I consulted Michael Havers, shadow spokesman on legal affairs, about these arguments. His reply, which at the time seemed to me a powerful one, was that, reviewing the cases on which the Conservative Party had supported a referendum, we could say that apart from the case of food tariffs, where the Party was trying to avoid a damaging rift (as Labour was now), the issues were all constitutional. Moreover, in none had Parliament already decided the issue and in none were we risking the breaking of a treaty unilaterally. He concluded that past precedent offered no justification for a referendum on EEC membership.
I had, therefore, thought through the issue thoroughly by the time I spoke in the House in the Referendum Debate on Tuesday 11 March. It would be my maiden speech as Leader of the Opposition. In spite of the reservations I had about the case I was making, it was the kind of speech I enjoyed. The main intellectual weakness of the Government’s case was the confusion about whether and how the referendum would be ‘binding’ on Parliament. If it was binding, then parliamentary sovereignty, which mattered a good deal to anti-Marketeers on both sides of the House, was infringed. If it was not binding, then what was its force? I did not in my speech rule out the use of referenda, but I urged that it would be necessary to consider the full constitutional implications. I rejected the argument put forward by the Government that the case of continued membership of the EEC was unique and thus a referendum was required. I said:
To use the referendum device at all is to ask the question: to what category of measure should referenda apply? Presumably the answer would be: in cases of constitutional change. But it is hard to define such a change in the British tradition because so much depends on convention and precedent.
A referendum may, however, become acceptable if given a proper constitutional foundation — that is to say, if the conditions under which it could be used were defined. But that would mean, like many other democratic countries, going as far as a written constitution or at least part of the way. The implications for parliamentary sovereignty are profound. But if our sense of constitutional rules and conventions is weakening, there may come a time when some such course should be considered.
Although there are some other passages of that speech with which I would not now agree, these assertions still seem a good starting point for consideration of the case for a referendum on, say, the Maastricht Treaty or a single European currency.[43] What I had not grasped at this time, though some others had, was that the conditions for a referendum which I had outlined had more or less already been met. The subordination of UK law to European Community law, which flowed from accession to the Treaty of Rome and which both successive treaty changes and the practices of Community institutions would accelerate, did entail a constitutional change. And we had gone ‘at least part of the way’ towards a written constitution by accepting the contents of the Treaty of Rome and a special European Court of Justice, which could strike down laws passed by Parliament which conflicted with it.
The Commons passed the proposal for a referendum by 312 votes to 248. But it was the outcome of the debate on Wednesday 9 April on the substantive issue of continued EEC membership which was a foretaste of things to come: Ayes 396, Noes 170. From now on until Thursday 5 June, the day set for the referendum, the formidable power of business, the leaderships of both parties and the wider, respectable establishment combined to extol the merits of Community membership, to elaborate fears of job losses, to warn of a third world war originating in intra-European conflict and to ridicule the odd combination of Labour left-wingers and Tory reactionaries which constituted the ‘No’ lobby. The ‘Yes’ campaign was well organized and very well funded — not least as a result of the efforts of Alistair McAlpine, whom I would shortly recruit to be Conservative Party Treasurer. For all the talk of a ‘great debate’ it was really a contest between David and Goliath, which Goliath won. The substantial issues often went by default.
Most distasteful of all to me was the patent opportunism of the Labour leadership. The ‘renegotiation’ of Britain’s terms of entry, which had been concluded in March at the Dublin European Council where a special ‘Financial Mechanism’ had been agreed to prevent Britain shouldering too heavy a financial burden, was simply not serious: the mechanism was never triggered and so never yielded a penny piece. Yet the booklet distributed to all households by the Government abandoned all of the Euro-sceptical rhetoric which Labour, particularly the Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, had employed at the general election. It contained such assurances as:
As a result of these negotiations the Common Market’s agricultural policy (known as CAP) now works more flexibly to the benefit of both housewives and farmers in Britain… Under the previous terms, Britain’s contribution to the Common Market budget imposed too heavy a burden on us. The new terms ensure that Britain will pay a fairer share… There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union… This threat has been removed… To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense… It is the Council of Ministers, and not the Market’s officials, who take the important decisions.
I duly launched the Conservative pro-Market campaign at the St Ermin’s Hotel, at a press conference presided over by Ted Heath, even describing myself as ‘the pupil speaking before the master’. I spoke in my constituency and elsewhere. I contributed an article on the eve of poll to the Daily Telegraph. I felt that I did my share of campaigning. But others did not see it that way. There was criticism in the press — the Sun, for example, commenting:
Missing: one Tory Leader. Answers to the name of Margaret Thatcher. Mysteriously disappeared from the Market Referendum Campaign eleven days ago. Has not been seen since. Will finder kindly wake her up and remind her she is failing the nation in her duty as Leader of the Opposition?
Some of this was undoubtedly being fed to the press by people who had other axes to grind at my expense. But Alistair McAlpine, a supporter soon to become a friend, was sufficiently concerned to tell Willie Whitelaw that I should take a more active role. Unfortunately, on the prearranged day for me to hold a press conference at Central Office as part of the campaign, Edward du Cann, the 1922 Committee Chairman, came out with a call for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum. I learned about this shortly before I had to face the press. Caught between Edward Scylla and Edward Charybdis, I had to weave and tack rather than steer directly towards Brussels.
The referendum result itself was no surprise, with 67 per cent voting ‘Yes’ and 33 per cent ‘No’. Less predictable were the effects on the political scene as a whole. The result was a blow to the left of the Labour Party; and Harold Wilson, whose cunning tactical ploy the whole exercise had been, used it to move Tony Benn from Industry, where he had proved a political liability, to Energy where his scope for mischief was more limited. For the Conservatives, it was naturally Ted and his friends who won most of the plaudits. I myself paid tribute to him in the House. He made no response. That came later.
Soon the press was full of accounts of Ted’s earlier meeting with me at Wilton Street, but given in such a way as to suggest that I had not made a serious offer to him to join the Shadow Cabinet. These stories were accompanied by suggestions that he now intended to use the position gained through the referendum campaign to make his way back — presumably at my expense — to power. Ted’s ambitions were his own affair. But at least the real facts about the Wilton Street meeting should be known. Consequently, I told them to George Hutchinson of The Times — not a supporter of mine, but a journalist of great integrity — and the account duly appeared.
No doubt Ted’s hopes were buoyed up by two other things. First, I could not fail to be aware that all sorts of well-informed commentators were predicting that my tenure of the leadership would not last; indeed, that I would be gone by Christmas. Secondly, the deepening economic crisis into which a combination of the Heath Government’s earlier financial irresponsibility and the Wilson Government’s presen
t anti-enterprise policies were plunging Britain might conceivably lead to that National Government on which Ted’s prospects were deemed to ride. And perhaps too, the introduction of proportional representation might keep a centrist coalition in power — and people like me out of it — permanently.
In fact, the chances of any of this happening were less than the commentators imagined. It was not just that I had no intention of relinquishing the leadership, nor even that Tory backbenchers were unprepared to tolerate Ted’s return. Neither was there any prospect of a shrewd, self-assured politician like Harold Wilson stepping aside gracefully to allow the sort of self-important figures he despised a free hand to sort Britain’s problems out. If he went he would do so on his terms and at his timing: this of course is what subsequently occurred.[44] A further aspect not widely grasped at the time was that, for all the criticism levelled at me for my alleged failure to beat the European drum with sufficient vigour, I emerged from the campaign as a unifying figure for the Party. The anti-Market Tory MPs felt no bitterness towards me. The majority of backbenchers also felt very much as I did about Europe, viewing it as a framework within which Britain could prosper rather than a crusade. The issue of whether Britain should or should not be a member of the European Community had been settled for the foreseeable future. But the real question now was what sort of Community should that be? On this issue a rather different coalition of opinions within the Conservative Party would emerge.
Two short foreign visits which I made in the course of the European referendum campaign provided me with food for thought. At the end of April I visited Luxembourg and attended the European Assembly, which was already demanding to be termed a ‘Parliament’. A lacklustre debate on some trivial issue was in progress, after which the best I could say to an eager press corps was that the institution was obviously ‘very valuable’ and that its members worked ‘very hard’. At this time the members of the Assembly were still nominated MPs from the constituent countries. We all ought probably to have thought more carefully about whether it was right to end this system in favour of direct elections. At least under the old system there was close contact between the members of the national Parliament and members of the European Assembly; they were, indeed, the same people. The Assembly had a limited role for which full-time MEPs were unnecessary. When the latter appeared on the scene they demanded a wider role, in part in order to justify their salaries, generous expenses and existence, and this was to cause no end of problems. My main conclusion from the visit to Luxembourg, however, was that such an Assembly in which people did not speak the same language or share the same traditions illustrated the shortcomings of attempts to create artificial Europe-wide institutions. Peter Kirk, the Conservative Leader in the Assembly, who organized a reception for me in Luxembourg, was doing his best to import British parliamentary attitudes and impose some financial discipline. But it would take more than this to create a real European Parliament.
The following month I was invited to Paris as the guest of the Gaullist Party — then called the UDR, later the RPR. It was on this visit that I first met Jacques Chirac, the Prime Minister, with whom I had lunch at the Hôtel Matignon (his office and official residence), and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom I saw later at the Elysée Palace. In spite of the marked differences of character between the two — the Prime Minister’s charismatic exuberance was the complete opposite of the President’s chilly precision — both the Matignon and the Elysée made the same statement of the historic grandeur and national pride of France. French identity and interests would always come first in the Community or any other forum. Some people might have felt aggrieved at this, but I found it oddly reassuring: you knew where you stood.
Three different but connected developments from now on commanded my attention in Europe. First, there was the matter of the speed and extent of European integration: in particular, we had to consider the arrangements for direct elections to the European Assembly and our policy towards the European Monetary System. Secondly, there was the feeling, which I shared, that the right-of-centre parties in Europe ought to cooperate more closely, providing a kind of answer to the Socialist International. Thirdly, it was necessary to establish what Western Europe’s role should be in East-West relations, particularly in the light of the Helsinki process — something which is best examined later.[45]
At the beginning of July Leo Tindemans, the Belgian Prime Minister, came to Britain, having been asked by the heads of Government at the Paris Summit of December 1974 to draw up a report on ‘European Union’. I met him with Reggie Maudling and others in a room at the House of Commons. I had set up a committee under Reggie on which Sir Anthony Royle, a former diplomat, and others sat, to look at such matters. But I emphasized to M. Tindemans that it would be best if the Community developed organically rather than according to some pre-ordained structure. This was intended as a warning that, although I envisaged that Britain under a Conservative Government would adopt a more positive attitude to the Community than had been the case under Labour, our partners should not imagine that we were keen on grand plans imposed from the centre.
Within the Conservative Party, debate about Europe focused increasingly on direct elections. I received regular reports on Party opinion. A group of MPs led by Neil Marten argued a powerful case against having direct elections at all. A larger group of MPs reluctantly accepted that the pass had been sold and that the real question was when the elections should take place and under what electoral system. A third group was keen to create a real European Parliament to provide a check on the actions of the Council of Ministers and the Commission. Luckily, the divisions on the Government side were at least as large as on ours, and we were able to unite in blaming them for the delay in bringing the requisite legislation before the House. Equally satisfactorily, the Government proposal to use proportional representation, a gesture to sustain the Lib-Lab Pact, was soundly defeated in December 1977. Consequently, the first direct elections took place — under a first-past-the-post system — in 1979 when I was Prime Minister.
The pressure for political integration was to have its economic counterpart. The first ambitious plans for European economic and monetary union were embodied in the so-called ‘Snake’ set up in 1972. Britain had joined under Ted as one earnest of his iron-clad commitment to Europe; he had to pull out within six weeks. But the economic planners were only stimulated by failure, and at the end of 1978 the European Monetary System (EMS) was agreed and eight of the nine Community currencies joined. Britain alone stayed out. Her Majesty’s Opposition under my leadership would have been less than human not to take advantage of this as evidence that sterling was too weak to join as a result of Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. That was a fair enough tactical position, but it was more difficult to judge what a Conservative Government itself should do.
At the end of October 1978 Geoffrey Howe sent me a note outlining the case for and against joining. He felt that if we were now the Government and had committed ourselves to the right financial and economic policies, we would have been able to join. Geoffrey also believed that we needed to maintain the Party’s stock of European goodwill and feared that the alternative meant ‘surrendering the direction of the EEC and its policies to the Franco-German high table’. Nigel Lawson, a junior Treasury spokesman, also sent me a searching analysis at the end of October. He understood that the EMS was seen by the French and Germans as having a political objective, the next stage in the progress of European unity. He shrewdly noted that ‘those who support UK membership of the EMS as part of their devotion to the EEC cause should pause to reflect whether adherence to the discipline which is its sole merit might not in practice prove so unpopular as to make support of continuing EEC membership political suicide’. Nigel’s reluctant conclusion was that we should join anyway: but his ‘best hope’ was that the system would collapse shortly thereafter, not due to the weakness of sterling but because of pressures on other currencies, and that we could then propose
some more sensible framework for European economic convergence. I was impressed by the quality of both these analyses. My thinking on this was still evolving, but I decided at this point that we should continue to adopt a positive general approach to the EMS while avoiding making any specific commitments.
The second important European theme — the closer cooperation of the right-of-centre parties — eventually led to the foundation in 1978 of the European Democratic Union (EDU). But this modestly useful organization was less significant than the political impulses which lay behind it. The mid-1970s was a time of advance by the Left, both democratic and non-democratic, in many areas and ways. Communist parties seemed to be on the verge of entering government in Mediterranean Europe. And everywhere the Left was encouraged by the feeling that history and Soviet military power were pushing the world in its direction. This was something which could only ultimately be combated and reversed by NATO decisions and under reinvigorated American leadership. In the meantime, the European Right had to fight a fierce battle on the political front.
Nowhere was it fiercer than in Portugal. Within weeks of my becoming Leader I had a long talk with Professor Diogo Freitas do Amaral, the leader of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), the only party to the right of the ruling coalition. He was a gentle intellectual, clearly involved in politics for the highest motives. He was also, when I saw him, in deep despair. Since the overthrow of the dictatorship of Dr Caetano in April 1974, communists and other radical leftists in the army, in cahoots with the Portuguese Communist Party, had successfully manipulated their way to almost total power. This they used ruthlessly to extinguish opposition. The CDS was denied access to the media and its rallies were broken up by force. Professor do Amaral knew that under these conditions there was no hope of a successful result in the forthcoming elections. He half wondered whether it was worth his going back to Portugal at all. But we both agreed that in spite of all the difficulties he had to return and see it through. He did so. But he was fighting impossible odds. His party received less than 8 per cent of the vote. There would probably be no democracy in Portugal even now if brave men and women like Professor do Amaral had not risen up against the arrogance of the communists in northern Portugal and prevented the forcible attempt to seize the peasants’ land and turn the country into a Cuban-style state. It was a frightening insight into the ambitions and methods of the Left, which were by no means confined to Portugal. Indeed, the British Labour Left, intoxicated by the prospects of a European revolution, supported the communists.
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