David Cameron made a speech about the EU on the day Helmut Schmidt died. It makes for a painful contrast about the parlous state of Europe today that the British prime minister’s set of demands for EU reform in 2015 address doubts the former West German chancellor must have thought he had helped resolve in 1975.
Schmidt even addressed a special Labour conferencebefore the UK’s last in/out referendum. Pity the lads weren’t listening. They’d listen now.
The then prime minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson, was equivocal during his negotiations with what was still the European Economic Community (EEC) about whether or not he would recommend Britain staying in the organisation it had joined two years earlier. Schmidt was suspicious. So is Angela Merkel now.
But few people watching the wily Wilson could have doubted that this was his goal, the referendum merely a device to sustain his divided cabinet and party. Sounds familiar? You bet it is. In April 1975, Labour’s special conference voted no and seven cabinet ministers campaigned for a no vote in the referendum, despite Schmidt’s eloquent plea – in perfect, humorous English – for social democratic solidarity.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men …” he reminded them with Shakespeare’s help. I was there. It was a classy performance from a classy politician who had emerged from eight years in Hitler’s army with an Iron Cross and a determination to help rebuild his shattered country and continent. Read Dan van der Vat’s obituary on the great politician.
The 1975 referendum was easily won by a ratio of 2:1. Most of Fleet Street and the Tory leadership, Margaret Thatcher included, aligned behind the modernisers’ vision of Europe and against the siege economy and revived Commonwealth options being touted by the romantic Labour left and Tory right. Tony Benn, who had come up with the referendum idea (then widely deplored as a totalitarian ploy), predicted victory for no on polling day.
Did he really believe it, I asked myself at the time. Like Tony Crosland, the Labour politician I most admired in 1975, I was a pro-European sceptic, disinclined to believe most of the more lurid nonsense spouted by partisans on both sides. I still am in 2015, not expecting Cameron to get much out of his “renegotiation” (nor did Wilson) but again likely to vote to stay in when the time comes at some point before New Year 2018.
Cameron’s speech made clear what’s changed since then. Even allowing for tactics, the tone was agnostic, tepid. Truly, the PM (born in 1966) is one of Thatcher’s children, not quite 22 when she did her famous U-turn on Europe in that Bruges speech in 1988. No wonder last week’s LSE report from those ex-diplomats warns that Britain is fading from the global stage.
So Wednesday’s papers are full of disappointment on both sides. Ken Clarke, the last fully paid-up pro-EU beast still standing, made his usual Jeremiah-like warning of failure. The Eurosceptic Tories, all but a handful pretty third-rate, raged in an equally familiar way, as Nick Watt reports. Rafael Behr sums up Cameron’s decade of tactical retreat, Danegeld paid to those who won’t be appeased. The Guardian’s editorial urges Cameron to end his “phoney war” and declare for staying in. But he won’t. When he finally does, it may be too late.
We all know there is a sizeable chunk of public opinion out there that has decided the EU is the root cause of all our current woes. In 1975, our quite different woes were focused on agricultural subsidies and something called the EEC “food mountain” and its “wine lake”.
Today they relate primarily to immigration, even in Scotland, which elected a Ukip MEP against Alex Salmond’s instructions only last year. Most of the Tory papers have switched sides, too, happily encouraged to play fast and loose with immigration and welfare data. The facts are bad enough. Heading for a population of 70 million, net migration of 300,000 a year is “unsustainable”, as Cameron put it. He doesn’t indicate much of a clue about tackling it.
But it’s the pro-European camp that has changed most, in ways that may prove fatal to its cause. Gone is the enthusiasm, lurid or otherwise; gone are the weighty statesmen and women, the Helmut Schmidts and young Margaret Thatchers, you might say, the Jacques Delors and Valéry Giscard d’Estaings, politicians of weight formed in years of war and economic turmoil.
It came home forcefully to me recently when I chaired a session on Europe at the annual Cambridge festival of ideas. On the panel, distinguished academics of cosmopolitan outlook spoke in such measured, tepid terms that the sole Ukip man – the ex-Tory leader of Cambridgeshire county council Nick Clarke, who was standing in for the party’s first leader Alan Sked – couldn’t believe his luck. “A reception like this from a Cambridge audience? Wow,” he kept saying.
I get a similar experience reading the Financial Times, where the wide boys of finance, venture capitalists, buyout merchants and their kind, make all the running in declaring that Britain will do much better out than in. They then put some of their doubtfully gotten gains where their mouths are. The big firms and their collective mouthpiece, the CBI, seem muted, even embarrassed. Europe hasn’t been handling its crises very well lately, has it? Even Merkel, the German chancellor and the EU’s only visible heavyweight, is stumbling.
Manufacturing firms get the prosaic point of access to EU markets. The financial sector exudes resentment of EU regulation and restraint, and it’s not hard to see why. The eurozone hasn’t tackled its banking crisis properly yet while it seeks to impose new rules on the City, not all of them wise. A lot of financial products Britain would like to see in Europe are not compatible with national rules in different countries. Modify them to sell, say, insurance to Italians, and you fall foul of new problems elsewhere.
So “in or out won’t make much difference to us”, say some who would once have counted as solid in voters. The shine is long off the ball, though the universities – seriously alarmed by what Brexit might mean for their research funding – are stirring, not before time.
As we saw in rather similar circumstances in Scotland’s own in/out referendum last year, defending the boring old status quo can be hard when the other side has all the zeal and enthusiasm for something shiny and new. That referendum was nearly lost, as the EU referendum will be if “apathy rules – OK” becomes its slogan.
The out camp frequently denounce the “integrationist ratchet”. Isn’t it about time someone started complaining more loudly about the “disintegrationist” alternative?
