State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  What was conspicuously lacking from Heath’s case for joining the EEC was any admission that it might affect Britain’s national sovereignty and self-government. In his broadcast to the nation, he talked in terms of renewing Britain’s prestige, explaining that joining the EEC would be ‘a chance to lead, not to follow’, allowing Britain to ‘fulfil the role we have played so often in the past’. As his biographer remarks, one of the paradoxes of Heath’s European vision was that it was rooted in ‘sturdy English patriotism’, with the Prime Minister convinced that Europe was the ideal platform on which to display Britain’s inherent greatness. But it made no concession to the argument that, by joining the EEC, Britain would be giving away its national sovereignty. In his fine history of Britain in Europe, Hugo Young suggests that sovereignty did not seem a key priority in the early 1970s, with economic issues apparently much more important. But not only did maverick Euro-sceptics like Enoch Powell, Michael Foot and Tony Benn make great play of Heath’s alleged surrender of sovereignty and the European threat to the sanctity of Parliament, but the thirty-nine Tories who ultimately voted against the bid often cited sovereignty as their central concern. Rather than meet their arguments head on, Heath preferred to sweep them under the carpet. His White Paper claimed that there was no question of ‘any erosion of essential national sovereignty’ but instead proposed ‘a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignty in the general interest’, which was so vague as to be practically meaningless. Meanwhile, Heath’s ministers deliberately avoided admitting that European Community laws would take precedence over British law, even though they knew perfectly well that this was the case.

  This does not mean, however, that the British people were duped by a sinister federalist conspiracy. Rather, as one historian writes, they were ‘told what they wanted to hear’, becoming partners in a ‘compact between a disingenuous governing class and a people too preoccupied with the economic problems of the day to pick a fight over a constitutional issue which even the most politically astute knew would not begin to affect their lives for many years to come’. From Heath’s point of view, this was not deception so much as careful political strategy – something all too rare during his time in office. ‘If Heath had laid it on the line, what he thought it would lead to,’ Denis Healey said later, ‘he wouldn’t have got it through. He thought it was more important to get it through, even if it was ignorant and misunderstanding acquiescence rather than support, than to let it go. And I suspect he was right about that.’24

  Since Harold Wilson had been looking forward to taking Britain into Europe himself, the spectacle of Heath and Pompidou exchanging smiles like love-struck teenagers must have been deeply infuriating. As grammar school and Oxford boys from modest backgrounds, as dynamic modernizers fascinated by the machinery of government, the two rivals had a lot in common. For years Wilson had held the upper hand; during the late 1960s he had dismissed Heath’s clumsy attacks in the Commons with almost embarrassing ease. All that had changed, however, in a few hours in June 1970. Once the cheeky, cheerful prodigy of British politics, the former Boy Scout had taken defeat very badly indeed. It was a ‘terrible trauma’ for him, one aide said, while others remarked that Wilson seemed exhausted, demoralized, even burned out, a careworn and untidy figure who relied on handouts from his very shady business friends just to keep his office going. It was revealing that when the BBC’s David Dimbleby asked about his finances for the controversial documentary Yesterday’s Men in 1971, Wilson kicked up an enormous fuss with the BBC governors. In the old days, when he was younger, fitter and quicker-witted, he would simply have come up with a smart reply. And even in the Commons, where he had once carried all before him, he seemed tired and apathetic, his speeches perfunctory when they had once been dazzling. As Anthony Sampson reported in 1971, he seemed shrunken, diminished, ‘mesmerised by his memory’, forever harking back to the past when once his eyes had been firmly fixed on the future.25

  In some ways this made Wilson the ideal leader for a miserable, backward-looking party. The Labour Party was a deeply unhappy ship in the early 1970s, defeat having cast it into yet another debilitating bout of feuding and factionalism. Its problems ran deep: after the humiliating devaluation of the pound, Wilson’s approval rating had sunk to unprecedented depths, while the party had been crushed in one local election after another, losing control of cities like Sheffield and Sunderland, as well as all but four of London’s thirty-two boroughs. Beyond that, however, lay a deeper problem. As the party’s industrial heartlands were transformed by economic change and social mobility, so its core vote entered a steady decline. Even in the late 1950s, political experts had wondered whether Labour could ever hold its own in an increasingly affluent society, but Wilson’s invocation of science and modernization had temporarily papered over the cracks. Now, in defeat, there was a palpable sense of horizons narrowing as Labour turned inwards, relying more and more on the council tenants of the North, Scotland and Wales, on public-sector workers and on the trade unions. Paradoxically, its parliamentary representatives were increasingly well-educated and middle-class, their politics driven by conscience rather than class. In 1966, the Labour benches contained more university graduates than the Tory ones for the first time, and by October 1974 no fewer than 182 Labour MPs had university degrees.26

  Revealingly, they included 22 journalists, 25 university lecturers, 32 barristers and 38 schoolteachers, but only 19 miners – a far cry from the first Labour representatives at the dawn of the century. And many of the newcomers burned with righteous anger, impatient to see injustice banished by a genuine social revolution. For Wilson they had only contempt; increasingly, they looked for inspiration to the messianic figure of Tony Benn. Once the former Viscount Stansgate had been Wilson’s semi-comic technological protégé, safely confined to redesigning stamps and opening the Post Office Tower. But with Labour in the wilderness, Benn took the opportunity to reinvent himself as a latter-day Puritan demagogue, the heir to the Levellers and champion of participatory democracy, workers’ control and massive nationalization. Many of his colleagues openly scoffed at his ostentatious gestures of proletarian solidarity, such as when he formally asked the BBC to stop calling him Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or when he deleted all references to his expensive education from Who’s Who. But mocking Benn was now a risky business: nobody had more support among the high-minded young activists who increasingly dominated Labour’s constituency parties.27

  Even without the issue of Europe, Labour would have slid into bickering and factionalism after 1970. Wilson’s government had been disfigured by almost unbelievably self-serving disloyalty from his senior ministers, who seemed to spend more time plotting against their leader than actually doing their jobs, while Wilson made matters worse by trying to play his ‘crown princes’ off against one another. And once he had lost his image as a winner, he also lost his ability to restrain their mutual dislike. By 1971 the party seemed to be subsiding into indiscipline, with senior figures trying to outdo one another by moving ever further to the left. Looking around that year’s Labour Party conference, one journalist wrote that he could almost see in the rows of faces ‘the layers of political geology’ as the rock face crumbled, from the ‘pacifists with their bright eyes and violent convictions’ to the ‘small bands of Marxists’, from the ‘cranky fringe parties handing out angry pamphlets in the foyer’ to the ‘Oxford intellectuals’ who still believed they ought to be running the show. It was no wonder that, even then, political commentators wondered whether the party could survive without a major split. In January 1974 Wilson’s former Commonwealth Secretary George Thomson, now one of Britain’s two European Commissioners, told a friend that even if Labour won the next election ‘the internal strains would be so great as more or less to paralyse it’. If Labour lost, he mused presciently, ‘he thought it would split, giving rise to a new Social Democratic Party’. He was a few years too early; but he was right all the same.28

  It was around Europe
that the fault lines developed. Labour had always had its fair share of European enthusiasts, most of them members of the liberal coterie that had gathered around Hugh Gaitskell in the late 1950s and early 1960s (even though Gaitskell himself was passionately anti-European). To them, the cause of Europe had an almost religious intensity: it was the cause, they thought, of tolerance, of progressivism, of liberalism, of cosmopolitanism, and their high priest was a man who embodied all of these characteristics, or at least tried to, the former Chancellor Roy Jenkins. But they were never more than a minority, and their generally moderate politics (regarded as right-wing by Labour standards) automatically made them targets of suspicion. ‘The pro-Market fanatics’, said the firebrand Barbara Castle, were ‘sanctimonious middle-class hypocrites’, and plenty of her colleagues agreed with her. There was a long tradition of Little England insularity inside the Labour Party, an introverted desire to build socialism in one country, a Methodist suspicion for the corrupt Catholic ways of the wine-drenched Continent, which might appeal to Tories but could never compete with an honest pint of workers’ ale (or in Tony Benn’s case, a gallon of tea).

  By the early 1970s, this had evolved into the firm belief that the Common Market was a millionaires’ conspiracy, designed to crush British socialism for ever. This was, after all, an age in which there was no dirtier word in the socialist lexicon than ‘multinational’, with companies being excoriated not just because they were pillars of capitalism but because they were owned by foreigners. The EEC was therefore the perfect target – not least because it was so close to the despised Heath’s heart. It was a ‘rich nations’ club’, Michael Foot told the voters of Ebbw Vale, opposed to ‘the interests of British democracy [and] the health of our economy’. It would destroy ‘the real power of the people to control their destiny’, agreed Neil Kinnock – this, of course, some years before he became a European Commissioner himself. ‘Beating capitalism in one country is enough of a task. Beating it in several countries – without even having a solid domestic base – goes too far even for me.’29

  It was in the unmistakably English surroundings of Blackpool, at the Labour conference in October 1970, that Wilson first realized he had a serious problem on his hands. In theory at least, he could ignore the fact that the conference had come dangerously close to endorsing outright opposition to EEC entry. But he could not ignore what happened in January 1971, when more than a hundred of his own MPs signed an early day motion opposing EEC entry ‘on terms so far envisaged’, or in May, when Jim Callaghan gave a blistering speech warning that British membership of the Common Market would mean a ‘complete rupture of our identity’ and a retreat into ‘continental claustrophobia’. In a memorably chauvinist passage, Callaghan poured justified contempt on Pompidou’s suggestion that French should be the sole language of Europe. That ‘the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton must in future be regarded as an American import’, Callaghan said mockingly, was totally unacceptable. ‘If we are to prove our Europeanism by accepting that French is the dominant language of the Community, then the answer is quite clear and I will say it in French to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.’30

  This was good knockabout stuff, but for Wilson it was deeply disturbing. Although he and Callaghan got on fairly well, they had been undeclared rivals since the early 1960s, and the popular former Home Secretary was seen as embodying the solid centre of the party, the darling of the trade unions, the ‘keeper of the cloth cap’. By his very presence he seemed to define the centre ground; where he went, scores of Labour MPs followed. And since Wilson could never shake the suspicion that Callaghan was plotting a coup against him, he decided to step in before his rival laid claim to the anti-European mantle. ‘He is totally obsessed by the leadership question now,’ noted Tony Benn after they met to discuss Europe in June. ‘The risk that Jim Callaghan might stand against him is something that worries him very much.’

  Never mind that Wilson himself had once been all for EEC membership; as he had shown before, nobody in British politics was a better or more unscrupulous adept of the dark arts of party one-upmanship. So, after months of hedging and waiting and vague ambiguities, he chose the occasion of the party’s Special Conference on the Common Market, held in Westminster on 17 July, to nail his colours to the mast. With typical Wilson cleverness, he did not come out against the principle of Europe, only the practice. The problem, he said, was the terms: ‘I reject the assertion that the terms this Conservative Government have obtained are the terms the Labour Government asked for, would have asked for, would have been bound to accept.’ Nobody believed him, but that was almost beside the point. ‘It’s all over bar the shouting now,’ wrote Benn, ‘and he feels he has warded off Jim Callaghan’s assault on the leadership, which he almost certainly has.’31

  But that was far from the end of the matter. Labour’s pro-European wing – the ‘Marketeers’, as they were known – were horrified by Wilson’s apparent treachery, especially since it confirmed what many of them had suspected for years: that he was a duplicitous, untrustworthy political fixer, unfit to wear the mantle of their beloved Hugh Gaitskell. Above all, Wilson’s most dangerous rival, Roy Jenkins, was outraged at his perfidy. Jenkins himself was not exactly the soul of self-denying constancy: even while serving as Wilson’s Chancellor in the late 1960s, he had maintained a network of personal supporters in the Commons, and on more than one occasion came close to launching a leadership putsch. In June, he had even tried to strike a deal with Wilson, promising that if the leader stayed true to the European cause, then ‘there could be no question of the Labour Europeans joining in any intrigue with Callaghan or anyone else to embarrass him, still less to endeavour to replace him’. But this, of course, was little less than blackmail: if Wilson had accepted, he would not only have alienated much of the left and centre of his own party, he would have made himself a prisoner of the Jenkins camp, his leadership dependent on his European enthusiasm. Fortunately for him, his principles were endlessly flexible, so he was able to wriggle out of it. But Jenkins’s principles were not. He already cut a slightly semi-detached figure in the Labour Party of the early 1970s, a sleek and self-consciously sophisticated lover of croquet, tennis, fine wines and aristocratic women. ‘With his big smooth head he looks like an aristocratic egghead,’ one profile remarked in 1971, calling him ‘the most improbable leader of a workers’ party’. Even then, observers commented that he seemed ‘more like a Liberal than a Labour leader’, more at home with the memory of Asquith, whose biography he had written, than with the modern reality of Arthur Scargill. And as Jenkins saw it, Europe left no room for compromise. It was ‘a battle between outward-looking tolerance and generosity of spirit on the one hand’, wrote his friend David Marquand, ‘and mean-minded Pecksniffian narrowness on the other’.32

  Jenkins issued his declaration of war just two days after Wilson had come out against the terms of the EEC bid. At a raucous meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he insisted that ‘socialism in one country’ (or ‘pull up the drawbridge and revolutionise the fortress’, as he witheringly put it) was ‘not a policy, just a slogan’. The atmosphere sizzled with revivalist passion; Jenkins later wrote that the speech attracted more ‘violent applause’ than any other of his career, with many Labour MPs hammering their desks in approval and one Scotsman even banging his shoes on the table, as if in homage to Khrushchev. On the left, however, the reaction was horror and disgust. In the Commons smoking room afterwards, left-wing Euro-sceptics huddled in angry conclaves, and as Jenkins passed, Barbara Castle, no stranger to hysterical over-reaction, said bitterly: ‘Roy, I used to respect you a great deal, but I will never do so again as long as I live.’ As for Wilson, he characteristically saw the issue purely in terms of his own leadership, not in terms of Britain’s long-term future in Europe. The next morning, Tony Benn found him ‘extremely agitated’, issuing wild threats against Jenkins and talking of walking away from the party leadership, but underneath all the bluster ‘despe
rately insecure and unhappy’. All in all, it was a pretty pathetic spectacle of introversion and feuding, played out in the full gaze of the media and the public. And with Jenkins adamant that Britain’s European future must come before party unity, there seemed little prospect of an end to hostilities. ‘I saw it in the context of the first Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws, Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, the Lloyd George Budget and the Parliament Bill, the Munich Agreement and the May 1940 votes,’ Jenkins wrote later.33

  What finally pushed Jenkins overboard was a wheeze that Benn himself had cooked up at the end of 1970, which was for the next Labour government to call a national referendum on the issue of Europe. At first, Wilson rejected the idea outright; at the time, only Callaghan realized that it offered the ideal way to paper over Labour’s European divisions, remarking sagely: ‘Tony may be launching a little rubber life-raft which we will all be glad of in a year’s time.’ But by the beginning of 1972 Wilson had come round. Although a referendum would be unprecedented, it was the perfect way of appeasing the sceptics without completely conceding the issue. Jenkins, however, loathed the idea of referendums, not least because this most self-consciously elitist of politicians saw them as ‘the likely enemy of progressive causes from the abolition of capital punishment to race relations legislation’. When the Shadow Cabinet voted to back the scheme in March 1972, Jenkins demanded the right to speak against the decision, and when this was denied, he promptly resigned as deputy leader. ‘It was the only way he could see to lance a swelling boil of misery and guilt,’ his friend David Marquand wrote later, and Jenkins’s letter seethed with righteous anger, denouncing Wilson’s ‘relentless and short-sighted search for tactical advantage’. In the process, however, he comprehensively demolished his last chance of becoming Labour leader. Like the last deputy leader to resign, George Brown, he made no secret of his bitter contempt for Wilson’s endless compromises, but his bombshell was no more effective than Brown’s. Although Jenkins still commanded the ardent support of a small group of right-wing admirers, his reputation within the broader Labour Party, where loyalty and solidarity were still seen as the supreme virtues, was in ruins. A Harris poll in October found that 79 per cent of Labour supporters preferred Wilson, with a pitiful 5 per cent picking Jenkins. A few days later the party conference formally approved the referendum scheme, and the twin issues of Europe and the leadership had been settled at last.34