Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  In the ranks opposite were Benn, Powell, Foot and most of the key union leaders, notably Jack Jones. They were joined by extra-parliamentary parties from both the far right and the far left, a fact to which the pro-Europeans were not slow to draw attention: ‘Those who want to come out are deeply divided,’ claimed the pamphlet Why You Should Vote Yes, happy to impugn by association. ‘Some want a Communist Britain – part of the Soviet bloc . . .’ The financial backing available to the antis was also considerably less than that of their opponents, partly because, despite the hostile position of the Labour Party, its resources were not permitted to be used in pursuit of the campaign. Benn and Powell commanded substantial followings in their own right, but each could also be counted upon to alienate in equal measure, and their divisive characters enabled the No camp to be too easily painted as the refuge of extremists.

  More specifically, and despite the presence of Powell, it was portrayed as almost exclusively harbouring left-wing extremists, with Benn himself becoming very largely the story of the campaign. ‘Like all journalists Harry is fascinated by the way Benn has taken over this referendum,’ wrote Bernard Donoughue, after meeting Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times. ‘He will lose it, but it has been his referendum, from inception to the end.’ With the comforting conviction of victory, Wilson could afford to be patronizing; Benn, he said, ‘has many of the qualities of a great Old Testament prophet, without a beard, who talks about the new Jerusalem he looks forward to at some future time’. Heath employed the same imagery in his own contribution: ‘Before you could say Lord Stansgate, he would be leading us into his vision of the promised land, not flowing with milk and honey but swamped by ration books and state directives,’ declared the man who, as prime minister, had been the first since the days of post-war austerity to have ration books distributed. Others were even less courteous. When Benn claimed that the EEC had already cost Britain hundreds of thousands of jobs, Jenkins was withering in his condemnation of his cabinet colleague: ‘I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economic minister,’ he pro claimed in his most lofty manner. Towards the end of the campaign, Jenkins declared that to leave the EEC would be like entering ‘an old people’s home for faded nations’, and, without mentioning names, made clear his contempt for his opponents: ‘I do not think it would be a very comfortable old people’s home. I do not like the look of some of the prospective warders.’

  The cumulative effect was irresistible. ‘My wife and I had agreed that the issue was so important that we ought to watch the long television debate before making up our minds,’ remembered the Metropolitan Police chief, Robert Mark; his conclusion at the end of the evening was: ‘My God! If that’s the lot who want us to come out, let’s get up early and go to vote to stay in.’ On a relatively high turn-out, the vote was two to one in favour of remaining in the EEC. ‘I doubt if ten per cent voted on the merits of the issue or even according to their reaction to the question on the ballot paper,’ wrote Hattersley. ‘They put a cross against their prejudices and – most important of all – supported the position taken up by the politicians they supported.’ Or, as Jenkins put it when the results came in: ‘They took the advice of the people they were used to following.’

  It was a critical moment in British history. ‘There is a swing to the right, which I think one has to accept will continue for the remainder of the 1970s,’ reflected Benn, who was removed from his job as industry secretary in the wake of the referendum. ‘The 1980s may be different but it is going to be a long hard wait.’ There was no doubt that the vote had damaged his political standing, nor that the balance of power had shifted: ‘The Labour Party was beaten but the Labour prime minister upheld,’ he reflected later. It took the blind faith of the far left to find any comfort in the result. The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist), a British group representing the Posadist heresy within worldwide Trotskyism, insisted that those who didn’t vote should be counted along with those who opposed the EEC, a calculation which allowed them to claim that in the referendum the working class had expressed its ‘rejection of submission to parliament and the need for a consistent policy and programme to throw out capitalism’.

  Throughout the campaign, politicians on both sides behaved as though they were merely treading the path of pure principle. The truth was more prosaic. They might not have followed to the letter Terry Collier’s description of young British women abroad in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? – ‘once they bridge that strip of English Channel, they drop everything: reserve, manners, morals and knickers’ – but even politicians were shaped by their personal experience of Europe. Norman Tebbit, later to become an arch-Eurosceptic, was initially an enthusiast because his job as an airline pilot saw him working alongside colleagues from other European nations whose lives and culture were interchangeable with his own; it was only when he discovered this was not necessarily the case on the shop floor of the average factory that he changed his position. Similarly, the Europhiles in the Labour Party – Jenkins, Hattersley, Shirley Williams, Tony Crosland – tended to be those who felt most comfortable holidaying in France and Italy. This was in sharp contrast to Benn, who, on a working tour of European capitals as energy secretary, adopted the same approach to foreign culture as have millions of British tourists over the years: ‘I took my own mug and lots of tea bags.’ The former Labour minister Douglas Jay, who was equally opposed to the EEC, went a stage further; he loathed France and its cuisine so much that whenever he was obliged to travel there he made sure that he took a supply of ham sandwiches to sustain him.

  Benn’s opposition to Europe, once established, was publicly expressed in terms of democracy and loss of parliamentary sovereignty, but underlying these rarefied concepts was a strand of old-fashioned patriotism, manifest in his instinctive defence of the symbols of Britishness. When the long-running saga of the Channel Tunnel returned to the political agenda in 1973 – a bill was passed by the Commons, though it proved to be yet another false start – he insisted that the issue ‘has now become inextricably linked with the Common Market’; consequently, ‘Peter Shore and Michael Foot are strongly opposed to it, as I am, with Tony Crosland in favour.’ Even more painfully, in 1975 the cabinet, of which he was a member, agreed to replace the blue British passport with a new European-styled document: ‘This made my stomach turn,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I had an absolute gut reaction that this was selling our birthright for a mess of unemployment.’ And in cabinet he argued that ‘We have got to be careful: like metrication and decimalization, this really strikes at our national identity and I don’t like it.’

  Earlier that same year, Wilson had evidently come to the same general conclusion, when he initiated a programme called Little Things Mean a Lot. Under this heading he saw, for example, a European proposal to end the selling of beer in pints; this measure would be fought, he explained to his cabinet colleagues, though his argument was, even by his own standards, deeply cynical: ‘It is important that we show that we are sensitive to these feelings, especially when doing so does not pre-empt any significant amounts of public expenditure.’ The same obsession with symbols, though from the other side, had earlier been displayed by Heath, when he found fault with the design of the new £5 note, depicting the Duke of Wellington and, in the background, what looked like French soldiers in full retreat after the battle of Waterloo; it was an image, Heath felt, that would do little to enhance his rapport with Pompidou.

  For most Britons, whichever way they voted in the referendum, there was little confusion over such issues: the pint was sacrosanct, while the offending of French sensibilities was scarcely a cause for widespread concern. For there was still a strong legacy of suspicion aimed at mainland Europe, a reluctance to get too involved. Britain might have been late in joining the EEC, but the same was true also of British football clubs in the European Cup, of the Eurovision Song Contest and even of the slapstick television game show Jeux Sans Frontières. This latter grew out of a domestic Fr
ench series, which de Gaulle himself suggested should be developed into an international tournament to help ease European relations; he calculated that once countries got used to throwing water over each other, whilst dressed as medieval knights and kicking giant beach balls round an obstacle course, the prospect of war would be too absurd to contemplate. When the UK did decide to participate, a couple of years after the start, the show was renamed It’s a Knockout for domestic consumption, and even when that most internationalist of British rock stars Peter Gabriel had his first top 10 hit in 1980 with a song using the phrase ‘Jeux Sans Frontières’ as a chorus, the track still had a translated title: ‘Games Without Frontiers’.

  The residual distrust of Europe was manifest in a revival of one of the recurrent symbols of British isolationism: the rabies scare. The fear of this killer disease, which no human had contracted in Britain since 1902, was a traditional standby for newspaper editors when the flow of real stories was sluggish, but in November 1976 the Sun introduced a fresh slant by serializing a novel by David Anne, originally called Rabid, but now given the much more sensationalist title Day of the Mad Dogs. A TV advert for the serialization was sufficiently shocking that it ‘received a record number of complaints and was pulled at 11 p.m. on its first night, provoking huge delight at the Sun’. The book itself was published early the following year and was immediately followed by two other entries in the field: Walter Harris’s Saliva and Jack Ramsay’s The Rage. The subtext was not hard to find, for although the influence of James Herbert was clearly evident in these tales of killer animals, they were novels that were as much concerned with Europhobia as they were with hydrophobia. In Saliva a French civil servant becomes infected by a bite from his dog, and brings the disease to England at a trade conference for European ministers, where he passes it on to one of his mistresses, who happens to be the wife of the British prime minister. The Rage has a similar mix of sex and bureaucracy: a British civil servant working with the EEC in Brussels finds that his relationship with a prostitute involves him in a smuggling operation; meanwhile he discovers that his daughter has herself smuggled a stray dog back from France while on a family holiday. The dog is, of course, rabid, and the daughter dies of the disease, sparking an entirely predictable panic.

  This trio of rabies novels, all written in 1976 in the aftermath of the referendum, may not have addressed the subtleties of the Common Agricultural Policy, let alone those of economic and monetary union, but they did connect on a visceral level with the fears and anxieties of the British about their neighbours. And as such, they were perfectly in tune with the preceding political arguments, which had similarly avoided detail in favour of broad generalizations. Although, for example, there were those in the Foreign Office discussing amongst themselves ‘the creation of a European federal state with a single currency’ as early as 1970, little of this reached the general populace. And those who did address such questions in public were not much heeded. ‘Last October, without preliminary notice, not to mention debate, Britain was committed to European “economic and monetary union by 1980”,’ Powell explained in a 1973 speech. ‘“Economic and monetary union” effectively means unitary government; for when all that concerns economics and money is removed from government, precious little remains. “By 1980” effectively means in the lifetime of one more parliament. Do not laugh or shrug your shoulders. You have been told; it is your fault if you do not listen.’ But even those who might have been expected to listen were not doing so, as Thatcher apologetically made clear in her memoirs: ‘It then seemed to me, as it did to my colleagues, that the arguments about sovereignty which were advanced by Enoch Powell and others were theoretical points used as rhetorical devices.’

  One of the very few on the pro-European side who was prepared to discuss such issues was Jenkins, who cheerfully conceded that ever closer economic integration would necessitate what he called ‘a quite substantial pooling of sovereignty’. But such voices were seldom to be heard during the referendum campaign that could and should have addressed the issues. Instead the prime minister, departing for once from his football metaphors, offered instead an even more homely cricketing image: Britain couldn’t survive, said Wilson, ‘by taking our bat home and sinking into an offshore mentality’. This simplistic account of the fait accompli that was Britain’s membership of the EEC was ultimately the one endorsed by the electorate. It was not entirely surprising that in later years there were many who felt they had been cheated.

  PART THREE

  SENSE OF DOUBT

  1976–1979

  The great British mistake was looking for a way out,

  Was getting complacent, not noticing the pulse was racing.

  The mistake was fighting the change, was staying the same.

  It couldn’t adapt so it couldn’t survive.

  The Adverts, ‘The Great British Mistake’ (1978)

  AMYL: Life in England these days is inflationary. But we’re carrying on regardless, coping with misgovernment and idiocy on every side.

  Derek Jarman, Jubilee (1977)

  If I didn’t laugh at people like Thatcher and Callaghan, I’d want to blow my brains out.

  Terry-Thomas (1977)

  11

  The Callaghan Years

  ‘Falling apart at the seams’

  Let us put behind us the unnecessary disputes, the scrimshanking and the sloppy management. Let future historians look back on 1977 as a pendulum year in our history – the year when the people of Britain found themselves and began to climb back.

  James Callaghan, New Year’s message (1977)

  Friends, let us take – yes, take, not borrow – this year of 1977. Let it be our year. To lift up our heads and resolve that this time next year, we can say: We did it! And it cost nothing but determination, hard work, freedom from strikes, better management, and from all of us: guts! Lest without these virtues, we lose our freedom for ever.

  Hughie Green, ‘Stand Up and Be Counted’ (1976)

  RIGSBY: I can see 1977 hasn’t been your year. But cheer up – things are bound to get better.

  Eric Chappell, Rising Damp (1977)

  It was probably the most upmarket soap ever broadcast. The BBC’s 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius novels depicted a Roman empire wallowing in corruption and depravity, as it told the story of the five emperors of the Julio–Claudian dynasty, a family whose members seemed to spend less time ruling than they did squabbling, scheming and murdering their way to the imperial throne. And behind the lashings of sex and violence was a lurking fear that this society was inherently unstable, that it might yet slip back into conflict and anarchy. ‘Only a single hand at the helm will keep this ship on course,’ insists Livia (Siân Phillips), a matriarch with a predilection for poison. ‘The only question is: whose hand will it be? If there is any doubt, the rivalry will plunge us into civil war again.’

  Earlier that year Britain had enjoyed a bloodless dry run of the same internecine struggle, with the battle to succeed Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party and therefore as prime minister. Labour too was in fear of open warfare, riven as it was by splits, both between left and right, and then again within each of those groupings. From the outside, it was a confusing spectacle, particularly since the terms of the debate were uncertain, with the clear red water between socialists and social democrats now muddied by the European question, so that, for example, Peter Shore – essentially on the right of the party in terms of workers’ control in industry – was seen as a left-winger because of his opposition to EEC membership, even though he always phrased his arguments in terms of patriotism. ‘I can’t conceive of us ever having the kind of revival of morale and effort and achievement,’ he explained, ‘except within the concept of being the British nation.’

  The three principal candidates of the right in the election were Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, who had respectively voted for, voted against and abstained in the crucial 1971 Commons debate on entry into Europe. The ri
valry between them ensured that there was no single figure around whom the right could comfortably coalesce, though the election did go some way towards resolving the issue for the future. In the first ballot Crosland was decisively beaten into last place with barely 5 per cent of the 314 votes cast by Labour MPs (who then made up the entire constituency), and was therefore automatically knocked out. Jenkins came third in a field of six but, distraught at having got only fifty-six votes, withdrew from the race, to the undisguised glee of his arch-enemy: ‘When I think of the fantastic press that man has had, year in year out, and all the banging I’ve had, it is gratifying that he should have only got eighteen votes more than me,’ exulted Tony Benn, who had already announced his own withdrawal. It was indeed a disastrous performance by Jenkins; ninety Labour MPs were considered at the time to be strongly pro-European and yet the man who had risked his career by defying the party whip on the issue, and should therefore by rights have been the leader of that group, attracted little more than half of them.

  Healey, however, coming second to last, with a paltry thirty votes to his name, refused even to consider withdrawing, and thereby enhanced his position for the future. Where Jenkins looked like a beaten man, Healey was revealed as a born fighter, determined to stay in the ring until forcibly ejected from it – next time round, it was clear, he would be the champion of the right and would probably be the favourite to win. Crosland’s analysis of the contest summed up the shifting fortunes of the also-rans: it was, he said, ‘A year too soon for Denis. Four years too late for Roy. Five years too soon for Tony. Two years and one job too soon for me.’