When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Detention brought a change in her. In addition to the exercise, housework, the BBC World Service and the detective fiction that helped her cope, Suu Kyi took up the Burmese practices of meditation. Her solitude introduced her to the concept of metta, or loving kindness, which became an important part of her political method. While evoking her father for the standing he offers in her country, and stressing the continuity of aim, she nevertheless signals a break with him here.

  Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical principles combined with a historical sense that despite all setbacks the condition of man is set on an ultimate course for both spiritual and material advancement. It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute. At the root of human responsibility is the concept of perfection, the urge to achieve it, the intelligence to find a path towards it, and the will to follow that path if not to the end at least the distance needed to rise above individual limitations and environmental impediments. It is man’s vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

  This is a fine statement of an important democratic principle expressed beautifully in Albert Camus’s observation that democracy is more valuable for what it prevents than for what it achieves. It is important to remember the depravity to which the Burmese military regime was partial. The parodic name, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, cannot hide a propensity for violence that was, if not quite first-division, then at least in the upper reaches of the second. A foreign diplomat who took too great an interest in Suu Kyi came home one evening to find that his dog had had its eyes burned out. This tyranny was all maintained by the apparatus of a police state, the cameras, the spies, the informers, the absence of a free press. In 1988, the army shot over 3,000 unarmed civilians on a single day. Thousands of members of the NDL were detained and many were tried, summarily, before military tribunals. Some of them were tortured with cigarette burns to the flesh, electric shocks to the genitals and beatings that inflicted permanent damage to the eyes and ears.

  If the preservation of order cannot be left to the courage of individuals acting on their own behalf, and if the will to misuse power is as strong as it has always been, then the only bulwarks against brutality are democratic institutions and the democratic habits that are instilled within them. The greatest virtue of a democratic society is that people can live lives no longer at the mercy of others. This is the nation that Suu Kyi is envisaging and talking into life. At the time of their writing her words sounded like utopia, and in a nation in which expression remains tightly controlled and journalists regularly find themselves threatened and imprisoned, they do not sound greatly more realistic yet.

  THIS BLESSED PLOT

  ‘The people are blowing the trumpets round the city walls. Are we listening?’ These are my favourite lines of all those in which I had any hand. Quite who first concocted the idea of a biblical cadence to round off Tony Blair’s speech to the European Parliament in 2005 I do not recall. Resonant turns of phrase have many authors while flat lines are orphans. Good speechwriting is often like comic writing. Without all the feed lines the punchline would never be found. The credit should usually be shared.

  Blair was seeking, as many of his predecessors had done and his successors were to do, to define Britain’s vexatious relationship with the European Union. This was a story, as we shall see, that had run through British politics, first one way and then the other, ever since the Second World War. It was Britain’s turn to take up the presidency of the European Union, and I had prepared a speech full of pieties and protocols. It was competent, well ordered, and numbingly dull. Worthy but not worth much.

  This will go down as one of those speeches that were written but never made, such as the speech drafted for John F. Kennedy declaring nuclear war on Cuba, Richard Nixon’s remarks commending the sacrifice of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon landing that went wrong, or Eisenhower’s jotted scribble about what to say in the event that the Normandy landings had gone awry. The European speech that Tony Blair might have delivered mattered a good deal less than any of these prepared-but-never-given remarks. Indeed, it is not even the best speech-never-given that I have myself drafted. That honour must go to David Miliband’s victory speech in the 2010 Labour Party leadership contest.

  The world was spared this crushing courteous nullity due to the intervention of Jean-Claude Juncker, at that time the prime minister of Luxembourg and the outgoing incumbent of the rotating presidency. The day before Blair was due to speak, Juncker had used his valedictory speech, on the floor of the European Parliament, to excoriate the British, and Blair in particular, for their recalcitrance in the recent attempt to settle the European budget. When, in 2017, Juncker gave a withering account of his dinner with Theresa May, his behaviour was simply a reversion to type. Junker’s 2005 address is a checklist of the evergreen European complaints about British detachment from their project. Every cliché of British exceptionalism is polished and personalised. Juncker’s attack invited one of two responses: ignore or retaliate. At the last moment, Blair decided to breathe fire.

  My deathless prose was replaced with a work of passion. The speech Blair delivered to the European Parliament on 23 June 2005 was a defence of the British social model, a renunciation of the lazy notion that Britain was a mere economic mimic of America, and also a clear statement that Britain saw its destiny as a nation within the fold of the European Union. The speech carried a sting from top to tail. From a position of comparative economic strength, Blair turned Juncker’s critique around. With youth unemployment at staggering levels, job creation negligible and growth stagnant, the European Union, he said, wasn’t working. It was time Europe fell in with Britain’s model rather than the other way round. His words were withering, and they were heard with great respect by an audience of MEPs who knew, those honest among them, that Blair was right. The speech ended with a warning that an alarming gap was opening up between the political class and the electorates. Not long before, the French and the Dutch had rejected the Constitution for Europe in referendums. ‘The people are blowing the trumpets round the city walls. Are we listening?’ Read back twelve years on, there is an uneasy prophecy in these words. They invite the obvious answer: No.

  The idea of Britain as a nation has always been complex. Whether Britain is really an identity, rather than a political transaction, is a contested point. Most of the attributes that are said, by outsiders, to be essentially British can be further subdivided into the constituent identities that come from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Great Britain is, strictly speaking, a state that contains four nations, none of which come equipped with a state. It is the most peculiar and convoluted nation-state in the world, and its assorted nationalisms often threaten to pull it to pieces.

  Since the end of the Second World War, the principal story of British nationalism has been the alternating repulsion from and attraction to the European Union. That story has been told in ten
speeches – eight by prime ministers, one by the leader of the Opposition, and one by an embittered former chancellor of the exchequer – that between them run the gamut of European options from a united state to departure. These are the speeches in which British leaders have tried to settle the definition of the nation amid its relationship with its most important supranational alliance. These were the speeches in which the idea of Britain was spoken into being. The story begins with Winston Churchill in 1946.

  United States of Europe

  On 19 September 1946, at the University of Zurich, Britain’s war-hero leader delivered his most notable speech since the summer of 1940. ‘I want to speak’, said Churchill, ‘about the tragedy of Europe.’ This blessed continent, the foundation of Christian faith and ethics, was also the source of the frightful nationalistic quarrels that had threatened a civilisation with extinction. Churchill was speaking before the creation of the European Economic Community about the Council of Europe whose main role was to ensure that its forty-seven member states abide by the European Convention on Human Rights. Churchill proposed a remedy for what he described as ‘a vast, quivering mass of tormented, hungry, careworn and bewildered human beings, who wait in the ruins of their cities and homes and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new form of tyranny or terror’. The remedy was to provide a structure under which the nations of Europe could live in peace, safety and freedom: ‘we must build a kind of United States of Europe’.

  Churchill lamented the failure of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and blamed its demise on the negligence of the states who brought it into being but failed to take it seriously and secure its future. He foresaw a world comprised of multinational blocs – the Commonwealth, the United Nations, the United States of Europe. There is a crucial plural in that phrase united states of Europe. Churchill was envisaging a union of sovereign states, a voluntary rapprochement of independent nations. He was not proposing a singular, federal state. Europe required, said Churchill, an act of faith, an act of oblivion against all the crimes and follies of the past.

  Churchill’s proposed act of faith astonished his audience: a partnership between France and Germany. Rather than merely punish Germany, which had been the mistake made at Versailles in 1919, Churchill concluded that the British should welcome the new family of Europe into existence, although he was careful not to suggest that the British should go so far as to actually join it. Britain was, as Churchill put it in a newspaper article at the time, ‘linked but not combined’, ‘interested and associated but not absorbed’. His Zurich speech gave the idea of Europe gravity at a crucial moment in its early formation. It remains the most eloquent expression of the noble founding purpose of the European Union – to prevent nationalist tyranny stalking through the continent again.

  Eleven years later the 1957 Treaty of Rome established the rudiments of Churchill’s envisaged plan. Britain was not a founder member, but the argument about joining, which has never really ended, then began. On 31 July 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave a speech in the House of Commons in which he pushed for Britain to begin negotiations, under Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome, to join the ‘The Six’ founding signatories – Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Macmillan shifts the focus from Churchill’s stress on security to the benefits of the European Economic Community (EEC). He attributes the reconciliation of France and Germany to their economic progress and recommends with some relish the prospect of ‘a single market of approaching 300 million people’. He concluded his case by insisting that membership of the EEC would be complementary to the British Commonwealth rather than a threat to it. Macmillan’s speech was a failure because his words failed to persuade the only man who mattered. President Charles de Gaulle of France vetoed the British application for membership in 1963 and then did the same again in 1967.

  From the beginning, the definition of Britain in Europe had the power to rend parties apart. There was strong opposition in the Conservative Party to Macmillan’s overture, but the Labour Party was the first to split open on the question. On 3 October 1962, Hugh Gaitskell gave the third notable European speech by a British politician. The annual party conference speech is usually the occasion for a tour d’horizon of the political landscape and a burst of obligatory cheerleading for party morale. Gaitskell instead devoted his entire speech to his reasons for opposing accession to the EEC. After a peculiar opening in which he mocked the low calibre of the debate (‘It should not be decided because on the one hand we like Italian girls, or on the other, we think we have been fleeced in Italian hotels’), Gaitskell denied that Britain and the Commonwealth would be stronger for joining. The speech is a litany of reasons for staying out of the EEC which is a template for the Euro-scepticism to come, even when it migrated to the Conservative Party.

  Gaitskell disputed the argument, common at the time, that Europe was competitive and modern in contrast to the sclerotic and antiquated Britain. He demanded control of employment policy at national level and commended exports to the Commonwealth, which were seven times their value, over exports to the Common Market. Gaitskell’s passage on the movement of capital shows how little this debate, up to and including its vocabulary of taking back control, has changed in half a century: ‘I know that some people are frightened lest, if we do not go into the Common Market, British industrialists will move their plants abroad, invest in Europe, with bad effects upon us at home. These are not easy things to decide, but you must know this – that at the moment while we are outside the Common Market that process is subject to Government control. It will no longer be subject to Government control if we go into the Common Market.’

  Then Gaitskell raised the scariest phantom of all Britain’s dealings with Europe. He predicted that political union would follow from economic cooperation. Gaitskell expressed the concern that the EEC was not just a customs union, that it was in fact a prelude to a political union he did not want, a united state of Europe.

  Not acknowledging the contradiction in his own text, he also supplied the reason why such anxiety was always an exaggeration. The federal idea would never be likely to progress, he rightly said, so long as General de Gaulle remained in charge of France. Gaitskell quoted Churchill from ‘their finest hour’ by using one of those strange phrases that only politicians use when he noted that de Gaulle ‘will not give up any jot or tittle of French independence’. Gaitskell was right about that, a point the British Euro-sceptics have never fully grasped. The pull of nation has always been strong in France and Germany, always strong enough to resist the countervailing pressure towards a single state. The limits of domestic opinion in France and Germany have always curtailed the European ambitions of federal politicians.

  There is one last contemporary resonance when Gaitskell repeated his final demand: ‘if when the final terms are known, this Party … comes to the conclusion that these terms are not good enough, if it is our conviction that we should not enter the Common Market on these terms … then the only right and proper and democratic thing is to let the people decide the issue’. Gaitskell pointedly accused the Macmillan government of elitism and a refusal to trust the people. His argument was, in all its rhetorical exaggeration, virtually without change, that of the most Euro-sceptic of observers more than half a century later. For Gaitskell it was a question of national power: ‘it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state … it means the end of a thousand years of history’. In summary, keep control. The speech dismayed many of Gaitskell’s natural supporters in the Labour Party. As the Left applauded, Gaitskell’s wife Dora observed at the time: ‘all the wrong people are cheering’.

  Despite the reservations of Gaitskell and the Labour Party, Britain joined the EEC on 22 January 1972. After ten years of arduous negotiation, Prime Minister Edward Heath signed the Treaty of Accession in Brussels, following which he gave a short speech to mark the occasion. Heath echoed Churchill in his case for the contribution that a stable and united Europe wou
ld make towards security. He paid lip service to Britain’s proud attachment to national identity but spoke in glowing terms of ‘our common European heritage, our mutual interests and our European destiny’. Heath made it plain that Europe faced a complex task in devising new institutions, but he had no doubt that Europe was where Britain belonged. He believed the question of Britain’s place in the world was now settled, describing the day as an end rather than a beginning. In that he was set to be disappointed. This wasn’t even the end of the beginning, let alone the beginning of the end.

  Indeed, the decision might easily have been reversed only three years later. Labour’s fault line on Europe had not closed, so when Harold Wilson came to power in 1974 he hit upon the ruse of a referendum, confirming or reversing membership of the EEC, as a device to bridge the division in his party. Three years and a day after Britain’s entry, Wilson told the House of Commons that a referendum would be held on the EEC on the basis of revised terms that he would himself negotiate. In response to an intervention from Heath, by now the leader of the Opposition, Wilson described the referendum as ‘a very special situation which I do not think anybody will take as a precedent’. With his usual chutzpah, the prime minister demanded that the question, which he had only raised to heal a rift in the Labour Party, be settled now definitively.