costs of Brexit have gradually accumulated, support among British voters for rejoining the EU now outstrips opposition by roughly 20 points. British liberals desperate to see their country return to the European fold might detect a sliver of hope in McTague’s conclusion: “A people cannot escape their history, for they are their history,” he writes.
