THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  It is time to take the chains off the giant, unshackled Britannia and let the Lion roar again!

  In the same piece, Priti Patel is reported as warning in rather less bombastic terms that the referendum represents the ‘last chance to keep our democracy’ and Michael Gove is cited proclaiming that a victory for Remain would be ‘game over’ for Britain since the EU would never reform itself. But Hawkes et al. return to BoJo for his assurance that voting Leave, far from being a leap into the dark, was actually a ‘stride into the light’ because beyond the confines of the European Union there was ‘a great sunlit meadow’.

  As noted above it was difficult for Remain campaigners to produce inspirational rhetoric when their message was essentially that it was better to just leave things as they were. A notable exception was The Mirror’s unsigned editorial on 18 June 2016 headlined Make the EU Referendum Victory in Europe Day and vote Remain for the sake of the future, which also refers to the Second World War but focuses less on Britain’s victory than on the subsequent peace in Europe. Below the headline and lead is a republished cartoon by Philip Zec (1909–1983) depicting a wounded soldier before a ruined landscape handing over a laurel representing ‘victory and peace’, and saying ‘Here you are. Don’t lose it again!’. The Daily Mirror published it twice in 1945, once on Victory in Europe Day on 8 May, then again on 5 July, the date of the first post-war general election, with an editorial urging people to vote on behalf of the men who had given their lives in the conflict and opt for the Labour Party’s commitment to building a more just society.

  In June 2016 Zec’s cartoon is compared with an image of someone in a similar pose to that of the wounded soldier and bearing a laurel representing ‘stability and a place in Europe’. There are fundamental differences, however, for in the updated version the person depicted is a healthy young woman who, in a society that offers far greater equality of opportunity, is dressed as a construction worker with overalls, helmet, goggles and fluorescent jacket, while in the background there is a well-maintained housing estate and a sunny sky. It is perhaps no coincidence that the woman in the second cartoon bears a certain resemblance to Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered four days earlier by Thomas Mair, a man with a history of involvement with far-right nationalist groups.

  The juxtaposition of the two cartoons is most effective, and the conclusion to the fairly short editorial proves that Remainers could also claim to have an appointment with history.

  The referendum is not just about our previous history. Where you put your X on the ballot paper is about making our own history.

  It is not about our past but how we forge our future. And it is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

  This is truly the battle for Britain. Make Thursday Victory in Europe Day.

  Where both the pro-Remain Mirror and the pro-Leave Mail, Express and Sun ignored recent history was in claiming that the 2016 referendum represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the public to have a direct say in their country’s destiny. As Denmark demonstrated in 1992 and 1993 over the Maastricht Treaty, and Ireland in 2001 and 2002 over the Treaty of Nice, a referendum result could trigger further negotiations and agreement upon opt-out clauses, followed by a second referendum and a different outcome. In Britain’s case the time span between the two referenda was much longer, and the voting switch was in the opposite direction from that in Denmark and Ireland, but there were notable similarities in some of the issues discussed in the two campaigns.

  11

  Little Englanders or reaching out to the world beyond Europe? Comparison with the 1975 referendum on remaining a member of the European Economic Community

  Remainers often portrayed Brexit supporters as Little Englanders nostalgic for a Britain that was militarily and economically powerful enough not to need to pay much heed to anyone else. Leavers retaliated with the claim that it was the EU that had a self-absorbed perspective, an almost provincial approach, while Brexit meant reaching out to the world beyond the 28-nation bloc. Comparisons were made between the 2016 referendum and that of 1975 on whether to remain a member of the European Economic Community (EEC), at the time usually called the Common Market. Remain supporters hoped that, as in 1975, common sense and realism would prevail over isolationism and self-delusion, while Leavers argued that the EU had become a very different animal from the free-trade zone that was the old EEC.

  On 31 July 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced to the House of Commons that Britain was to apply for membership of the EEC, which then consisted of six states: West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. This marked quite a turnaround on the part of the Conservative government, which just four years earlier had declined to sign the Treaty of Rome. Macmillan appointed Edward Heath, who had been several years ahead of the party in advocating EEC membership, as chief negotiator with Brussels.

  Labour’s conversion came a few years later and was never as wholehearted as the Tories’ desire to get Britain into the Common Market. A little over a year after Macmillan’s announcement, the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell (1962), speaking at the party conference, noted that the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy would oblige Britain to import food from member states at higher prices than those offered by Commonwealth nations, but saved his strongest attack for the question of sovereignty. The basis of his argument was that the EEC was far more than a customs union but was actually the first step leading towards a political federation in which the UK would be no more than a state within a United States of Europe, just as Texas and California were states belonging to the United States. It would mean ‘the end of Britain as an independent nation state’, and would inevitably result in the collapse of the Commonwealth.

  We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say ‘Let it end’ but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought. And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth. How can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe (which is what federation means) it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations? It is sheer nonsense.

  The parallels with UKIP’s continual references to the EU superstate are obvious; Gaitskell warned of the dangers of ceding sovereignty and losing control while the Brexiteers campaigned on a platform of regaining both. Gaitskell’s choice of the word province drew attention to the UK’s loss of international stature in a European federation while the pro-Brexit press imagined a confident, independent Britain assuming a leading role on the world stage once again. By 1962 it was already clear that the newly independent nations of the Commonwealth did not feel that they had to defer to ‘the mother country’; in the previous year they had expelled South Africa’s apartheid regime without worrying too much about what the Westminster government thought. In 2016 Brexiteers’ were confident that Britain would have no difficulty negotiating deals with the Commonwealth nations despite the fact that they had for decades been trading with the rest of the world.

  President Charles De Gaulle of France was suspicious of Britain’s close relationship with the United States – Hattersley (1998: 144) goes so far as to talk of his fear of ‘an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to rule the world’ – and not everyone was surprised when in January 1963 he vetoed the UK’s first attempt to join the Common Market. Momentum was not lost, however; after Labour narrowly won the general election of 1964 and increased its majority seventeen months later, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and most of his cabinet had come round to the view that Britain’s future was as part of the EEC. The second application to join the Common Market was made in 1967, and de Gaulle again used his veto. By this time, however, becoming a member of the EEC was favoured by nearly all of the Conservative Party, a majority of Labour MPs (although a significant number, mostly but not exclusively on the left wing of the
party, continued to oppose entry), all the newspapers with the exception of the low-circulation Morning Star, the CBI and an increasing number of trade unionists. It was just a question of waiting until de Gaulle departed from the scene, and he duly obliged by resigning from office in 1969 and dying shortly afterwards. His successor, Georges Pompidou, did not oppose British entry, and when the Conservatives led by the committed European, Edward Heath, won the general election of 1970, there was little doubt that the EEC was soon to expand. The Treaty of Accession was signed in January 1972, Parliament passed the necessary legislation during the course of the year, and on 1 January 1973 the UK, the Republic of Ireland and Denmark become full members of the EEC.

  This was not the end of the story, of course. When Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street in 1974 his main concern was a domestic economy reeling from the effects of the decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to raise the price of oil by 400 per cent, and the split within his party over Europe was something he wanted to deal with once and for all. He opted for the strategy of opposing Britain’s membership of the EEC ‘on Tory terms’, engaging in renegotiations with Brussels, then allowing the British people to vote in a referendum on whether they wished to stay in the Common Market under what he would present as significantly improved terms. It was far less of a risk than David Cameron’s gamble in 2016 in that a series of opinion polls indicated that in the 1960s and early 1970s EEC membership was not something the electorate had particularly strong opinions about, and most ‘were disposed to take their cues on the Market from the political party they currently supported’ (King, 1977: 30). With a majority of Conservative voters already likely to vote to remain in the EEC, Wilson was confident that he and leading figures in the party, backed by the media, would be able to persuade a sufficient number of Labour supporters that the renegotiated terms were right for Britain. He had calculated correctly: after negotiations involving, among other things, changes to the Common Agricultural Policy and certain exclusions for Britain regarding value added tax, continued membership of the EEC was approved by 3,724,000 voters against 1,986,000 wishing to leave.

  An obvious similarity between the two referenda was the fact that the vast majority of the electorate was incapable of making an informed choice. When the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (2016) wrote that David Cameron was ‘recklessly playing Russian Roulette with our future’ by allowing ‘ignoramuses’ like himself to have a say in such a complex issue as membership of the EU, he was unconsciously echoing King’s (1977: 93) comment upon the 1975 result that ‘the details of the new terms were far too complicated for most voters to grasp; indeed, there were probably not more than two or three hundred people in the entire country who could describe them in detail, even in outline’. In 1975, voters were influenced by the politicians they most trusted (or mistrusted least), and the campaign to leave the EEC was led by left-wing MPs like Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who were viewed as less authoritative than Wilson and Heath and who also suffered the embarrassment of being on the same side as the right-wing, anti-immigration former Conservative minister Enoch Powell. In 2016 the sober, authoritative figures were again on the side of Remain, but the more swashbuckling approach and colourful language of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson evidently had more impact on voters who, lacking the competence to make rational decisions based on evaluation of technical details, were bound to follow their gut feelings.

  From Britain’s first attempts to join the EEC, there were some who portrayed anti-Common Marketeers as Little Englanders out of touch with the post-war zeitgeist and the emerging generation of young and youngish Britons who felt European and had an internationalist outlook. Richard Weight (2002, cited by Dominic Sandbrook 2007: 389) quotes Lord Chalfont, Wilson’s chief negotiator during the ill-fated bid to join the EEC in 1967, reassuring the Council of Europe that public support for the whole European project was strengthening:

  I hope no one will be deceived by the trivialities of Carnaby Street and much of ‘Swinging London’. Behind all this there is, rising in my country, a generation of young men and women, tired of humbug, angry with social inequality, sickened by war, and resolved to do something about it. To these young people the future that lies within . . . the European idea is as exciting as anything that has happened in the long and vivid history of Britain.

  Anthony King (1977: 38), referring to the Labour Party’s divisions over Europe in the early 1970s, oversimplifies the issue as follows: ‘The anti-Europeans, in one way or another, resisted the modern world; the pro-Europeans, by contrast, accepted it.’

  As noted in Chapter 5, four decades later the former president of the National Union of Students, Megan Dunn (2016), identified the Remain stance with youth and the modern world, presenting her own generation as internationalist by nature, scarcely conscious of national frontiers and hard-wired to think globally (Dunn’s demographic and their reactions to the referendum result are considered in Chapter 14).

  Brexit supporters did not meekly accept the accusation that they were old-fashioned, inward-looking Little Englanders. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, among the slogans used by the Better Off Out campaign, one of the most effective turned the accusation on its head and claimed that it was the Leavers who were the real internationalists: ‘No to the European Union, Yes to the Wider World’.

  Similarly, in 1975 a black-and-white poster used by anti-Common Marketeers featured Barbara Castle, the secretary of state for health and social services, shopping baskets comparing grocery prices in London and Brussels, and the slogan ‘Out & Into the World’.

  If Leave stressed the momentousness of the choice facing the British people in June 2016, in June 1975 it was Harold Wilson, urging the public to vote to stay in the EEC, who alluded to an appointment with history, a decision that would have profound consequences for generations to come (The Times, 5 June 1975, cited by King 1977: 117).

  Tomorrow is the decisive day in the affairs of our people. When all the arguments have died down and this campaign comes to an end and when the dust has finally settled, tomorrow’s decision will be seen not just as a vote, but as a vote about the future of our young people, our children and those who come after them.

  As noted earlier, in 1975 the national newspapers with significant circulation figures were all in favour of staying in the EEC. King (ibid. 134, 135) gives a summary of press reaction when the decisive vote to stay in Europe was announced. Headlines included:

  YES! MILLION TIMES YES (Evening Standard)

  MESSAGE RECEIVED (Daily Mirror)

  EUROPEANS! (Daily Express)

  YES! (Daily Mail)

  GOOD! NOW LET’S ALL GET CRACKING (The Sun)

  The Times quoted the home secretary and future president of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins, who made the kind of reference to the Second World War that in 2016 was more characteristic of the Leave camp. He described the referendum result as ‘a second D-Day for British resurgence in Europe based not on sulky acquiescence but on enthusiastic cooperation’.

  In an untypical display of fair play, the Conservative Daily Telegraph congratulated the Labour prime minister, whose referendum gamble had ‘paid off handsomely’, producing a result that was ‘quite frankly, a triumph for Mr. Wilson’.

  King did not have the benefit of hindsight when he reached a conclusion that proved to be spectacularly mistaken (ibid. 137):

  The most important single consequence of Britain’s ‘yes’ vote on June 5, 1975, was to place Britain’s membership of the Common Market beyond any doubt. The fact that the vote was a democratic one, together with the size of the pro-European majority, gave Britain’s membership in the EEC a legitimacy that nothing else could possibly have done. The question of British Common Market membership had been on the agenda for nearly a generation. Suddenly, and permanently, it was struck off.

  What King could not possibly predict was that well before the end of the century a British prime minister would have a bitter, long-las
ting confrontation with the president of the European Commission, and that this conflict would sow the seeds for a rift within the Conservative Party that would culminate in the blue-on-blue clash of the 2016 referendum campaign. It was under Jacques Delors’ presidency that the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), the first stage of a process intended to lead to monetary union, was created. Margaret Thatcher, much to the chagrin of her own cabinet, made it abundantly clear that the UK would never sign up to a single European currency under her watch. But there was something about Delors’ vision of Europe that antagonized Thatcher even more than the ERM. For Roy Hattersley (1998: 356, 357), a committed European and a leading figure in the Labour opposition of the 1980s, the conflict was ideological and had at its core Jacques Delors’ concept of a social Europe.

  Monetary union was not his only ambition. He came to represent the aspiration for a ‘people’s Europe’. The idea was French as well as socialist. At the 1989 meeting of European socialist leaders, President Mitterrand had told the British delegate that he would veto the implementation of the Single Market in 1992 if Margaret Thatcher refused to accept the Community’s ‘social dimension’. Predictably, she would not endorse and he did not veto. But at the Trades Union Congress on 9 September 1988, Jacques Delors set out a vision of Europe that earned him a standing ovation and confirmed the Tory leadership’s worst fears. European union might one day become a vehicle for reinstating all the apparatus of socialism – consultation, consensus and regulation – which Margaret Thatcher had laboured for ten years to dismantle in the United Kingdom.

  Thanks to Delors the Labour Party became enthusiastically pro-European as its leaders came to see Brussels as a bulwark of social justice against the onslaught of Thatcherism. In the Conservative Party, on the other hand, a Eurosceptic faction emerged, grew rapidly, made life a misery for Thatcher’s successor, John Major, and made it impossible for the party to present a coherent approach to Europe up to and beyond the referendum of 2016. Certain newspapers that had had a pro-EEC stance in 1975 enthusiastically backed Thatcher in her confrontation with Delors, and continue to attack Brussels to this day. Among them is The Sun, which has gone from ‘GOOD! NOW LET’S ALL GET CRACKING’ to headlines of a very different nature.