Chapter 882 The Biggest Challenge

"In fact, after Mrs. Thatcher, especially since the new century, there is no longer a pro-European faction in the Conservative Party..."

Joe Harriman said to Barron helplessly:

"If he takes a clear-cut pro-European stance, I'm afraid he won't get any support within the conservative party. Cameron now needs support from within the conservative party. Every compromise on the EU will make him more popular among the conservative party." There’s a lot of pressure on the inside.”

She naturally understands Barron's interests, and with Joe Harriman's choice to rely on the other party, Barron's will must be implemented. But in reality, even if it is to avoid the Brexit referendum, in the It is also very difficult for the Conservative Party to be in power now.

It’s no wonder that in Barron’s previous life, when Cameron resigned as Prime Minister due to the success of the British Brexit referendum, someone ridiculed:

"When Conservative prime ministers came to power, they thought the biggest problem was running Britain; it was only when they stepped down that they realized the real problem was running the Conservative Party..."

In fact, Britain's first referendum on the issue of European integration first took place in 1975 after the Labor Party came to power. The referendum was held to bridge the differences within the Labor Party on its relationship with the European Community. Thatcher, then leader of the Conservative Party, Mrs Trump campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Community.

Later, after the Conservative Party came back to power, Mrs. Thatcher took an increasingly Eurosceptic stance in developing relations with Europe. Her most famous sentence was "get our money back." At that time, she was trying to force the European Union to The Community made concessions to Britain on budget issues...

She also holds a strong anti-European stance in areas such as the European Community's voting system and social policy.

Mrs. Thatcher's Eurosceptic stance aroused strong opposition from pro-Europeans within the Conservative Party at the time, and she gradually lost their support.

In October 1989, her finance minister Nigel Lawson resigned, largely due to serious differences with her over whether Britain should join the European Economic and Monetary Union.

In 1990, her close comrade-in-arms, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and current Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe resigned. In his resignation speech in the House of Commons, Geoffrey Howe, who had always been moderate, used fierce words to accuse Mrs. Thatcher of overstepping her bounds. There was an increasingly strong stance of hostility to Europe, believing that Mrs. Thatcher's European policies endangered the future of the Conservative Party and Britain.

Serious divisions within the Conservative Party over European issues were one of the reasons that led to Mrs Thatcher's eventual resignation.

Later, Major succeeded as Prime Minister. He tried to retreat from Mrs. Thatcher's Eurosceptic stance, but he was also strongly criticized by the Conservative Party. The difference is that if the criticism of Mrs. Thatcher within the Conservative Party was mainly Against his strong Euroscepticism, the criticism of Major is that his Eurosceptic attitude is not strong enough.

The so-called Euroscepticism is not absolute, but it means that we are absolutely not Eurosceptic...

The division within the Conservative Party on European issues became public and became one of the reasons for the Conservative Party's defeat in the British general election in 1997.

Haig, Smith and Howard, who later succeeded the Conservative Party leaders, were all well-known Eurosceptics. Smith, in particular, was a staunch opponent of the Maastricht Treaty that established the European Union.

Every development of the European Union during this period will cause greater controversy within the Conservative Party, and even trigger divisions within the party and the defection of MPs - some MPs have joined more extreme positions with the sole purpose of leaving the EU. The British Independence Party, whose members such as Titford, Knapman, Pearson, Farage, Nuttle and others have successively become leaders of the Independent Party, and the emergence of the Independent Party has also further promoted the suspicion of the Conservative Party. The development of Europeanist sentiment…

Logically, Mrs Thatcher's resignation in 1990 should have been the moment for the Conservative Party to move beyond Thatcherism, but in fact it was just the opposite.

Of the 165 newly elected Conservative MPs in 1997, 140 were Eurosceptics.

This situation continued in the 2001 general election. The Conservative Party became more right-leaning and failed to transcend Thatcherism and return to the middle road.

In the 1992 to 1997 Parliament, about 58% of Conservative MPs were Eurosceptic. After the 2001 British general election, this number became an astonishing 90%.

After Cameron was elected leader of the British Conservative Party in 2005, he tried to lower the status of European issues on the Conservative Party's agenda and called on the party to stop quarreling over European issues.

However, due to the development of European integration itself and the growth of Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party at that time, Cameron's attempt ultimately failed.

Among the Conservative MPs elected in 2010, only 7 were pro-European, accounting for only 2.3% of the Conservative MPs!

In this context, the pro-Eurosceptic divide within the Conservative parliamentary group has become obsolete – it has now become a division between “soft Eurosceptic” (pragmatic) and “hard Eurosceptic”.

"Soft Eurosceptic" refers to those who are not opposed to European integration and the EU in principle, but may be opposed to the EU on county-level policy issues.

"Soft Eurosceptics" tend to support retaining Britain's EU membership, although to a greater or lesser extent believe that membership should be renegotiated.

"Hard Euroscepticism" refers to opposing the EU and European integration from a fundamental principle, advocating giving up EU membership. Hard Euroscepticism tends to believe that Britain's EU membership is not negotiable. Negotiation means compromise, which means betrayal of sovereignty to some extent, no matter what kind of concessions can be obtained from Britain's European partners.

Although the majority of the Conservative Parliamentary Group under Cameron's leadership are soft Euroscepticism, hard Euroscepticism also accounts for 35.4% of the backbenchers.

More importantly, hard Euroscepticism is more organized and more willing to challenge the position of the Conservative leader and the Conservative Party's policies.

This also led to the fact that in Barron's previous life in 2013, under the pressure of Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party, in order to gain more support, Cameron was forced to announce that if he could win the election, a referendum on Britain's EU membership would be held during the next parliament...

Then, as Cameron envisioned, the Conservative Party achieved good results in the 2015 British general election and was able to form a cabinet independently.

At that time, Cameron made full preparations to fulfill his promise of a referendum on Brexit before the election. Before that, he negotiated with the EU on the relationship between Britain and the EU, and the EU was forced to make concessions to Britain in many aspects.

With these achievements, Cameron was confident in maintaining the relationship between Britain and the EU, so he announced a referendum on Brexit.

As we all know, what he didn't expect was that the result of the referendum was a big victory for the Eurosceptics. As a result, Cameron had to choose to resign as prime minister.

And the Conservative prime ministers after Cameron, whether Theresa May or Johnson, did not solve the problem of Brexit, which eventually led to their resignation. The revolving door of the prime ministers in Britain caused political chaos and further harmed the society and economy of Britain.

As the saying goes, the ice is three feet thick, and it is not a day's cold. For these current situations, Barron's think tank has also made detailed analysis. It can be said that avoiding the result of Britain's final Brexit in the previous life has become his biggest challenge at present.