State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  News of the vote travelled fast. All evening, Harold Macmillan had been waiting on the cliffs beside Dover Castle with a great bonfire prepared by the European Movement, and as the news broke at 10.30, he set the beacon alight to the cheers of 500 onlookers. Far away in the inky night, an answering flame burst into life, a beacon of goodwill on the Pas de Calais. At Folkestone, the town’s beauty queen lit seven rockets to symbolize Britain’s new partnership with the original Six, and there was enthusiastic applause as the French lit an answering beacon in Boulogne. In West Germany, where broadcasters brought the news live from London, the word YES flashed repeatedly on the screen, and moments later the Chancellor, Willy Brandt, faced the press to announce ‘a great day for Europe’. In Hamburg, where Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was attending a gala banquet, more than 300 guests burst into applause when she announced the news. ‘This is what I have been waiting for during the last twenty-five years,’ Jean Monnet told French television. ‘Now it’s the turn of the youth of Europe.’46

  For one man above all it was a moment of supreme joy, the sweetest of his premiership, perhaps of his political career. Edward Heath was never a great man for public displays of emotion; after a drink or two with supporters in the Commons bar, he went on to a party in Admiralty Arch for Jean Monnet, but then quietly slipped away. He thought back to ‘the battlefields of France, Belgium and Holland, to the rallies of Nuremberg and to Wendell Willkie’s voice, crackling over a radio set at my command post in Normandy in 1944, speaking of “One World”.’ And when he reached the sanctuary of Number 10, this most reserved, most repressed of men went up to his private sitting room, sat at his clavichord and poured his emotions into Bach’s First Prelude and Fugue for the Well-Tempered Clavier. After ten years of struggle, he had realized his dream. But only when the ‘still, small voice of the clavichord’ rang around the silent room, ‘at once so serene, so ordered and so profound’, did he find peace and fulfilment at last.47

  On 22 January 1972, Heath arrived in Brussels for the formal signing of the Treaty of Accession. Many of Britain’s most senior politicians, including Macmillan and the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, were on hand to lend moral support; pointedly, Harold Wilson preferred to go to a football match. It should have been another joyous moment, and Heath later recorded that as he sat at the long table in the Palais d’Egmont, the world’s press assembled before him, he felt an intense thrill. But as so often in Heath’s career, dark clouds all but blotted out the sun. Back home, the news that unemployment had just topped one million had put his government under tremendous pressure, while the miners’ strike was just weeks away. And that morning, as he was climbing the great marble steps to the Assembly Hall, a young German woman, infuriated by plans to redevelop Covent Garden, pushed her way through the line of spectators and hurled a bottle of black ink over his head and shoulders. Heath himself admitted that he felt ‘shattered’; it took an hour of frantic scrubbing by his aides before he was even vaguely presentable, and newspapers reported that the whole business left him visibly upset. No modern Prime Minister ever had worse luck.48

  Although Heath had signed the treaty amid all the pomp and ceremony Brussels had to offer, Britain was not quite there yet. For the next few months, the government’s legislative energies were absorbed by a gruelling drive to bring British law into line with the Common Market’s regulations, which meant getting a European Communities enabling bill through the Commons without it being shot down either by the determined Tory rebels or by Wilson’s Labour Party. This was not the stuff of glamorous public politics, of great oratory or tabloid front pages; it called for exhausting, niggling, time-consuming parliamentary management, sapping the government’s strength and attention at a time when the miners’ strike, the collapse of the Industrial Relations Act and Heath’s industrial and economic U-turns were dominating the headlines. Since Jenkins and the Labour rebels, having nailed their colours to the mast of European unity, had now retreated reluctantly into the party fold, the arithmetic was terribly tight, and Heath himself spent hours trying to persuade Tory dissenters not to bring down the government. After 300 hours of debate, however, the government managed to bring down the parliamentary guillotine, an unusual measure that provoked more wrath on the Labour benches but brought the gruelling process to a merciful end. It was no wonder that Heath’s Chief Whip, Francis Pym, danced a jig on the Commons floor when the battle was won.49

  Britain formally joined the European Economic Community on New Year’s Day 1973, the beginning of a new chapter in the nation’s history.* Already, British representatives had played their part at a summit in October 1972 to discuss the goal of economic and monetary union in 1980, while the nation’s first two European Commissioners, Sir Christopher Soames and George Thomson, were making their final preparations to join the new Commission. It was not quite the glorious occasion that some had hoped, however; with the Labour Party refusing to take up its seats in the European Parliament, there were only 21 British representatives, instead of the allotted 36. The unions, too, refused to enter into the party spirit, announcing that they would boycott the Community’s Economic and Social Committee. All the same, few British observers could entirely suppress a twinge of emotion as, that crisp January morning, the Union Jack was hoisted outside the Community’s Brussels headquarters. The fact that it was upside down was entirely beside the point.50

  In the press, the big day was generally hailed as a watershed, the beginning of a bright new era of international friendship, economic growth and renewed diplomatic purpose. ‘Any lingering idea that the British are a stuffy lot who believe that God created the English Channel to preserve them from foreigners and their funny ways gets ditched today,’ said the Mirror. Lord Goodman, the chairman of the Arts Council, wrote in The Times that Britain had embarked on a ‘splendid adventure’ that would ‘enable us to graduate from a nation of shopkeepers, trading only from our own back door, into a nation of industrialists, financiers and scientific and efficient agriculturalists’. Even the Express played along, if a bit grudgingly. Its front page boasted a picture of the first British baby born in the new era, Debbie Busby, ‘the Euro-baby who could not care less’, while the accompanying story assured readers that her 19-year-old mother Sylvia thought of her child as British, not European. In a front-page editorial, the Express observed that British entry still ‘DOES NOT carry the approval of the majority of the British people’, but since the decision had been taken, ‘it would be fatal to hang back’. And there was a warning for Britain’s new partners. ‘Let there be no doubt: If it becomes clear that there is no place for Britain in the developing European Community, Parliament has a way out. So watch out Europe – Here we come!’

  Among the great mass of the population, however, Britain’s European destiny provoked barely a flicker of interest. Membership was ‘accepted by most people with resignation, if not enthusiasm’, admitted Lord Goodman, noting that ‘the issues are too complicated for mass enthusiasm’, and that although people would happily dance in the streets at the end of a war, or mourn the death of a beloved monarch, ‘to expect them to dress themselves up in woad or plait a maypole because we have successfully negotiated a customs treaty is to underrate their sense of proportion’. If anything, however, he was underplaying public scepticism. The Times’s poll found that just 38 per cent of people were happy at the thought of European entry, with 39 per cent unhappy and 23 per cent undecided. And in the Mirror – which hailed Britain’s first day in the Common Market as ‘A Day in History’, and claimed that children leaving school in the 1980s ‘will have to be Anglo-European to survive’ – a more detailed survey shattered any illusions that Britain had become European overnight. ‘Would you like to see these “Common Market customs”?’ the paper asked:

  Yes No

  Regular wine with meals 23% 21%

  More pavement cafés 11% 34%

  More shops open on Sunday 5% 40%

  Coffee and roll for breakfast, not bacon and eggs 13% 58%<
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  Pubs open all day 18% 44%

  And in the Express, the columnist Jean Rook – one of the most popular journalists of her generation – spoke for the millions who shuddered at the thought of pavement cafés, Sunday shopping and coffee and rolls for breakfast. ‘Since Boadicea,’ she reminded her readers, ‘we British have slammed our seas in the faces of invading frogs and wops, who start at Calais. Today, we’re slipping our bolts. And, of all that we have to offer Europe, what finer than contact with our short-tongued, stiff-necked, straight-backed, brave, bloody-minded and absolutely beautiful selves? To know the British (it takes about 15 years to get on nodding terms) will be Europe’s privilege.’51

  For Edward Heath, there was no question of allowing the great moment to pass without celebration. He had already appointed an official committee to plan a nationwide festival, chaired by Lord Goodman and including such eminences as the V&A’s director Roy Strong, the new head of the National Theatre, Peter Hall, and the BBC’s new director of programmes, David Attenborough. ‘Fanfare for Europe’, the event was called, and Heath hoped that it might enter history as a great national celebration to rival the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain. But with a budget of just £350,000, the Fanfare was always facing an uphill struggle, and the fact that four out of ten people were still opposed to EEC membership made it hard to arouse much public enthusiasm. Heath should be ‘ashamed of himself’, Dennis Skinner bitterly told the Commons. ‘Can he tell us how the British people can celebrate a national disaster in the middle of a wages freeze?’ They would ‘certainly be prepared to celebrate the opportunities of improving their real living standards’, Heath retorted stiffly – stubbornly ignoring polls which showed that almost three-quarters of the population, whatever their views on the EEC, believed the Fanfare should not even be taking place at all.52

  It was entirely characteristic of Heath’s single-mindedness, his self-centred introversion and his complete misreading of public opinion that he arranged for the Fanfare’s opening night on 3 January, a gala at Covent Garden, to be devoted to classical music, precisely the kind of thing least likely to win over the sceptical masses. When the Queen, Prince Philip and the Prime Minister arrived at the Royal Opera House, splendidly attired and looking forward to an evening of high culture, they were greeted by 300 anti-European protesters chanting ‘Sieg Heil’, which was hardly the ideal start. In his memoirs, Heath records an evening of incomparable delight in a hall bedecked with pink roses: readings from Judi Dench and Sir Laurence Olivier, recitals by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Geraint Evans and Kiri te Kanawa, and performances of Britten’s Spring Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, conducted by Carl Davis. ‘Many great performances have graced that world-renowned stage,’ Heath wrote, ‘but few can have been more moving or more appropriate. Performers and audience then mingled afterwards for a splendid dinner at Lancaster House … My heart was full of joy at the recognition that Her Majesty the Queen had given to our country’s great achievement.’ He did not mention the protesters; nor did he mention the look of horrified distaste, quickly suppressed but there all the same, that crossed the Queen’s face when Carl Davis conducted his ‘modern’ adaptation of the National Anthem, a classic instance of Heathite reform gone wrong.53

  Much of the rest of the Fanfare was pretty desperate stuff. In London the V&A mounted an exhibition of ‘Treasures from the European Community’, while the Whitechapel Art Gallery put on an exhibition of European sweet-wrappers. In Cardiff, the Caricature Theatre mounted a stage show ‘for all the family’ in French and English; in Scotland, gas and electricity showrooms organized demonstrations of Continental cooking. In York Minster, there was a concert by something called the ‘Great Universal Stores Footwear Band’; in Lincoln’s Inn, there was a tin-whistle concert, charitably described by one observer as ‘an evening of nameless Irish wails’; in Hull, actors and poets at the local Arts Centre put on a show around the impossibly glamorous theme ‘Hull is the Gateway to Europe’. Then there was the bizarre international friendly held at Wembley on 3 January, in which a team of players from the six original EEC members took on a united British-Danish-Irish team from the new member states. To be fair, the organizers attracted some stellar names – Pat Jennings, Bobby Charlton, Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer for the ‘Three’, Dino Zoff, Franz Beckenbauer, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens for the ‘Six’ – but with only 36,000 bothering to turn up, the crumbling old stadium felt cold and empty. To add insult to injury, reported the Guardian, ‘the loudest cheer of the night greeted the news on the information board that Norwich City had reached the final of the League Cup’. All in all, the general experience was summed up by what happened in the little town of Ivybridge, Devon, where the pro-European mayor managed to organize a parade led by a teenager dressed as Britannia, and invited the townsfolk to line the streets and wave European flags. But as the odd-job man who put out flags along the route remarked, most people ‘didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t know what was going on. It was a big con-job. It wasn’t a celebration of going in; it was literally a good excuse for a booze-up on someone else’s expense.’54

  Heath refused to hear a bad word about the Fanfare for Europe, and for the rest of his life he rarely failed to wrap himself in the blue and gold banner of the European Community, or to describe Britain’s entry in January 1973 as his proudest hour. For critics hostile to the European project, of course, it was his lowest betrayal, the moment when the political elite ignored public opinion and inveigled Britain into a Franco-German cartel in defiance of history and tradition. Arguments about the value of Britain’s membership inevitably come down to personal prejudice, but it is worth pointing out that January 1973 hardly turned out to be the beginning of a new golden age, and the promised economic miracle never materialized. On the other hand, it was hardly a moment of apocalyptic disaster either. In any case, what many people forget is that if Heath had fallen under a bus in 1969, Britain would still have entered eventually. Both the Conservatives and Labour had already made one application each, Wilson was already planning a second bid, and the weight of business and Fleet Street opinion was almost impossible to ignore. But this does not detract from the fact that, by his own lights, Heath pulled off a major accomplishment. He was lucky to come to power at exactly the right time, when de Gaulle had given way to Pompidou, but it took enormous determination, diplomatic effort and parliamentary skill to manoeuvre Britain past the rocks and into the high seas. His biographer rightly calls it ‘the one unquestionable success of his premiership’, and, for the rest of his life, foreign politicians treated him as a respected elder statesman, a man of vision and drive who had decisively changed the course of history.55

  What he did not do, however, was to change the basic attitudes of the British people. For all the popularity of the Eurovision Song Contest and It’s a Knockout, the town-twinning and the au pair girls, the Spanish holidays, Scandinavian duvets, French wines, Italian restaurants and West German cars, there remained a deep cultural gulf between the British and their Continental neighbours – in their own minds if nowhere else. Even though the public voted to remain in the EEC when Wilson finally put the question to a referendum in 1975, there was never any sense of enthusiasm, of mission, even of common culture. For one thing, membership coincided with a wild surge in the domestic money supply and world commodity prices, so people associated the EEC (a bit unfairly) with inflation; for another, the economic picture for the next few years was so dire that it destroyed the case that Brussels was the great saviour. Two out of three people in 1974 thought that Britain should have ‘developed links with the Commonwealth rather than joined the Common Market’, and for the rest of the decade – the year of the referendum being a notable exception – barely one in three described EEC membership as a ‘good thing’, while as many as 40 per cent thought that it was a ‘bad thing’.

  Within a few years, meanwhile, Brussels had become a dirty word, a symbol of banality and bureaucracy rather than idealism and frien
dship: when John Osborne sneered in the Observer that Jerusalem would never be built ‘in the typists’ pools and conference rooms of Brussels’, he was aiming at the easiest of targets. And as W. H. Auden had once perceptively noted, attitudes to Europe still had a strong class dimension. The ‘High-Brows’, he said, could not conceive of life without Europe’s ‘literature, music and art’. But to the ‘Low-Brows’, ‘abroad is inhabited by immoral strangers’, and ‘an Englishman who goes there often, still worse, decides to live there, is probably up to no good’. Even in the age of the package holiday, these stereotypes still held firm: although millions of Britons now roasted on the beaches of Spain, they insisted on surrounding themselves with reminders of home, from fish and chips and warm beer to the Daily Mirror and kiss-me-quick hats, and shuddered at the thought of interacting with the locals.56