Into Europe, with the Peasants
We have seen how deeply the cause of Europe had marked Heath, and how hard he had struggled as a negotiator in the early sixties in the face of President de Gaulle’s ‘Non’. He had done the time, served in the tobacco-smoked rooms, haggled over the detail. As a keen European he knew his French partners better than any other senior British politician. Long before winning power as Prime Minister, he had identified Georges Pompidou who replaced de Gaulle as President as his likely interlocutor. At a meeting at Chequers, Heath later revealed, Pompidou had told him, in French, ‘If you ever want to know what my policy is, don’t bother to call me on the telephone. I do not speak English, and your French is awful. Just remember that I am a peasant, and my policy will always be to support the peasants.’
This was fair warning about the vast expense of the Common Agricultural Policy but it was not a true reflection of Pompidou’s wider vision. In fact, he wanted a Europe of large manufacturing companies able to take on the United States and the Far East. By 1970, after a decade during which Britain had grown much more slowly than the Six members of the Common Market, Heath was in some ways in a weaker position than Macmillan had been. On the other hand, Heath had some advantages. He was trusted as a serious negotiator. Britain’s very weakness persuaded Paris that this time, ‘les rosbifs’ were genuinely determined to join. Pompidou also thought the time was right. A ‘Oui’ would get him out of the great dead general’s shadow. France like the rest of the Community had for years been struggling to understand what Britain really wanted. This had been particularly difficult in the Wilson years, when the British left had been riven by the issue.
Heath had only promised to negotiate, not to join. His enthusiasm, however, was in total contrast to Wilson’s wiggling. The best historian of Britain’s relations with the rest of the EU described the difference between the two: ‘It probably mattered quite a lot to the direction of later events that in early September 1939, as Ted Heath was making it back to Britain from Poland by the skin of his teeth before war was declared, Harold Wilson was motoring to Dundee to deliver an academic paper on exports and the trade cycle, and that later, while Heath was training to run an anti-aircraft battery, Wilson became a potato controller at the Ministry of Food.’ Yet opinion polls suggested that Heath’s grand vision was alien to most British people and that the former potato controller’s warnings about prices had much more effect.
With Heath in power, over eighteen months of haggling in London, Paris and Brussels, a deal was thrashed out. It infuriated Britain’s fishermen, who would lose most of their traditional grounds to open European competition, particularly from French and Spanish trawlers. It was a second-best deal on the budget which would later be reopened by Margaret Thatcher. Above all it left intact the previous Common Market designed for the convenience of French farmers and Brussels-based bureaucrats, not for Britain. Vast slews of European law had to be swallowed whole, much of it objectionable to the British negotiators. Only at the very margins, dealing with New Zealand butter, for instance, did the Six make concessions – and the Commonwealth farmers’ deal was won at the expense of a worse agreement on the budget. The truth was that the British negotiators had decided it was essential to the country’s future to get in at any price. At a press conference at the Élysée Palace in Paris in 1971, Heath and Pompidou, after a long private afternoon of talks between just the two of them, language notwithstanding, revealed to general surprise that so far as France was concerned, Britain could now join the Community. Heath was particularly delighted to have triumphed over the media, who had expected another ‘Non’.
Now there would have to be a national debate about the terms of entry and a vote in Parliament. But in Opposition, Wilson was playing true to form. When Heath began negotiations, as we have seen, Wilson was a publicly declared supporter of British membership. But the tactical Wilson soon displaced the statesman. As British accession loomed, he cavilled and sniped. As ever, he was looking over his shoulder. Jim Callaghan, a potential successor, was campaigning openly against Europe, partly on the grounds that a French-speaking institution threatened the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. The left was in full cry. A special Labour conference in July 1971 confirmed how anti-EEC the party had become, voting by a majority of five to one against. Labour MPs were also hostile by a majority of two to one. Wilson now announced that he would oppose British membership on the Heath terms. He was not against in principle, he insisted, just here-and-now. After the long and tortuous journey this disgusted the Labour pro-Europeans. It did not much enthuse the Labour anti-Marketeers, who simply did not believe Wilson’s apparent change of heart and assumed he would sign up if he returned to Number Ten. So even Wilson’s great cause, Labour unity, was lost.
When the Heath proposals for membership were put to the Commons sixty-nine Labour pro-Europeans defied the party and voted with the Conservatives. They were led by Roy Jenkins, though to his later embarrassment he did not continue voting against his party on every detail. The left, led by Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Benn, were livid with the rebels. A divide which would eventually lead to the breakaway SDP was just beginning to be visible. For the Labour conference majority, staying out was a matter of principle. For the sixty-nine, going in was a matter of principle. Forms of words, pious evasions and bluster might patch over the cracks in opposition but this quite clearly had the potential to destroy Labour should it return to power. Caught between the moral self-belief of the Castles and Benns, and the steely self-certainty of Jenkins, Wilson protested to the shadow cabinet that ‘I’ve been wading in shit for three months so others can indulge their conscience’ and threatened to quit as party leader: ‘They can stuff it as far as I’m concerned.’ It was only a tantrum but as he struggled to hold things together, the left-wing New Statesman delivered a withering verdict on ‘the principal apostle of cynicism, the unwitting evangelist of disillusion…Mr Wilson has now sunk to a position where his very presence in Labour’s leadership pollutes the atmosphere of politics.’
After winning his Commons vote on British membership of the Community, Heath went quietly to Downing Street to play Bach on the piano in a mood of triumph. For the Labour party it had been a dreadful night, with screaming matches in the voting lobbies and ghastly personal confrontations between the sixty-nine rebels and the rest.
The hero of the hour turned out to be Tony Benn, then haring leftwards at a keen lollop. ‘Tony immatures with age,’ said Wilson but on this issue he proved a lot shrewder than the Labour leader. Benn began to argue that on a decision of such importance the people should vote, in a referendum. His constituency was in Bristol, whence the great eighteenth-century MP and writer, Edmund Burke, had sent a letter to his electors explaining that he owed them his judgement, not his slavish obedience to their opinions. In a reversal of the argument, the other Bristol MP argued instead that a democracy which denied its people the right to choose a matter of such importance directly would lose all respect. To begin with Benn had almost no support for this radical thought. Labour traditionalists despised referendums as fascist devices, continental jiggery-pokery not to be thought of in a parliamentary democracy. Though at this stage Benn was ambivalent about the Common Market, pro-Europeans also feared this was the first move towards committing Labour to pulling out.
Harold Wilson had committed himself publicly and repeatedly against a referendum. Slowly and painfully, however, he came to realize that opposing Heath’s deal but promising to renegotiate, while offering a referendum could be the way out. This could be sold to the anti-Marketeers as a swerve against Europe but the pro-Marketeers would realize he was not actually committed to withdraw. And the referendum promise would gain some political high-ground. He would ‘trust the people’ even if the people were, according to the polls, already fairly bored and hostile. When Pompidou suddenly announced that France would have a referendum, Wilson snatched at the Benn plan. It was an important moment. The referendum would make the attitude of the whole country clear, at least for the seventies. It was to be a device used again by politicians faced with particularly important or tricky constitutional choices.