Euro-vision
welcomes a timely study of why Britain voted to stay in the European Economic Community in 1975
Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain by Robert Saunders Cambridge University Press, 530 pages, £24.99
The 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community didn’t really change anything. By a margin of two to one, the country agreed with the government that we should continue to be members, and life and politics went on the same as before. Consequently, it’s never loomed very large in histories of the period. Following the contrary outcome in 2016, however, it takes on greater significance, making this a perfect time for Robert Saunders’ definitive account of events in 1975.
The differences are what stand out. In 1975, the European message was one of hope. Membership was sold as being “modern, dynamic and optimistic”, as the patriotic choice for the country’s future. Fronted by long-time Euro- enthusiasts Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, the Yes camp went beyond politics to pursue social and cultural programmes, pumping out T-shirts and bumper stickers that were “bright, glossy and humorous”. So cheerful was the attitude that there was even a suggestion of a wombles-for-Europe initiative.
Against this onslaught of optimism, the No campaign was chaotic, its message negative, with predictions of unemployment, conscription and the death of democracy unless Britain went its own way. Operating on a shoestring, it looked amateurish and dated, as well as being partially composed of – to use David Cameron’s later phrase – “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”: a list including the National Front, the Communist party and the IRA. No wonder many of them refused to share a stage with one another.
Meanwhile, seldom in clear view, there was Harold Wilson, the consummate politician making his last major contribution to the country. (He resigned as prime minister nine months after the referendum.) Unlike Cameron, he took a back seat and adopted a tone of “baffled scepticism”, suspicious of grand visions but ultimately persuaded by the economic arguments for Europe. His image as a pragmatic everyman may have been a pose, but his verdict carried weight.
Saunders warns against premature judgments on the 2016 result “when the plaster is still falling from the ceiling”, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the intervening four decades, one side learned from its mistakes, while the other forgot everything it knew.
This is history at its best: an insightful, exhaustively researched and immensely readable book that captures the period
In 1975, the European message was one of hope
as well as the vote. It was a Britain where the priorities for women – according to a pamphlet fronted by agony aunt Marjorie Proops – should be their husband’s job and their children’s future; where the concerns of the Commonwealth still formed part of public debate; and where the Church of England was listened to when it pronounced on national sovereignty – a “heresy” whose eradication was a “spiritual issue”, according, respectively, to the bishops of London and Chichester.
Whatever else has changed in Britain, however, there remains an unfortunate tradition of political pop songs: it turns out that Mike Read’s ‘UKIP Calypso’ had a predecessor in the 1975 Yes campaign’s ‘Common Market Reggae’.
Alwyn W Turner is the author of Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s (2013)