Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Once the preserve of the wealthy, Europe was now fast becoming a popular destination for the working class, a fact not missed by the comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which featured in 1972 a celebrated rant by Eric Idle against the new era of mass travel: ‘What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses, surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea?’ Despite the sneering, however, the trend continued, and 1975 saw the launch of the Union Travel Club, a collaborative venture between the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Pickford’s Travel, with the approval of Jack Jones himself; prices for the holidays on offer ranged ‘from £45 for a May week in Rimini to £119 for a summer fortnight in Malta’. The experience of other countries may have been, as Monty Python insisted, heavily coloured by the average Briton’s desire to seek home comforts abroad (‘fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel’), but it still marked a major break with the past for a nation whose previous experience of Europe had been restricted to the elite and to those in uniform.

  It also brought a less welcome development: the exporting of football hooliganism to the Continent. There had, in fact, been reports of violence abroad involving British teams in the past. As far back as 1908 Manchester United players had been attacked by local fans during a match in Hungary, and more recently the same club saw a 1965 match in Hamburg disrupted by fighting that spilled over from the terraces and onto the pitch. In this latter case, however, the trouble was started by soldiers serving in the British Army on the Rhine, and it wasn’t until 1974 that incidents involving travelling fans became major news stories, forming part of a repeated pattern; violence at matches that year between Feyenoord and Tottenham Hotspur and between AS Ostend and (again) Manchester United shifted the focus of media reporting from the domestic to the European stage. Perhaps it was fortunate that the failure to beat Poland ensured that England were absent from the 1974 World Cup, which was staged in easily accessible West Germany, though a 1977 match in Luxembourg did see the violence step up yet another level to affect an international, rather than simply a club, match. When compared to later events, particularly the 1985 European Cup Final at Heysel that left thirty-nine people dead and English clubs banned from European competitions, and certainly when compared to events in South America, such as the 1964 Peru–Argentina game where 318 were killed in a post-match riot, these incidents from the mid-’70s look like little more than skirmishes, but at the time there was a very real sense of national shame. Football hooligans had been part of the domestic game for some years; for them to appear on European TV coverage was seen as akin to washing one’s dirty linen in public.

  The hooligan element inevitably captured the headlines, but there were also many tens of thousands of young Britons whose first direct knowledge of Europe was in the context of football, and for whom it was a purely positive experience. There were too those who renewed their acquaintance with the Continent in a more peaceful way. In 1977, for the first time, Liverpool reached the final of the European Cup, which that year was staged in Rome; after they had comfortably defeated Borussia Mönchengladbach, manager Bob Paisley, who had served with the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, pointed out that it was not his first visit to the Eternal City. ‘This is the second time I’ve beaten the Germans here,’ he said. ‘The first time was in 1944. I drove into Rome on a tank when the city was liberated.’

  Such memories of wartime continued to dominate British perceptions of Europe, despite the new-found embrace of foreign climes. Back when Edward Heath was first attempting to negotiate entry into the European Economic Community, the very concept had been dismissed in Frederic Mullally’s novel Split Scene (1963) in terms that made it clear how deep those memories were: ‘What is it going to be a union for?’ demands the hero of the book. ‘What’s its morality, its faith, its dialectic? Look whom we’re asked to merge our sovereignty with! Germany. The most dangerous conglomeration of unrepentant megalomaniacs history has ever known. Make no mistake about that lot! They have no doubts about who’s going to finish up running the European Club.’ Nearly a decade later, as the debate over Europe edged its way onto central stage, Kenneth Tynan was even more explicit; the Common Market, he wrote, was ‘the greatest historical vulgarity since Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich – a capitalist bloc of Germany, Italy, France, Spain, England and the Low Countries, directed against socialism’. The left-wing Labour newspaper Tribune employed the same lexicon in its coverage of EEC entry: THE BIGGEST SELL-OUT SINCE MUNICH pronounced one 1971 headline, followed a few weeks later by a simple declaration of anger and sorrow: UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.

  Those on the other side, those who supported entry into the EEC, drew different lessons from the same memories. ‘Personally, my strong support for joining Europe was based more on broad foreign policy than on economic grounds,’ wrote William Whitelaw. ‘Having lived through the 1939–45 war, I was desperately keen to ensure that no further world wars would start through quarrels in Western Europe.’

  The fixation on the past was hardly surprising in a country that so cherished its history and that was in the grip of a nascent nostalgia boom. The end of empire had taken its toll on the nation’s self-image, but there was still a legacy in the shape of the Commonwealth, a worldwide voluntary association of former colonies and dominions united by a shared history, such as had never previously been seen in any country’s post-imperial experience. The integrity of the Commonwealth, however, was inevitably threatened by Britain’s turn towards Europe, and it was perhaps not the most astute political move by the French president Georges Pompidou to challenge too that other great survivor of empire, the English language, when he commented in 1971 that if Britain did join the EEC, it would have to accept French as the official language of the Common Market. Certainly it brought into the lists a new champion in the unlikely form of James Callaghan. ‘Millions of people in Britain have been surprised to hear that the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton must in future be regarded as an American import from which we must protect ourselves if we are to build a new Europe,’ he declared in a speech in May of that year. ‘If we are to prove our Europeanism by accepting that French is the dominant language in the Community, then the answer is quite clear, and I will say it in French to prevent any misunderstanding: Non, merci beaucoup.’

  Pompidou’s remarks, made in Le Soir, may have been prompted by a sense of mischief at having to listen to Heath speak French with what was perhaps the worst accent ever displayed by a British politician. So poor was it that it inspired the writers of the 1980s sitcom ’Allo ’Allo in their creation of Crabtree, an Englishman posing as a gendarme, whose inability to speak French was conveyed by malapropisms such as his catchphrase greeting ‘God moaning’. Heath’s linguistic infelicity, however, was not restricted to French. Even as Callaghan was leaping to the defence of Chaucer and Milton, the prime minister was discovering that while an educated person had a vocabulary of 40,000 words, the leading tabloid newspapers used only some 2,000; it was suggested that he might become a more powerful and populist speaker if his writers confined themselves to the same limited verbal palette. As Douglas Hurd once remarked, Heath’s ear for music was not matched by a similar gift for language.

  Despite this handicap, the relationship Heath struck up with Pompidou was instrumental in overcoming the French hostility, long cherished by Charles de Gaulle, towards British membership of the EEC, thereby realizing Heath’s equally long-cherished dream of signing up to the Treaty of Rome. The 1970 Conservative manifesto had stated that ‘Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less.’ But few political observers were persuaded that this open-minded approach reflected the totality of Heath’s ambitions, and the negotiations that he initiated as prime minister were concluded with remarkable rapidity. By October 1971 a vote was being held in Parliament on the principle of entry, commenci
ng a debate that would last into the next century, that would sporadically break into something close to overt hostility and hatred, and that would ruin more political careers than it made.

  From the outset, all the major parties were split on the issue of Europe. The official position of the Labour Party in 1971 was to oppose entry, but sixty-nine MPs ignored the whips and voted with the government (another twenty abstained), while thirty-nine Tories joined Harold Wilson in the opposition lobby. Even the Liberals, who were strongly in favour of membership, saw 16 per cent of their MPs disagree with the party line, in the solitary figure of Emlyn Hooson, who voted against. The resultant government majority of 112 represented what was probably the high point of Heath’s premiership; there might have been dissenters in his party (most notably Enoch Powell), but, having decided not to impose a three-line whip, he minimized the damage and ensured that the media’s attention was instead drawn to the much more damaging split in the Labour ranks, where the idea of MPs being given a free vote was vigorously if ineffectually opposed. ‘Call that democracy!’ snorted Tony Benn, when he learnt that Tories were to be trusted to make up their own minds.

  Benn himself had previously been a supporter of Europe: ‘All the arguments against it are short-term arguments, based on what it looks like now,’ he had written earlier that year, ‘and omit the possibility that we might make changes when the time comes.’ Now, though, he was moving towards the outright opposition that would become his more familiar stance. The unions and the grass roots of the party had long displayed a strong vein of suspicion – even at the time when Harold Wilson was unsuccessfully applying for membership – and the fact that it was Heath now leading the charge did much to strengthen that distrust. If entry was advocated by the Tories and by big business, ran the argument, then it was self-evident that the EEC must be pro-capitalist and against the interests of the working class. More immediately, here was an opportunity to inflict serious, perhaps fatal, damage to Heath, at a time when battle lines were being drawn over the Industrial Relations Act. By uniting with the Tory dissidents, the government’s flagship could be blown out of the water.

  The actions of the sixty-nine rebel MPs stymied any such strategy. Led by Roy Jenkins, seen by many as the most credible rival to Wilson, their act of defiance outraged many on the left, but had little immediate impact on the balance of forces within the party. Jenkins refused to stand down as deputy leader, despite his open mutiny, and indeed the following month he was re-elected to the job by Labour MPs, comfortably defeating the anti-European Michael Foot; the gap between the national party and its Westminster representatives was becoming ever more apparent. In April 1972 that fragile relationship took a more serious blow when Jenkins finally did resign the post, this time on the much more arcane issue of whether the party should commit itself to holding a referendum of the entire nation to confirm membership. ‘It was the moment when the old Labour coalition began to collapse,’ reflected Roy Hattersley on the resignation. ‘After that day, the Labour Party was never the same again.’

  The referendum proposal came from Benn, and was seen by him as a democratic way forward that could bring together the various factions within the party. And though it wasn’t initially recognized as such, it did offer Labour a short-term solution to its long-term problems. Wilson, twisting and turning with the tide as he sought to preserve some semblance of unity, claimed that he had been ‘wading in shit for three months to allow others to indulge their conscience’, and Benn did at least suggest a more honourable alternative. From the outset, though, Jenkins was implacably opposed to the idea, primarily on the grounds that Britain had never before held such a referendum – though he was quick to point out that Hitler had been keen on plebiscites – and that it was dangerous to allow the people to determine individual policy decisions. Acknowledging the truth of the old claim that the political elite was becoming remote from the population, he warned that, once introduced into the British system, referendums would constitute a ‘powerful continuing weapon against progressive legislation’. And certainly many of the parliamentary reforms of the 1960s would then have struggled to find majority support in the country, particularly the abolition of the death penalty and the legalization of male homosexuality.

  In short, referendums were dangerous waters, a fact of which social democrats of all hues were aware. As Benn recognized, the plan ‘went absolutely against the elitist thinking of the right wing of the party and also worried the left, which has a sort of authoritarian flavour about it and is afraid that if you do have a referendum, then the leadership of the trade unions and political leadership of the left will in some way be undermined’. Initially, therefore, he won few supporters for the proposal, and when it first came to the shadow cabinet in early 1972, it was comfortably defeated. Within days, however, the situation was transformed with Pompidou’s announcement that France would have a referendum (scheduled, appropriately enough, for St George’s Day) to decide whether the UK should be allowed to join, at which point the opposition to Benn’s suggestion became unsustainable: if the French could have their say, why should not the British? The shadow cabinet voted again, deciding this time to endorse the measure and to impose a three-line whip. At which point Jenkins resigned as deputy leader.

  Effectively that decision marked the end of Jenkins’s aspirations to be Labour leader. He was a long way out of touch with the party’s members, but retained a high level of support amongst MPs and in the radical sections of the middle class; he was ‘the hero of every drawing room’, sneered Benn, soon to become the hero of every sixth-form common room. Had Jenkins remained within the shadow cabinet, fighting his corner, or even had he resigned to challenge Wilson outright for the leadership, he could perhaps have shored up his status as the voice of the centre ground. Instead he exiled himself to the backbenches, refused to strike against Wilson, and waited and hoped for a forthcoming Labour defeat at the polls that would give him a way back; as he reflected in his memoirs of this period: ‘Every bad by-election strengthened my position, every good one weakened it.’

  A House of Commons motion calling for a referendum was defeated, despite the support of twenty-two Tory rebels (including, inevitably, Powell, who had overcome his own distaste for such constitutional irregularities in pursuit of his opposition to Europe), but it was now part of the Labour platform for the next general election, a fact which provoked Powell’s apostasy in February 1974.

  In theory the Labour policy going into that election was that the terms of EEC membership would be renegotiated, and that only when the government was satisfied that it had got the best possible deal would a referendum be held. Like Heath’s 1970 manifesto pledge, however, it was a commitment more honoured in the letter than the spirit. Callaghan, as the foreign secretary in the new Labour government, did engage in discussions with his European counterparts, but beyond a few cosmetic changes, nothing of consequence was gained, save perhaps for a swelling of self-importance. At his first European meeting, Callaghan was told by one of his foreign colleagues that the American secretary of state was interested in him for one reason only: ‘You don’t think Dr Kissinger would stop off in London on his way to Moscow if Britain were not part of the Common Market, do you?’ A neutral observer might think that the UK’s position as a nuclear power, and as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was more significant in the eyes of Washington than an alliance with Belgium and Luxembourg – guns before butter mountains – but the international stage has always lured politicians, and the approval of one’s peers is seldom unattractive. In any event, the renegotiation exercise did the job that was asked of it, creating a smokescreen that obscured the issues at stake: opinion polls in late 1974 showed that if the government said it supported a new settlement then a majority against membership could be converted into a vote for, even though few could identify what the negotiations were actually about.

  This faith in Britain’s leaders to look after the nation’s interests was probably the crucial f
actor when the referendum finally came in June 1975. The forces ranged against each other were massively unbalanced. A majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party rejected the new terms, as did the party beyond, but the cabinet voted in favour, which meant that the pro lobby could count on all three major party leaders – Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Jeremy Thorpe – as well as other senior figures such as Jenkins and Heath. They had the support of virtually all the media, including the Sun (whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, was then pro-Europe) and the Daily Mirror. ‘This country is no longer strong enough and rich enough to stand alone,’ argued the latter. ‘Britain can have more sovereignty INSIDE the Market than OUTSIDE.’ In the same camp could also be counted the leaders of big business and, some claimed, even the American security forces: ‘A dedicated federalist, Cord Meyer Jr, was to become head of the CIA station in London for the duration of the Referendum “to do what it takes” to secure a Yes vote,’ wrote the Eurosceptic Tory MP Richard Body.