Wilson said very little about Europe during the campaign. His crucial statement came in the House of Commons on 9 June 1975, the Monday after the Thursday on which the British people had voted by 67 per cent to 33 per cent to Stay (that, rather than Remain, was the word on the ballot) in the European Community. The debate, Wilson declared optimistically, ‘is now over’. His statement was a reiteration of what he had said during Labour’s deliberations about whether to accept the original Conservative proposal to join the EEC. British nationhood, he argued, was enhanced rather than compromised by membership. Wilson’s arguments were, in fact, usually narrowly economic. He set out a cost–benefit analysis of the balance of payments, the effect on the Commonwealth trade in sugar which he was not prepared to swap for ‘a marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Düsseldorf’, employment levels and capital movements. Wilson’s echoes of Gaitskell were clearest when he criticised Heath, which he did regularly, for straying into the territory of defence and security. This Wilson regarded as a resolutely national question.
Margaret Thatcher, replying as the new leader of the Opposition, could hardly have been more effusively content, firing off compliments to her predecessor Heath and commending the vision of Winston Churchill. Her joy did not last. Although Thatcher, following rather than creating her party line, made plenty of pro-European noises that, to her embarrassment, would later be quoted back at her, by 1988 her position had hardened into nationalistic objection. The speech she gave to the College of Europe in Bruges on 20 September 1988 was a turning point. This is the speech that begins the transition by which the Conservative Party ceased to be the party of Europe. The term ‘Euro-sceptic’ was coined in the discussion sparked by the Bruges speech. It was the first time since Britain’s entry into the EEC that the merits of membership began to come under question.
The speech was given at the instigation of the Foreign Office, which had been seeking an opportunity for the prime minister to make a positive statement on Europe. The original plan was to focus on economic issues, but as soon as Thatcher agreed to speak, that shifted. The early drafts strayed through an assortment of themes, ranging from the state and the individual in Europe to the fact that European cuisine apparently spurred British cooks to higher endeavours. The prime minister’s adviser on Europe, John Kerr, suggested focusing on enterprise and the need for greater European efforts on defence. There was a long to-and-fro between the Foreign Office and Downing Street over the draft. At one point, after Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, had raised substantive objections to the tone of the text, there were two drafts in circulation. Rather like Tony Blair’s European Parliament drafts in 2005, one observed the protocols of the European Community, the other assaulted them.
During the preparation of the speech Thatcher was irritated by Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission. During an appearance on the Jimmy Young Show on Radio 2 in July she slapped down what she took to be a hint from Delors in the direction of a single European government. On 8 September Delors won a standing ovation at the Trades Union Congress in Bournemouth for suggesting that collective bargaining should take place at European level. On the same day Delors informed David Hannay, Britain’s permanent representative to the European Community, that he would be unable to attend the prime minister’s speech in Bruges. He probably knew what was coming.
Thatcher opened by acknowledging the likelihood of controversy. The invitation to her to speak, she said, ‘must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence’. But not all of her speech can be described as anti-European. The Bruges speech was not the case against Europe at its full-throated loudest. Thatcher maintained that ‘our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community’. She included a far-sighted reference to extending the European community beyond the Cold War boundary to the East: ‘we shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities’.
The burden of her critique was practical rather than philosophical. Europe was not ‘an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept’. Europe, for Thatcher, was either a means of securing prosperity or it was nothing. In effect she said, much as Blair was to do seventeen years later, that the people were blowing the trumpets around the city walls, largely because the Community was not working practically and because it had proved to be so poor at encouraging enterprise. The Treaty of Rome’, she said, ‘was intended as a Charter for Economic Liberty’. The original impulse towards freedom, she continued, was being stifled in a panoply of regulations inspired by social democratic centralisation.
Thatcher’s solution, though, was not no Europe but a better Europe. Her guiding principle in the Bruges speech was the willing cooperation between independent sovereign states – ‘France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain’. She went on that this proclamation of national independence did not preclude speaking as one where that was in the common interest, citing trade, defence and international relations as examples. Thatcher had an intriguing story to symbolise cooperation. The printing press made possible the novel and the newspaper, the two forms that helped incubate national identity. The first book printed in the English language was produced, she recalled, in Bruges by William Caxton.
Like all political rhetoric, the speech was soon reduced to its headline. Thatcher pulled down the standard of the United States of Europe that Churchill had raised in 1946. The famous passage, in which she attacked the tendency of the European Commission to interfere, soon became all the speech was known for. Thatcher was doomed to become her admirers, as Auden said in memory of W. B. Yeats. Which is not to say that the words in question are not heroically direct in their own way because they are: ‘Let me say bluntly on behalf of Britain: we have not embarked on the business of throwing back the frontiers of the state at home, only to see a European super-state getting ready to exercise a new dominance from Brussels.’ Margaret Thatcher took the conventional view that a nation was a unit in which the culture and the legal status were in large part congruent. She did not believe there was a European people or that Europe could command popular allegiance. A free trade alliance was desirable, and so was cooperation on defence, but, for her, concentrated power in Brussels was illegitimate.
Blowing the Trumpets
The Bruges speech began the process that would bring Thatcher down. The trigger for her resignation was another speech on Europe by the foreign secretary whose views she had discarded during the drafting of the Bruges speech, Geoffrey Howe. Twelve days after resigning as deputy prime minister, Howe got his own back in the House of Commons on 13 November 1990. He quoted both Churchill from 1946 and Macmillan from 1962 to echo the idea that Britain should not ‘retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our own destiny in the future’. It was clear that he saw that destiny, as Macmillan had, within the European Community.
In Howe’s version, Thatcher held a Manichean view of Britain and Europe. He was withering on the false choice he said she posed between independent sovereign states on the one hand and a federal superstate on the other. He disliked the talk of ‘surrendering’ sovereignty and dismissed Mrs Thatcher’s supposition that national identities were dissolving into a solvent called Europe. Howe’s is one of the least well written of devastating speeches. He was far too fond of clichés like ‘style not substance’, ‘two sides of the same coin’, or ‘at all costs’. His peroration contained a cricket metaphor that did not work in its own terms, would not travel and was hardly relevant to Mrs Thatcher: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ The effect, though, was cataclysmic. Howe’s assault triggered a leadership challenge. Margaret Thatcher resigned days later.
The fault line over Europe exposed by Howe’s resignation speech opened into a chasm into which John
Major fell after Thatcher. The Blair government came to power in 1997 with the intention of changing the mood. Blair’s European Parliament speech was a warning to the capitals of Europe, but he was also the most unequivocally pro-European prime minister since Heath. The 2005 speech did not just make the case for union as a transaction of mutual benefit. It went further than that, with a suggestion of an identity of kinship: ‘This is a union of values, of solidarity between nations and people, of not just a common market in which we trade but a common political space in which we live as citizens.’
Those words did not change much. The call of nation proved too strong. In 2013, David Cameron chose the same day, 23 January, that Harold Wilson had chosen thirty-eight years earlier, to announce another referendum on Britain in Europe. Like Wilson before him, Cameron dressed up a party fix as a noble calling. He paid the obligatory tribute to the original purpose of the European Union, which was to preserve the peace in the theatre of twentieth-century conflict. The task now, he declared, was to secure prosperity, competition and enterprise within a single market. Cameron confirmed that his objective was to stem the flow of powers from the national to the European level and sometimes to send it into reverse. He demanded more power for national parliaments and expressed the fear that a European state, Thatcher’s phantom, was still viable. Cameron’s passages on the economic failure of European nations were an echo of Blair’s concerns that the people were blowing the trumpets round the city walls, though, if I may say so, without quite the turn of phrase.
The speech really turned, as did the history of the nation, on the announcement that a referendum would take place. Eleven years to the day after Tony Blair had delivered his lecture on the values that were shared in solidarity between Britain and other European nations, Britain voted to leave the European nation, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent of those who voted, in a referendum. Mr Cameron became the latest Conservative prime minister to find his words turned against him. As soon as it became clear he had lost, he resigned. The chain of events led to the tenth and, at least so far, the final speech in this sequence, which was delivered by the new prime minister, Theresa May, at Lancaster House, London, on 17 January 2017.
May summarised where this long debate about the nation had brought Britain, which was to a point of some confusion. Britain needed to ask again, she said, what kind of country it wanted to be. In a strange anachronism she included a section on the future of trade with the Commonwealth, the issue that had so occupied Gaitskell and Wilson. She left the impression of a nation going round in circles, or perhaps coming full circle. The vote to leave, said May, was in essence a demand for control to be exercised at the level of the nation-state.
One Nation
‘I have sat through Council Conclusions after Council Conclusions’, Tony Blair told the European Parliament in 2005, ‘describing how we are “reconnecting Europe to the people”. Are we?’ Clearly not; no leader, in this rhetorical litany, succeeded in defining the European Union in a way that resonated as powerfully as the call of nationhood. The European Union, like Great Britain, is an imagined community. It is just that one was imagined long before the other and excites an allegiance that no international body has ever commanded.
The lesson of these ten speeches on the European Union is therefore that the idea of the nation is tenacious and important. The vital question is, then, just how that nation is defined. The speeches in this chapter defined it in the face of a threat from an external aggressor, in the case of Elizabeth I, and from an internal aggressor, in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi. In the cases of Benjamin Franklin and Jawaharlal Nehru the nation is defined as the prize to be won after the departure of a colonial power. Nelson Mandela defined the nation generously in defiance of an exclusive account of who belongs to it.
The nation is constituted by the people, and belonging therefore needs to be widely drawn. By contrast, the populist understanding of the nation is always narrow. The claim of the populist to have a mystical understanding of the genuine will of the people leads, in a straight line, to the claim that those who disagree are not really part of the true and faithful nation. This dismal version of nationalism is an exercise in exclusion. The history of Britain’s half-hearted engagement with the European Union in its various incarnations shows that the desire for rootedness and a sense of place cannot be wished away. But it does need to be spoken about with care.
Nationalism stands astride the division that runs throughout this book. On one side of the chasm, there is the generosity of the democrat; on the other the angry exclusivity of the populist. Nationalism has taken both forms, and the real history of any nation is complex and winding. The real identities of actual citizens are plural and changing, especially in a world shrunk by travel and technology. National identity, like everything else that has political value, needs to be wrestled from the clutches of the populists.
The populist always starts with the claim that the country has suffered some dreadful decline, to which the only viable answer is the populist himself. Only he can Make America Great Again. Only he can Put the Great Back into Britain. Substitute the name of any nation and there is another populist making the same unhistorical, unsubstantiated, unwarrantable claim. The core claim of the populist is that only some people are truly the people. Only some people count. The nation is some but not all. The populist argues that there are two nations – the elite and the common people. To which argument, authentic speech needs to assert that there is but one nation and that all citizens compose it.
The speeches in this chapter are arguments about who counts. The answer has to be that everyone counts and that the idea of the people has to be generous. Amid the comparatively gentle arguments about Europe, in which the only harm will be economic rather than physical, we still need to take care to carve out a single British nation. All countries are imagined and forged by words. The act of saying that someone is included is also the act of including them. It is very dark down at the other end of the spectrum. The egregious twentieth-century nationalisms were murderously exclusive. Colonial conquerors and racist regimes have always sought to define the people out of existence. The best retort to them is the one that runs through this book. It is the creation and defence of a democratic and free society, an ideal for which one should, in extremis and if one has
the requisite moral courage, be prepared to die.
4
PROGRESS:
THROUGH POLITICS THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE IS IMPROVED
The Guy Next Door
I never expected Les Dawson to be such an important voice for improving the condition of the people. The setting was the Labour Party conference in Manchester Central on 26 September 2006. Prime Minister Tony Blair had made it plain that this was to be his last address to the conference. In truth, the party had tired of him and allegiance was moving, by slow degrees but inexorably, to his main rival, the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown.
The previous day, Brown’s own conference speech had been pushed down the news schedule by a remark allegedly made by Blair’s wife Cherie to the effect that he, Brown, was less than sincere in his demand, from the podium, for a more equal society. If this seems a trivial dispute a decade on, it was big news on the day. I had prepared an address on how globalisation, trade between nations and the movement of people brought with it both great prosperity but also the test of ensuring that the rewards were evenly distributed. That message would be lost entirely if we could not divine a way to close down the Cherie and Gordon story.
We knew that the solution was a joke. Scriptwriters and playwrights hide plot twists in a joke. In the midst of laughter an audience drops its guard. The smuggled plot twist they notice only in retrospect. A joke in a speech has the same dual function. A Greek joke book called Philogelos (The Laughter-Lover) survives from the fourth century BC, and three books of Cicero’s jokes, which he was thought to use too much, were published after his death, though they are sadly lost to posterity. As long as it works as a jok
e, it simultaneously allows a contested point to be gently made, or a concession to be granted, as it was in this case. Searching frantically for the right line with the clock running down, it struck me that the circumstances had all the elements of music hall. There was a wife too candid for her own good whose truth-telling embarrassed the put-upon husband and a rival man who lived next door. Looking up all the comedians of the right vintage, I found nothing suitable in Arthur Askey or Max Miller, but then I hit upon this, from a local boy, Les Dawson of Collyhurst, Manchester: ‘My wife’s run off with the guy next door. And, do you know what, I’m really going to miss him.’
The prime minister, not to my knowledge much of a Les Dawson fan, liked the joke, and so we tried to make it work. In its unvarnished form the gag was too vulgar, too obviously seaside-postcard for a prime minister, so we had to turn the line. The final version was left out of the script released to the press and did not appear on the autocue. It was left to Blair himself, in the spotlight on the stage, to read the mood of the audience. He decided to risk it and the customised version of a Les Dawson joke brought the house down: ‘At least she won’t run off with the guy next door.’
A joke carries more risk than the rest of the speech. Say the line to yourself. If you stumble at the punchline you lose the effect. As the joke is often the only point in a speech where the speaker asks the audience for an instant verdict, a silence bare of laughter can be devastating. It is no accident that comedy shares a language with mortality. The comedian corpses if she laughs. The line dies a death. Plato thought a sense of humour was the last thing a statesman needed, and the anthologies of the great speeches contain very few funny moments. A turning point of history, when an injustice is named, is rarely a moment for levity. But when it works the effect is memorable, and, like Lloyd George calling attention to his own size, it only works when the comedy has a serious intent. The Manchester joke conceded the point that Cherie Blair had indeed said something disobliging about Gordon Brown. The story dissolved into the laughter and Blair gained permission to give a disquisition on the condition of the people. The rest of the speech anticipated the problems, as well as the benefits, of globalisation. It was a serious analysis of the social forces which, years later, contributed to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and to Britain’s departure from the European Union. It was fitting that such a speech should have been made in Manchester, which is the first place that the question of the condition of the people was raised.
When They Go Low, We Go High Page 25
