Here’s a fresh casualty of Brexit which has so far gone unnoticed by LBC’s James O’Brien and the Remainer social media forces — the 1975 UK referendum to stay in the European Economic Community (as the European Union then was). In an age when the most minor anniversaries get celebrated, it seems odd that so little attention should be paid to the fiftieth anniversary of Britain’s first national referendum on 5 June 1975 which endorsed Parliament’s decision two years earlier to join the Common Market.
The first European referendum was frequently cited in the run-up to the Brexit vote in 2016, but mostly to draw comparisons between David Cameron and Harold Wilson: both Prime Ministers, fresh off winning a general election but with a wafer-thin parliamentary majority, calling a national referendum on the European question principally to consolidate their own political fortunes, only to face torturous renegotiations with their continental allies ahead of the vote.
Unlike in 2016, 1975 wasn’t a close contest, with 67 per cent of UK voters opting to stay in the Common Market. Since Brexit, historian Robert Saunders has published Yes to Europe!, a definitive account of the 1975 referendum. His book chronicles the mismatch between the political, economic and media establishment overwhelmingly supporting staying in the EEC and the anti-marketeer contingent opposed to European integration. While Wilson’s cabinet was split, every living Prime Minister and present political party leader supported EEC membership, notably recently-elected Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher who even campaigned in a jumper knitted from the flags of member states. By contrast the oratorical flair and charisma possessed by high-profile politicians advocating withdrawal from the Common Market, such as Tony Benn, Enoch Powell and Barbara Castle, was not accompanied by compelling electoral appeal.
According to Yes to Europe!, the main pro-EEC campaign group Britain in Europe (BIE) secured £2 million from businesses, compared with just £9,000 raised by its anti-marketeer equivalent the National Referendum Campaign (NRC). Resources for the Common Market opponents were so scarce that Saunders report an exchange between two leading anti-marketeers, Douglas Jay and Neil Marten, in which Jay raised alarm at the prospect of the government giving both sides a free national mailshot on the grounds that the NRC “cannot afford to purchase the envelopes”.
George Gale and Patrick Cosgrave turned The Spectator into a one-issue campaigning periodical
A cross-section of heavyweight celebrities, ranging from J.B. Priestley to David Bailey and Agatha Christie to Andrew Lloyd Webber, endorsed staying in the Common Market (in his diaries Something Sensational to Read on the Train, Gyles Brandreth, who was entrusted with recruiting young celebrities for BIE, castigated Lloyd Webber for wearing “grubby trousers”, adding he “can barely string a sentence together”). Notable names against EEC membership included George Best, John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan, Kingsley Amis and Harry Corbett; ideal guests for a lively dinner party perhaps but unlikely to sway too many hearts and minds.
The biggest imbalance of the 1975 referendum lay in the media coverage. The press was comprehensively pro-market with the exception of The Spectator, Morning Star, Tribune, The Scottish Daily News and The Dundee Courier. Ironically given its later subsequent strident euroscepticism, The Sun led the support for EEC collaboration. In May 1975 the paper described the referendum as being “a battle between the sane, sensible, moderate majority [and] lunatic fringe extremists”.
While Brexit and the EEC referendum generated different outcomes in markedly different circumstances in different centuries, the opposition to European integration in both campaigns remained consistent in substance and tone. When I wrote my Durham University history dissertation on The Spectator and its attitude to Europe 1966-79, which was published by the Bruges Group as a pamphlet in 2000, I was struck by how similar the Speccie’s warnings about the loss of sovereignty and self-governance were with the contemporary unrest with the EU being expressed in The Sun and the Daily Mail. The Sun’s warning on the eve of Brexit, “Vote Leave, and we will reassert our sovereignty — embracing a future as a self-governing, powerful nation envied by all” could have come straight out of The Spectator four decades earlier.
Under the editorship of future Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s, The Spectator advocated for an Anglo-European special relationship with an editorial in December 1968 declaring, “the lack of progress towards a common currency is the fundamental flaw in the structure of the European Community”. Lawson was succeeded by rancorous anti-marketeer Spectator journalists George Gale and Patrick Cosgrave who, with the help of fellow anti-EEC travellers, such as Peterhouse don Maurice Cowling, turned it into a one-issue campaigning periodical.
The Spectator hit an all-time commercial low in the early 1970s with circulation often registering under 20,000 copies. One shambolic episode involved proprietor Harold Creighton sacking Gale and appointing himself as editor, reputedly so he could get into Who’s Who. Yet while The Spectator may then have been on the wrong side of political influence and profitability, it now deserves to be seen as the first modern eurosceptic publication, long before the position became a widespread mainstream media stance. The Spectator’s argument that European economic union was an undemocratic political enterprise that the British electorate would ultimately turn against proved to be prophetic.
But whether Brexit would have turned out better had the current editor of The Spectator, Michael Gove, not defenestrated Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership bid in the aftermath of the 2016 vote, thereby ushering in Theresa May and such damaging chronic political dysfunction, is another story.
