Thread by @PropertySpot

Thread of clips from lectures given by Sir Stephen Wall on the history of the UK's relationship with the EU.

On the UK's prevarication about whether to join:

Treasury: "If this organisation succeeds we may find it's so economically powerful we will have to join it."
Foreign Office: "We needn't worry because it won't succeed."

On how the UK only joined after exhausting every alternative.

Stephen Wall points out that the UK publicly committed to economic and monetary union prior to accession in 1972, and again when Harold Wilson renegotiated some aspects of the budget and Commonwealth trade before the 1975 referendum.

On how the BSE crisis was an example of how European institutions worked to the benefit of the UK.

The key point of departure for modern Euroscepticism was when Thatcher turned against Delors over the incipient Maastricht treaty, but by modern standards her views at the time bore no relation to the Brexiteers.

Thatcher "grouped around her a group of young loyalists for whom loyalty to the fallen leader was synonymous with opposition to the Maastricht treaty and therefore to the idea of European Union."

Two weeks before the 2016 referendum, Stephen Wall gave an uncannily accurate forecast of the likely voting pattern.

Wall predicts a Leave win, calling it "an extraordinary misjudgement of our own self-interest" and "an abandonment of our commitment to our friends, our neighbours, our partners in a world that we have, however awkwardly, played our part in building over the last 40 years"