Pod Insights The Rest Is History 663. Britain in the 70s: The Brexit That Never Was (Part 2) About this episode In the Spring of 1975, why was the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, so embattled? Why was the left so divided during this period? And, was Britain’s relationship with Europe already fracturing…?
Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the trials of Harold Wilson, as the melee of 1970s Britain rolled on.
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Transcript 14,079 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:08 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defensive against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.
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1:57 Dominic Sandbrook? The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search GatesFoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.
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2:57 Speaker 02 Please allow me to introduce myself. I am the owner of Faulty Towers. And may I welcome your war, you war, you war, you all. And hope that your stay will be a happy one. Now, would you like to eat first? Or would you like a drink before, savour? Uh, trespassers will be, um, tied up with piano wire. Sorry, sorry. May I say how pleased we are to have some Europeans here now that we are on the continent. Didn't vote for it myself, quite honestly. But now that we're in, I'm determined to make it work. So I'd like to welcome you all to Britain. We're all friends now, eh? All in the market together.
3:40 Speaker 02 Old differences forgotten and no need at all to mention the war.
3:46 Tom Holland? So that was Talkie Hotelier Basil Faulty, as played by John Cleese in Faulty Towers. And the episode that we were citing there was The Germans, which was first broadcast on the 24th of October, 1975. And I'm actually so exhausted from doing that.
4:08 Tom Holland? That I just need to catch my breath.
4:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Tom, have a rest.
4:10 Tom Holland? I gotta have a breath. But just to say, I mean, Faulty Towers consistently voted the greatest British sitcom of all time, but it's also a brilliant window into the state of the nation in the mid 1970s, coming out just as Harold Wilson is starting his second stint as Prime Minister between 1974 and 1976. And in that episode, and in all the other episodes, it captures the mood of the times, doesn't it, Dominic? So the hotel is kind of very shabby. The management style of Basil is less than suboptimal. He's
4:51 Tom Holland? obsessed with class. He's always kind of fawning around his betters and kind of kicking, well, actually, kind of clipping around the ear hole, those who are employed by him, most notably his ludicrously inept Spanish waiter Manuel. He's got this loveless marriage with the very tyrannical Sybil. And there is a retired major who is always making racist jokes, complaining about strikes, and loves a test match. And I guess that probably that passage where he meets a load of Germans, he's knocked, he's, he's knocked himself on the head, hasn't he? So he's gone a kind of little bit mad.
5:29 Dominic Sandbrook? With a moose.
5:30 Tom Holland? Yes, that's right. And, and so all the kind of buried thoughts of the average strangulated, middle-class Englishman, it just kind of pours out of him unmediated, and it all revolves around the war.
5:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So at one point, they say to him, will you stop talking about the war? And he says, you started it. We did not start it. Yes, you did. You invaded Poland, and so on and so forth. And Basil is absolutely, I mean, one of the glorious things about Basil is a comic creation. He is a textbook, kind of frustrated, middle-class conservative, isn't he? There's no doubt whatsoever that he's always placed his vote in the Tory column. And so when a fire extinguisher goes off in his face in this episode, the Germans, he knows whom to blame. He says, it sits there for months. And when you actually have a fire, it blows your head off. I mean, what is happening to this country? It's bloody Wilson. And this is the story of today's episode.
6:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It's about Basel and the Germans, or rather, it's about the first Brexit referendum in June 1975, when Britain took the fateful decision not to leave what became the EU. And it's about Basel's bete noire, bloody Wilson, and how Harold Wilson struggled to stop Britain plunging into hyperinflation and complete economic meltdown in the course of 1975. So last time, we talked about some of the background to all this. So to remind people, a very demoralised and sort of hangdog Britain is reeling after the 1973 oil shock. The Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath has tried to impose his wage controls.
7:07 Dominic Sandbrook? The coal miners rebelled, they blew his economic policy apart. He called an election in February 74, the result was stalemate. Back came Basel's nemesis, Harold Wilson, the leader of the Labour Party as Prime Minister for the second time. He paid off the miners, paid off the other unions. He called another election in October and he won a three-seat majority.
7:29 Tom Holland? And just to remind people that that three-seat majority means that Wilson's position is very, very weak because he has to pay attention to every MP behind him because they now exercise incredible power.
7:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly right. So we did a series in 2024 about the year 1974 and we talked a lot about Wilson in that. But I know we've got a lot of new listeners since then, so we should remind ourselves a bit about Wilson. Once such a pivotal figure in British politics, kind of forgotten today, but he won four elections out of five in the 1960s and 1970s, a record that seems very unlikely to be equaled any time soon. So Wilson was born in West Yorkshire in 1916. He went to Oxford and he was an absolutely brilliant student, supposedly got the best mark in economics that anyone had ever got. He became an economics don and then a government statistician, became a Labour MP, then Labour leader,
8:23 Dominic Sandbrook? then a modernising Prime Minister between 1964 and 1970. Wilson, I think we said this before. He's a very likeable character, I think. He's a very kind man, he's generous. As a politician, he's resilient, he's pragmatic, he's very cunning, his wileness is legendary. He has moved over the course of his career, you know, it's a very common trajectory. He started out kind of on the left and he's moved steadily more and more towards the centre. As a man, his tastes are modest and unpretentious. He loves Agatha Christie, he loves golf, he loves Gilbert and Sullivan. And he loves scouting, doesn't he?
9:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Above all, he loves scouting. Boy Scouts, I mean, he can recite the scouting oath and he takes it very seriously. Does he have a pair of very tight scouting shorts? He loves, he loves his tight shorts and he wears them on holiday in the Scilly Isles. So he will go to these islands, they are south of Cornwall, and he will go to these islands that sort of are trapped in sort of the 1950s time warp. And I've seen a photo of his house at the Scilly Isles, never seen it in the flesh. It's really modest, kind of unpretentious. I think it's a bungalow, so one storey, you know, very simple place for a British prime minister to be going on holiday. Now, that first government that he had in the 1960s was a bit of a mess.
9:46 Dominic Sandbrook? The economy grew, but basically he's kicked from crisis to crisis. There's a sense that all his grand plans didn't really work out, that he was completely beleaguered and overwhelmed by events, and the voters booted him out in 1970. But that was because England lost at football, wasn't it? Well, England lost to West Germany unexpectedly in the 1970 World Cup, just a few days before the vote. And Wilson always said that was the reason. I don't actually think that was the reason, but might have made a few voters change their minds, I suppose. So he comes back in 74, you know, not through any great achievement of his own, but really because Heath has shot himself in the foot. He's 57 at this point, but he seems much older. He has a very weary,
10:27 Dominic Sandbrook? careworn, kind of listless air. So during the 74 campaign, the Sunday Times described him as looking withdrawn, nervous, tentative, apprehensive, not to say distinctly bored. And I think that's absolutely right. He is all of those things. He's often ill, he has endless colds and stomach upsets, he's got endless problems with his eyes getting infected, and his chief aides, so they are his very acerbic press chief Joe Haynes, and his chief policy adviser, who's a young academic from the LSE called Bernard Donoghue, who writes a brilliant diary during this period. These aides thought that these ailments of Wilson's were often stress-related, though
11:10 Dominic Sandbrook? they might also have been foreshadowings of the dementia from which he suffers at the beginning of the 1980s, so that the onset of that dementia is only a few years away. Wilson is drinking a lot, so Bernard Donoghue's diaries from 1975 often describe him drinking four or five glasses of brandy or whisky at lunch, especially when he's got to go, you know, to the Commons and argue with Margaret Thatcher. I mean, I suppose it worked for Pitt, didn't it? Yeah, but Pitt was drinking wine, wasn't he, or port? Port, a bottle of port. I think there's a big difference between drinking a glass of port and drinking a glass of, a massive glass of brandy, I would say. I think it's a noble British tradition. It is a British tradition, but sometimes he comes very close to disaster.
11:55 Dominic Sandbrook? So, an example, in November 1975, Donoghue recalls that Wilson went to a diplomatic lunch, and then, at this lunch, Joe Haynes said he was all over the place and drank too much, and then he went to the Commons, gave an absolutely shambolic performance, this is before there's any broadcasting, TV or radio in the Commons, so the public don't get to hear this, but he is slurring his words, and the Tories are kind of jeering at him with absolute delight that he's making such a spectacle of himself. Right, because Tories are never drunk at the dispatch box. They're all marinated on port by this point. Yeah. Now, part of the reason he's drinking is obviously he's under such pressure, and the pressure is both political and personal.
12:36 Dominic Sandbrook? So, in the 1974 series, we described this sort of Harold Pinter-style struggle between Wilson, his long-suffering wife Mary, who hates politics, is gutted that he's Prime Minister. Very good poet, isn't she? She wants to hang out with John Betjeman, her friend John Betjeman, and write poems, and his political secretary Marcia Williams, who is the daughter of a Northamptonshire builder. Very much friend of the show. Very much a friend of the rest is history. She, when we did, and this will be incomprehensible to many listeners, but we did an episode about historical Love Island. In which she copped off with Judas Iscariot. And kind of proved too much for him, I think.
13:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think so. I think she actually dumped Jimmy Carter for Judas Iscariot. In Love Island. Anyway, that will be babble to a lot of listeners. To get back to the history. Marcia is Wilson's political secretary and she has this extraordinary and inexplicable hold over him. So every now and again, she would lift up her handbag, point to her handbag and say to his other aides, whom she hated. One call to the Daily Mail and he will be finished. I will destroy him. What do you think is in her handbag? Nothing. I think it's just. It's just, she's just making it up. She knows stuff. She knows stuff. And one of the things she knows, she supposedly said to Wilson's wife, Mary. I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it was not satisfactory.
14:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Which, as we said before, it's not a sentence that any, you know, wife ever wants to hear, I think. But she has this in, whatever the truth of this, she has this extraordinary power over Wilson. So at one point, Donoghue's, I think it's either Donoghue or Haines describes his prime minister, it's kind of 1975. She has banned him from having lunch with his advisers, so he has to have lunch on his own. And at one point he escapes her clutches. And she has ordered him to go to a reception at the House of Lords and he escapes from the House of Lords and bunks off back to number 10. The Calum, our new supremo will have to prepare his bleeper. Because he escapes back to number 10. She follows him back and when she, and he's there, she finds him with all his advisers and civil servants.
14:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And she shouts at him, you little, you come back with me at once. Do you think, do you think this is a kind of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale dynamic? I think that definitely is. Yeah. There is a, I think he quite enjoys it. It's some weird. Likes being bossed around by a powerful woman. At some weird level, yeah. Now, as we discussed before, Wilson's other aides genuinely contemplated murdering her.
15:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Just say that again. People may have missed it. Say it again. They genuinely contemplated murdering her. So Wilson's doctor, Lord Stone, went to Haines and Donoghue and said, look, I can dispose of her and I will sign the death certificate. Nobody will ever know. And he says it would be a mercy, didn't he? Like, like putting an animal, a mad dog down. Well, I think that's, that's actually what Jeremy Thorpe said of Norman Scott. Oh, I'm getting the bubble. They're all murdering each other. We're now conflating lots of different 70s scandals. We shall be coming to Jeremy Thorpe. I'm happy to say later on. Now there's a, since the 1974 series that we did in 2024, there's been an exciting development in the case because we now know that according to Joe
15:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Haines, that Wilson was also having some kind of relationship with his deputy press secretary, Janet Hewlett Davis, who was 22 years his junior. There is some doubt about how physical this relationship was, whether maybe it was just a kind of emotional relationship, a very intense friendship. But she would definitely spend evenings with him, Janet Hewlett Davis. And so I think this is clearly contributing to Marcia's fury, her general fury throughout this story. As we go through the political narrative in today's episode, and indeed next week's episode, you have to assume that in the background, there's enormous amounts of drinking, there's a lot of squabbling and probably bed hopping of sort of farcical proportions
16:37 Dominic Sandbrook? going on. It is like a 1970s bedroom farce, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, to give you a sense, I mean, we're not going to get into all the lunch negotiations, which are just insane. But as late as May 1975, they are still negotiating what Donoghue calls, quote, "a compromise package",
16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? in which Marcia will allow the Prime Minister to have lunch with his advisers as long as it is not the number 10 dining room. I mean, negotiating with the trades unions must seem picnic compared to all this. Exactly. So this is going on. But the other thing, of course, is the state of the nation, which is contributing to the pressure on Wilson. Because thanks to Ted Heath having inflated the economy and then the 1973 oil shock, inflation has gone through the roof. It is now hurtling towards 25%. And on top of that, public borrowing is totally and utterly out of control. Because during the course of 1974, Wilson's Chancellor, Dennis Healy.
17:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Has spent very recklessly. Basically, he blew a lot of money on pensions and sort of giveaways to help Labour win the next election in October, which was very canny politically, but not terribly canny economically. Because the result was that in cash terms, public spending went up in 1974 by 35%. Now, some of this was funded by very high taxes on the rich. So to remind people, Labour in 74 put the top rate of income tax up to 83%, and the top rate of tax on investments went up to 98%. But that's still not enough
18:19 Dominic Sandbrook? to generate the cash they need. So after the October election, the Treasury presented Dennis Healy, the Chancellor, with the bill. Britain was going to have to borrow, they said, twice as much as expected, six billion pounds in 74, 75, and almost nine billion in 75, 76. Now amidst all this, business confidence has absolutely tanked, the stock market is in meltdown. The financial magazine International Insider says Britain is fast turning into a borrower to be classed alongside an underdeveloped country, which is not a good thing to hear. And when you get to the beginning of 1975, Wilson's advisers in Downing Street are at him constantly, and they are saying there is going to be, quote, "a terrible
19:03 Dominic Sandbrook? crisis unless we change course and get a grip on the economy. We're completely out of control. We're sort of, we're basically Argentina is what we are." But you mentioned it already. Wilson only has a three-seat majority in the House of Commons. He has a lot of left-wing MPs who don't like the thought of any form of cuts, and he has a very left-wing manifesto.
19:25 Tom Holland? This is a kind of enduring theme, isn't it, with Labour governments?
19:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
19:29 Tom Holland? Is that the Prime Minister
19:32 Tom Holland? It's kind of forced by circumstance or whatever, or the economy, whatever, to to move rightwards. And MPs on the back benches, who are not in the government, tend to be more left wing. And if there's a small majority, or indeed, in Keir Starmer's case, even if they've got a massive majority.
19:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
19:47 Tom Holland? They then create trouble.
19:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, do you know what? I was thinking about the Keir Starmer parallel. Harold Wilson has a much worse inheritance than Keir Starmer. I mean, far worse. And, you know, Harold Wilson has only three, a majority of three, whereas Keir Starmer's got a majority of about 500 or something, a massive majority. Wilson is a much more adept political operator than Keir Starmer is. But even he, you know, he is trapped. And he's trapped in part, you mentioned the manifesto. I mean, you might well think, who cares about manifestos? The public never read them. But political people in this era care an enormous amount. And as odd as it may seem to a lot of listeners, especially outside Britain, in these days, in the 1970s, you don't choose your own manifesto. It's imposed on you, if you're in the Labour
20:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Party, by your own activists. So the activists have basically written the manifesto. And it calls for, and I quote, "A fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families." So it's the most radical manifesto with which Labour have come to power in generations. The commitments include a referendum on pulling out of the European Community, a massive expansion of state intervention, the creation of a new national enterprise board to take over private firms in the public interest, all of this stuff which we will come on to later. The most obvious aspect of the manifesto is they're committed to a relationship with the unions, which they call the social contract. It has nothing to do, by the way, with Jean-Jacques
21:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Rousseau. I mean, they just like the name. So under the social contract, the government will basically give the unions unprecedented rights and powers. They'll give them lots of new legislation on employment protections and strikers' rights and all this kind of thing. Basically, they'll tick off the unions' wish list. And in return, the unions will keep their pay demands in line with the cost of living. And when Labour get in, they absolutely do deliver on the first bit. Wilson's Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, pushes through five bills in two years to strengthen workers' rights and union powers. So they've delivered. The problem is the union leaders can't really deliver on their end of the bargain because they're under massive pressure from their members in an age of inflation.
21:59 Dominic Sandbrook? And because the unions are very competitive, they're always fighting each other, they're always trying to outflank each other and get a better deal. Which is ironic, isn't it? Well, yeah, I guess so, yeah. Because competition is what Mrs. Sacha's all about. Well, this is what foreign observers like Helmut Schmidt, the West German Chancellor, when he came to Britain, and he came to Britain to address the Labour Party Conference in 1974. And he would say, you know, why have you got so many trade unions? Mental. Like in Germany, we have only a few trade unions that work very closely with the government and it's all fine. You have hundreds of trade unions and they're all squabbling the whole time. And because of that, they're always trying to outflank each other to get a better deal. So you just get this ratchet effect where you're giving away ever better deals.
22:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, as a result of this, throughout 1974 and 1975, the Wilson government are hurling money around. So they're giving these big pay increases, 30% to the railwaymen, 31% to the power workers, 32% to the civil servants, 35% to the doctors. As the postman's leader, Tom Jackson, said, "It was as though we had found a gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that had suddenly got stuck in favour of the customer." So that's the union leader saying that? Yeah. And in fact, so by the spring of 1975, prices in Britain are rising five times faster than in any other European country. If you're in a powerful union, this is kind of all right because your union will probably
23:23 Dominic Sandbrook? have got you a 35% pay increase. So you can, you know, you can, you can afford your tins of beans or whatever. If you're not in a powerful union, if you're self-employed, if you are very young, if you are old, if you're living on a pension, if you live on your savings, this is a nightmare. And we'll talk about this a little bit more next week. So faced with all this, the mood at the top is very gloomy.
23:47 Dominic Sandbrook? At the end of 1974, Wilson's cabinet had an away day at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country house. And they basically, you know, you can read all the accounts in their diaries, they basically say they have no idea what to do. They genuinely have no idea what to do. And most famously, his Foreign Secretary Jim Callahan, who will be playing a big part in this series as it goes on, said to the others, "When I'm shaving in the morning, I say to myself that if I were a young man, I would emigrate." And obviously, this is a terrible tone for the people at the top of your societies to be striking. And actually, a lot of people do emigrate. In 1975, the population of Britain fell for the first time since records began, and then it fell again in 1976 and again in 1977, basically
24:30 Dominic Sandbrook? because so many people are getting out to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, whatever.
24:35 Tom Holland? And so what is this doing for Britain's international standing?
24:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I'll quote Henry Kissinger. We have an Oval Office transcript from January 1975. Henry Kissinger is talking to Gerald Ford, President Ford, and he says, "Britain is a tragedy. It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in. That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace." I feel that's sad. That's a, I like Britain, and I don't like to see it being slagged off in the Oval Office. Wall Street Journal, three months later, "Britain is sinking", it says. "Labour are heading for a policy of total confiscation, so anybody with any money should get it out of the country. Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you." And actually, we haven't even mentioned Northern Ireland. I mean, this is now a frozen conflict.
25:21 Dominic Sandbrook? We'll talk about this a tiny bit more next week. The province has now been governed from Westminster, but hundreds of people are dying every year. Again, terrible publicity for Britain, especially in America.
25:31 Tom Holland? So would you say things are worse then than they are now?
25:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, yeah. Unquestionably worse then.
25:36 Tom Holland? So this is cheering people up, actually?
25:38 Dominic Sandbrook? I like to cheer people up. We don't have hundreds of people dying in terrorist attacks.
25:42 Tom Holland? And the economy's not as bad?
25:43 Dominic Sandbrook? The economy is utterly moribund. But what's inflation now? 3% or something?
25:49 Dominic Sandbrook? What was inflation then? 25%.
25:51 Tom Holland? Mind you, we are recording this in the middle of the Iran war. So God knows what will have happened by the time this goes out.
25:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but the difference is that's an external shock. I mean, an external shock is always bad for you, whereas this, at this point, has become endemic. Everybody else is basically recovering from the after effects of the 1973 oil crisis. Britain is just plunging deeper and deeper into the, into the morass, I suppose. Also, Keir Starmer is not behaving quite as ludicrously as Harold Wilson, surely. I mean, I would almost be heartened if he were, because he's so boring. So, talking of Harold Wilson, we come to the spring of 1975. His advisers are desperately begging him to take action against inflation, but he doesn't do anything about it because, basically, he's got this tiny majority, he doesn't want to offend the left. And the amazing thing about this is the trade union leaders themselves now are
26:39 Dominic Sandbrook? saying, this has got to change. So some of the trade union leaders go to the head of the trade union congress, Len Murray, and they say, and I quote, "We can't go on like this. You know, I have to keep asking for a better deal for my members. However, at some point, the government needs to say no." Ideally, they won't say no to me, but they shouldn't say no to some of my fellow leaders, and they should, you know, we should sort something out. This is madness. And then on top of all this, there is a further twist, and this takes us back to Basel and the Germans, because this twist is Europe. For two years, Britain has been a member of the European Community, and now Wilson wants to give people the chance to come out. A Brexit referendum. And to explain why he's doing this, we have
27:23 Dominic Sandbrook? to go back to something we've actually never talked about in the rest of history. So we've done however many hundred episodes, but we've never done Britain and Europe. I think because there's a general sense, isn't there, Tom, you might disagree with me about this, I bet you, but I don't think you will, that the subject of Britain and the European Community is unbelievably boring.
27:40 Tom Holland? It's quite boring, yes.
27:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you not think people think that? See, I think, which is one thing, an underappreciated element of Brexit, that if you live in Luxembourg and you think about the European Union, your heart sings. There's a spring in your step. You think of a new age of peace. Whereas in Britain, someone mentions to you the EU and you think of regulations about the size of sausages.
28:01 Tom Holland? You do? Yeah, absolutely. Checks on lamb, that kind of thing.
28:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
28:05 Tom Holland? Just intrinsically dull, unless you're a lamb, of course.
28:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, we will unpack this, because let's talk about Britain and Europe. So if you go back to the origins of it, in 1957, six countries signed the Treaty of Rome to build the European Economic Community, and that was the first step in this project to build ever closer union.
28:23 Tom Holland? It's all about coal and steel, isn't it?
28:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It was coal and steel originally, the European Coal and Steel Community. But basically, it was a conveyor belt idea. Yeah, we'll move slowly but steadily towards greater union. This will mean there'll never be another war in Europe, and we'll all be richer, and we'll be happier, and we'll be friends, and it'll be great.
28:40 Tom Holland? But seen from London, it's something for losers, isn't it?
28:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly.
28:45 Tom Holland? Because it's either people who've been defeated by the Allies, or people who've been defeated by the Germans, or been fascist.
28:52 Dominic Sandbrook? This is what Clement Attlee said when he was asked about it. He said, what do you think about it? And he said, well, very recently, we had to stop two of the six countries from basically killing everybody in the other four. Why would we get involved with them? And actually, I don't think there's any scenario in which Britain would have joined early on. First of all, Britain has an empire in the 1950s, so that's what everybody's interested in. Politicians are much more interested in what's going on in Canada, Australia, or the Middle East than they are in what's going on in Belgium, Luxembourg, or Italy.
29:21 Tom Holland? And this is what de Gaulle famously says, isn't it? That Britain's horizons are...
29:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Global, yeah, and Atlantic.
29:29 Tom Holland? She looks to the sea.
29:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And lots of people think that, and Britain themselves. I mean, lots of exporters think that they're selling goods to Australia or to Canada. They don't really want to sell goods to Luxembourg. On the left, the Labour Party and the trade unions generally, at this point, think of Europe as a capitalist Christian Democrat plot. These are all a load of weird Italians with thin glasses who are rigging elections to stop socialists winning, and they don't like socialism. Why on earth would we get into bed with these people? They're bad people, and what's worse, they're all Catholics. And there's loads of people in the Labour Party and the trade unions who are low-church Protestants, and they're like, why would we get into bed with these people? They're the worst people.
30:14 Dominic Sandbrook? And then generally, the public at large, for completely obvious cultural and historic reasons, just do not think of themselves as continental Europeans. In recent years, historians have written excellent books saying, this is nonsense. Britain was always part of Europe, the War of the whatever succession, William of Orange, all of this kind of thing. That's all fine. But the public just don't want to know that at this point, they just don't think, you know, you see so many quotes in sort of post-war Britain. Well, we're not like them. We're not like the French and the Germans. We've always stood alone. You know, all that kind of thing. And you can't persuade people by writing academic monographs. Well, more deep-seated than that.
30:56 Tom Holland? I mean, people have lived through two wars in which the continent was nothing but trouble. I mean, that would be one way you could frame it.
31:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think that's exactly how people think. They think we've fought two wars against these people. They're terrible people. Why would we get involved with them?
31:09 Tom Holland? We don't want to have anything to do with it.
31:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, by the early 60s, elite opinion had begun to shift. The empire had gone, the Suez Crisis had happened, which very much damaged the relationship with America. And as we talked about last time, the British economy is performing really badly compared with France or Germany or Italy or whatever. And actually, a lot of people at the top in Westminster in the media grudgingly changed their minds. Ah, maybe it would be good to sell our products to the Europeans after all. So 1961, Harold Macmillan, Tory Prime Minister, applied to join. And General de Gaulle vetoed it in January 63. He said, come on, you're Europeans. You're always going on about your Commonwealth and the America and yeah, the open sea, all of that stuff.
31:55 Dominic Sandbrook? I've had, I'm sick of hearing about Nelson. You can't join.
31:58 Tom Holland? And so they, he rejects it. So ne pleurez pas, my lord.
32:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Ne pleurez pas, my lord, he says to, don't cry, my lord, he says to. I mean, that's, it's very ungrateful from de Gaulle, given that we bailed him out.
32:10 Tom Holland? I know.
32:11 Dominic Sandbrook? But I kind of respect him for it, though. You know, that's what the French do very well, the knife in the back. The chief British negotiator was a young, a young Turk, a thrusting young Turk called Ted Heath. And Ted Heath said, we in Britain are a part of Europe by geography, tradition, history, culture and civilisation.
32:31 Tom Holland? I mean, he had been to the Nuremberg Rally, right? I mean, he'd seen what could go wrong in Europe.
32:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you not recall he had shaken hands with Himmler?
32:39 Tom Holland? Yeah.
32:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Was disappointed by Himmler's handshake.
32:42 Tom Holland? Yeah.
32:43 Dominic Sandbrook? And then he'd fought in the Second World War. And yeah, Heath is, Heath is basically the one man in Britain or one of a very small group of people who are passionate Europhiles, but most people aren't. In 1967, Harold Wilson, Labour, made another very tentative approach and de Gaulle rejected it again. No way, I'm not even going to contemplate it. Now, there are two telling things about these first bids. First of all, neither of them was very popular with the public. So when people are asked, they were either utterly indifferent or hostile. And the second thing I think is really important and explains actually how you got to Brexit in 2016. Both of them were basically born out of weakness and desperation and not enthusiasm. British governments did not try to join Europe because they loved Europe.
33:28 Dominic Sandbrook? They were trying to join Europe basically because they'd run out of other options. And this was the last card on the deck. And it's very grudging. It's a kind of getting into bed with Luxembourg feels like the last thing, you know, you want to do. But they have to do it. Anyway, Heath, who's the one person who really is passionate about it, finally gets Britain through the door. And in January 73, Britain joins the European Economic Community, which at the time was known in Britain as the common market. The thing is that by this point, a lot of time has gone by, so the rules are already established.
33:59 Tom Holland? And they've been established by governments that have, for instance, lots of farmers.
34:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:04 Tom Holland? Who have their own take that aren't necessarily advantageous for British farmers.
34:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So Britain had to swallow 13,000 pages of European enactments about farming and fishing and all these kinds of things. And this becomes this running sore. So basically, nobody in Britain likes having to swallow the rules. And they complain about it consistently for the next, what, 50 years or whatever it is.
34:30 Tom Holland? Dominic, am I right that because we invented cricket, we therefore follow the laws?
34:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
34:37 Tom Holland? Whereas sneaky continental types don't.
34:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Wow, Nigel Farage joins us on the show.
34:42 Tom Holland? I'm just asking, is that, because that, that is, that has been a prevailing stereotype.
34:49 Dominic Sandbrook? That is the perception. That is the perception. Okay. So a couple of observations on the politics of it. At this point, it is seen primarily as a conservative project. So it's Heath's project. There are some Tory rebels, about forty of them, who are led by Enoch Powell, who think that Europe will undermine British sovereignty. But they are definitely a minority. Heath never admits that there's a trade off between the benefits of joining the common market and the obvious sort of downsides, which are that obviously it will affect British sovereignty because European laws will take precedence over British ones. And Dennis Healy, Labour Chancellor, who had been at university with Ted Heath,
35:32 Dominic Sandbrook? he said later, if Heath had been honest about it, he would not have got it through. Heath did what he had to do, smart politics. He downplayed the democratic implications of European membership because he knew that the British people would, you know, have a massive hissy fit if they found out that European laws took precedence. And actually, that brings us to this question of the great British public. In some ways, you could say that British people in the seventies are more European than they've ever been. They go on holidays abroad, which they'd never done before in any great numbers. They're even little, tiny little things. So I always think a good indicator is wine drinking. People didn't drink wine in, at all, really.
36:15 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, about something like fifty nine percent of people in the nineteen fifty's never drank wine in the course of a year.
36:23 Tom Holland? Because they're drinking beer.
36:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Because they're drinking beer. And it quadruples wine drinking in the twenty years between nineteen sixty and nineteen eighty. And this is, of course, the quintessential sign of continental sophistication.
36:34 Tom Holland? Isn't there another piece of evidence for British engagement with the continent? That the, um, the Christmas specials of much loved sitcoms always involve the various characters going on an amusing.
36:49 Tom Holland? An amusing holiday jaunt to the Costa del Plonca or something.
36:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
36:54 Tom Holland? Where hilarity ensues.
36:56 Dominic Sandbrook? When you see Europe on TV in 1973, it exactly, it's either the the.
37:02 Tom Holland? Building sites, donkeys.
37:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
37:04 Tom Holland? Letheros men, all of that.
37:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's either salt of the earth Englishmen getting into amusing scrapes and in in terrible Costa del Sol resorts. Or it's hard faced Germans.
37:17 Tom Holland? Of course, yes.
37:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Punishing prisoners of war at Colditz, or it's Dad's Army, or it's the World at War, the documentary series, which I think comes out in 1973.
37:26 Tom Holland? With Sir Laurence Olivier.
37:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Sir Laurence Olivier, there's a, there's a profound obsession, I think, with the Second World War in the 1970s for obvious reasons. I mean, it's very recent, but also it's such a telling contrast with the state of the nation in the seventies. And I think as a result of all that, it's absolutely true that most people do not feel, they, they do not describe themselves as Europeans. They are very hostile to the idea of European integration. In 1970, when Ted Heath won the election, only one in five people said they supported Britain joining Europe. A year later, 70%, when Heath had launched the application to join, 70% said they were against it. And I think this is a result of Heath's excellent publicity blitz because he sends girls to beaches.
38:14 Dominic Sandbrook? He sends girls to beaches dressed in tight T shirts that say, say yes to Europe. And they're handing out leaflets that say, Europe is fun, more work and more play too.
38:25 Tom Holland? You see, people, people complain that Keir Starmer isn't proactive, but there is an example of how he could promote his policies.
38:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I actually think Keir Starmer and Ted Heath, Keir Starmer and Ted Heath, I think are very similar. They have terrible voices, they are civil servants, basically, aren't they? They're technocrats. They're not brilliant communicators with the public.
38:46 Tom Holland? Keir Starmer is, is more willing to go on about his disadvantaged background.
38:50 Dominic Sandbrook? My father was a toolmaker.
38:52 Tom Holland? Ted Heath would never talk about it.
38:53 Dominic Sandbrook? So anyway, Ted Heath gets Britain into Europe in January 73. And are people delighted and do they care? Basically, no and no. So a survey for the Times found that 39% of people said it made them unhappy. 38% said happy and 23% couldn't decide. And my favorite survey, one of my favorite surveys ever done, I think was done by the Daily Mirror. And it said to people, would you like to see these European customs in our country? Would you like to see more pavement cafes? No, one by 23%. Awful. Would you like to see more shops open on Sundays? No. One by 35%. Would you ever like to have coffee in a roll for breakfast? No.
39:38 Dominic Sandbrook? No, one by 45. I mean, you genuinely wouldn't like to have coffee in a roll for breakfast, Tom? I just think things were better then, you know? Yeah. This is the maddest one, given the British people's tastes. Would you like to see the pubs open all day as they are in the continent? No, again, one by 26%. They don't really have pubs on the continent though, do they? That's the problem. It's bars. It's all bars, yeah. I think if you had said to people, pavement cafes are British, would you like to see more of them? People would say yes. More hangings. And actually, in 1974, they did another survey and they found that two out of three people regretted joining Europe, they thought it was a terrible idea. And the survey quoted a trade union official from the black country, which will enable me to do my black country accent.
40:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And he said, now that we're in the common market, we're just like all those other countries who are foreigners making decisions for us. Do you think that's actually, I mean, are they experiencing that as something that is directly impacting them? No. Or is it just a kind of vague sense of who are foreigners to tell us what to do? That's exactly what it is. There's nothing, there's no way in which that trade union official from the black country, in which his life has been affected at all by being in the European common market. This brings us back to Harold Wilson and the Labour Government. So Wilson, he's not an instinctive European. He always used to say, I've always been a Commonwealth man. And a holiday on the silly house man. When he was in Number 10, he said to his aides at one point, I don't want French cheese.
41:07 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't like French cheese. I mean, who's ever heard of French cheese? I want proper English cheese, get rid of all this stuff. The problem for him is that the Labour Party is deeply split. So on the one hand, you have the sort of the progressive do-gooding kind of middle classes.
41:22 Tom Holland? Roy Jenkins, who will become the head of the European Commission, loves a bottle of claret, loves a French cheese. So he'd been Home Secretary, hadn't he?
41:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and he's the darling of that wing of the party. He loves Europe. He thinks Europe is the be all and end all. And as you say, he goes off to to run the European Commission.
41:41 Tom Holland? And he comes from a Methodist background.
41:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Mining family in Wales.
41:44 Tom Holland? And he totally rejects it and kind of transforms himself into a a kind of claret-swilling grandee.
41:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he went to Ballyo and they put him through a special sort of chemical process that turned him into Roy Stewart. And that's, you know, he came out the other side.
41:58 Tom Holland? Did did you get offered that when you went to Ballyo?
42:00 Dominic Sandbrook? I did, but I turned it down. The working class activists on the left of the party hate Europe. They think it's terrible. It's a threat to socialism. It's a threat to the honest independence of the British working man. So Michael Foot, who was a great sort of tribune of the left of the Labour Party, told his voters in Eberveil in South Wales, "It's a rich nation's club opposed to the interests of British democracy and the health of our economy."
42:27 Tom Holland? So Michael Foot is a romantic about British exceptionalism. And exactly the way that Heaton Powell is on the right. And actually, they're very good friends, aren't they?
42:36 Dominic Sandbrook? They bond over this. And in the second half of this episode, I mean, we we will discuss how they work together against Europe. Anyway, so Wilson's party is split and he comes up with a great wheeze to avoid pinning his own colours to the mast and to stop the party splitting. He says, "I'm in favour of Europe in principle, but not in practice." So basically.
42:57 Tom Holland? That's brilliant.
43:00 Dominic Sandbrook? He says, he says, "Ted Heath has got us in on very bad terms. So when I come back as Prime Minister, I will renegotiate the terms and then I'll hold a referendum so that the people can decide."
43:11 Tom Holland? Which is exactly Cameron's strategy in 2016.
43:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, renegotiation and referendum. And it worked for Harold Wilson and Cameron thought it would work for him. Now, there's never been at this point a referendum in Britain. And the reason there's never been a referendum is because we don't need one. We have Parliament. Referendums are foreign. Parliament is sovereign. Parliament expresses the will of the British people, which you need to ask people for. They've sent their representatives to Parliament.
43:37 Tom Holland? Also, totalitarian governments use referendums. That was another favourite theme, wasn't it?
43:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, that's what Margaret Thatcher said. It's a divisive dictator's. Actually, do you know what? There have been a lot of talk of having referendums before in British history. Nobody ever talks about this, but in the Edwardian period, there had been serious proposals to have referendums about tariff reform, about women's suffrage, about the deadlock between the Lords and the Commons. Churchill wanted to have a referendum in 1945.
44:03 Tom Holland? Winston.
44:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Winston, of all people, wanted to have a referendum to keep his own government going at the end of the war with Germany, to keep it going during the war with Japan. Clement Attlee said no, didn't agree with it. But Harold Wilson is now back as Prime Minister and the referendum is on. So he goes to the Europeans. He says, I want to renegotiate Britain's terms.
44:24 Tom Holland? Do they understand what he's doing? Do they get the politics of it?
44:27 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, they're pretty annoyed about it. They do get the politics of it and they want Britain to stay in, so they agree to do it. But they're not best pleased. There's an excellent cartoon in the French equivalent of Private Eye, the satirical magazine Le Canal En Chine. And it shows this, it's a very French cartoon. It shows this Wilson as this sort of ludicrous little figure lying between the legs of a naked woman. And the woman wears...
44:51 Tom Holland? So French.
44:52 Dominic Sandbrook? So French. The woman wears a crown labelled Europe and the woman says to him in French, "Get in or get out, my dear Wilson, but do stop all this ridiculous coming and going." Anyway, they have the renegotiation. Wilson sends his Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, who later complained that he spent most of his time arguing about, and I quote, "the fixed position of rear view mirrors on agricultural tractors." That's the British image of the European project.
45:18 Tom Holland? Nothing about stopping the rise of fascism.
45:20 Dominic Sandbrook? No. So, March 75, 17th of March, Wilson goes to see his cabinet and he says, "I've got a great deal for Britain, a great new deal." Now, actually, it's basically exactly the same as Ted Heath's deal with a couple of superficial differences. And he also says, "Thanks to my renegotiation." We have stopped Europe from developing in a federalist direction. And as long as we stay in, we will stop it. I mean, how many times were we to hear that in the next, you know, 20 years or whatever? Now, his lefty ministers did not agree. So one of them, Tony Benn, who we talk about after the break, said, this is rubbish. The community will destroy the whole basis on which the Labour movement was founded and our commitment to democratic change.
46:04 Dominic Sandbrook? But Wilson is adamant the deal is done. The first referendum in British history is set for Thursday, the 5th of June. Wilson himself would advise the British people to vote yes, but his ministers can campaign on whatever side they like. And the question is very simple. Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community?
46:24 Tom Holland? God, unbelievable tension. So how will the British people vote in this referendum? And most crucially of all, can Paul McCartney swing the balance? We'll find out after the break.
46:42 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
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47:54 Tom Holland? Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History where it is the late spring of 1975 and the date has been set for Britain's first referendum. And the choice is simple, it's between splendid isolation and continental brotherhood. And you couldn't think of anything really more likely to galvanise people and get them talking with huge excitement about politics in the pubs that they don't want to open all day and in the
48:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Non-existent pavement cafes.
48:25 Tom Holland? In the street cafes that they regard as foreign rubbish.
48:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, well, actually, do you know what? No one cares. I mean, that's the thing with this. So it's odd to be doing a subject on the Rest is History that nobody cared about. But it's Europe, it's not surprising. So basically, the referendum is on and for weeks nothing happens at all. There have been two elections in the last year and people are sick about another election, it's the last thing they want. So it only really gets going with a couple of weeks to go and the two sides start holding press conferences. And we'll start, you know, since we're a sister podcast of The Rest is Politics, we'll start where they would want us to start with the Remainers of the day, with the Yes campaign. So the best known Remainer is Harold Wilson. I mean, he's so unenthusiastic, you know,
49:11 Dominic Sandbrook? he's very like Jeremy Corbyn in 2016. His aide Bernard Donoghue wrote in his diary, "Harold is clearly unhappy about having to come out so firmly in favour of the market. He's really a little Englander and at heart he agrees with every word that no campaign says. So he fights to the end against actually telling people to vote yes", which is true, he did, he did it very half-heartedly. Now, part of the reason for that is his own party is so split. So they're split right down the middle, seven of his Cabinet Ministers are Leavers and about half of his MPs and the Unions too are divided about 50/50.
49:43 Tom Holland? Oh, really? I thought the Unions were really against it.
49:45 Dominic Sandbrook? No, there are a couple of Unions. A lot of the big Unions are against it, but there are other Unions that are for it. So it's not quite as
49:54 Tom Holland? Right.
49:54 Dominic Sandbrook? simple as it's sometimes painted. Now, by contrast, the Tories are much more pro-Remain.
50:00 Tom Holland? And the Tories by this point are led by noted Euro enthusiast Margaret Thatcher. And she's all over it, isn't she?
50:06 Dominic Sandbrook? So Margaret Thatcher, this is the funny thing. Thatcher's relationship with Europe is always really ambiguous. So her father, Alfred Roberts, we talked about him in the last episode, he once told the Grantham Rotary Club, "I would sooner be a bootblack in England than a leading citizen in a good many of the other leading countries in the world today." I, the person who polishes your boots. And that, I think, is very much her vibe. She thinks being British is to have won first place in the lottery of life. Europeans cannot be trusted. They're sneaky. They don't follow the rules. All of this stuff.
50:40 Tom Holland? They wear ludicrous uniforms. They're always invading Poland. All of that.
50:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, exactly. However, she's also a free trader and she likes open markets. And a lot of Tories, including Margaret Thatcher, see Europe as a bulwark against socialism. So it's a kind of, it's part of the Cold War, basically. The Western Alliance, Tom.
51:00 Tom Holland? Free nations.
51:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So in 1975, she is all for it. She tells a press conference, "There is no genuine alternative to working closely together." And she boasts, you know, "We did this. We got Britain to Europe. The Conservative Party has been pursuing the European vision almost as long as we existed as a party. We are inextricably part of Europe. Europe is where we are and where we have always been." Now, at this first press conference, there's an excellent moment. Takes us back to something we discussed last time. Because she's sitting next to the chairman of the Conservative Group for Europe, the great totem of Britain in Europe, Ted Heath, who hates her with a passion. And she says to Ted Heath, you can see the clip online, it's really funny. She
51:43 Dominic Sandbrook? says, she plays the sort of bashful protege. She says to Ted Heath, she turns to him, she says, "You have done more than anyone else for the conservative cause in Europe. And to see that Britain's place is in Europe, naturally, it is with some temerity that the pupil speaks before the master, because you know more about it than any of the rest of us." And the camera at this point, the camera sort of moves across Ted Heath and he is staring at her with Arnold Lloyd hatred. That says nothing.
52:12 Tom Holland? Is she at this point wearing her comedy Euro jumper?
52:16 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
52:16 Tom Holland? Which with all the European flags on it?
52:18 Dominic Sandbrook? I love this. So she doesn't wear it at the press conference, but she wears it later at a photo call by Churchill's statue. And she wears this tremendous jumper. So there's nine women in jumpers or t-shirts with European flags on. And then there's Margaret Thatcher in a jumper with all the flags of the European. And it's just such a laughable image and presumably whenever a sort of Tory eurosceptic today, you know, when Jacob Rees-Mogg contemplates that image, he must be, I mean, steam must come out of his ears, like the circuits must explode or something. And in fact, the whole Yes campaign, really, the backbone of it was the Tory party. So they provided a lot of
52:59 Dominic Sandbrook? the organisational muscle. The headquarters of the Yes campaign was donated by Mrs Thatcher's future party treasurer, Alistair McAlpine. It's a big business campaign, so they get tonnes of money from Shell, Ford, IBM, ICI, all the biggest firms in the country. They have a war chest of one and a half million pounds, which is the biggest war chest that any side had ever had in a British electoral campaign. And it's 10 times as much as the No campaign had. So I mean, they are able to absolutely obliterate the Leave campaign.
53:33 Tom Holland? So left wing kind of suspicion of the common market as a capitalist plot. I mean, there's a kind of element of, I mean, it's kind of illustrating that.
53:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I mean, I suppose at some level it is a capitalist plot. I mean, Christian Democrats do play a big part in setting up the European Union.
53:49 Tom Holland? No, but I mean, that it is the forces of capitalism in Britain who are funding this against, you could frame it as the, you know, the oppressed working masses who don't, can't tap all this money.
54:01 Dominic Sandbrook? I think you could frame it and there'd be an element of truth in it. I mean, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, but I think you're dead right. Big business wants us to join the European project and wants us to stay in because they want the markets and they want the integration, much more so than in 2016, when it was more divided. But business is unanimous in the 1970s. They've also got celebrities. So Graham Greene came out in favour of it. Alec Guinness, Tobey on Kenobi.
54:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Peter Eustonoff, Hercule Poirot, and the England Football Manager, Don Revie, soon to be disgraced, he came out in favour as well. And there's generally a very rest is politics-y vibe to the campaign. So it's basically sensible, moderate people.
54:47 Tom Holland? Meeting up.
54:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
54:49 Tom Holland? Coming together.
54:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Agree on common sense policies for Britain. Exactly. So that's at the top and then at the grassroots, you basically have a much more, it's quite herbivorous, it's quite lib dem. So there's gin and tonic parties, there's basically, people get together and compare their lovely beards. They meet, there's actually some, there's actually some places where they genuinely, genuinely hold meetings at vegetarian restaurants. It's very mid seventies herbivorous behaviour. Let's get to the no campaign. The no campaign has a very different vibe. It's, it's, it's, these are the people who want to leave and these are some very peculiar combinations. So basically, I'll give you two examples. One is Ipswich. In Ipswich, the no campaign was run by an alliance of Labour, the communists,
55:33 Dominic Sandbrook? people on the very right of the Tories and a married couple who were described as, quote, "not quite National Front but close."
55:40 Tom Holland? So quite like X.
55:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
55:42 Tom Holland? Twitter as was. That's that kind of vibe.
55:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So Burnley, where Tony Pastor, our goal hanger boss comes from, the no campaign was run by an anarchist communist, some Labour Party activists and a very lone and friendless Tory. And they didn't get on very well. And as one of them said afterwards, "Our campaign was a shambles from beginning to end." That's Burnley for you. The one thing the no campaign have is the support of one of your favourite people, Tom. So Paul McCartney.
56:09 Tom Holland? I mean, I think probably my favourite person.
56:11 Dominic Sandbrook? He's virtually the only celebrity who votes, who says he wants to leave in 1975. And his rationale, he says, "Europe is very much like the Beatles. Now the partnership has been dissolved, I'm much better off."
56:25 Tom Holland? He didn't really mean it though.
56:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you not think he meant it?
56:27 Tom Holland? No, he didn't mean it.
56:28 Dominic Sandbrook? About the Beatles or about Europe?
56:29 Tom Holland? Both, I think, because he didn't vote in the Brexit referendum.
56:32 Dominic Sandbrook? In 2016?
56:34 Tom Holland? Yeah. And then he ended up saying, "Actually, I think Brexit's a bad idea." Ringo was, Ringo was all in favour of Brexit.
56:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Paul, I feel like if you shattered your mouth off in 75, you should at least turn up in 2016. No?
56:44 Tom Holland? He couldn't make his mind up.
56:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, fair enough. The big problem the no campaign have is they have absolutely no money. The yes campaign are described as having one and a half million pounds. The no campaign have £133,000. And unbelievably, all but £9,000 of this came from the government. So basically, they only raised £9,000. And as one account of the campaign puts it, it was a race between a Formula One car and a bicycle. And the other big problem they have is the people who were their spokesmen are very, very unpopular.
57:12 Tom Holland? Yes. So who've they got?
57:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Dominic. They've got Enoch Powell, who some people may remember from last time. They have the radical pamphleteer, Michael Foot. So we'll be having a bit more of him on the show in the next week.
57:26 Tom Holland? Very long hair.
57:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, long white hair.
57:28 Tom Holland? Thick glasses, loves Jonathan Swift and Byron.
57:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Byron and the Romantics and Haslit and all this stuff. But he looks about 6,000 years old, doesn't he?
57:38 Tom Holland? He looks like Wordsworth Gummidge, the scarecrow.
57:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. And then Tony Benn, and we'll come to Tony Benn in just a second. He's the main spokesman, really. And I cartoon in the Evening Standard how to get Britain out march. It showed a great levers march led by all these three people. And they were surrounded by banners reading Trotskyists, National Front, Orange Order, Communist Party, IRA. And that sort of summed up the public perception.
58:04 Tom Holland? That they were fruitcakes and lunatics or whatever Cameron said about Brexit.
58:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And this brings us to their chief spokesman, who is Tony Benn. Now, Tony Benn, in the 1970s, I mean, he's also been in Love Island, hasn't he? Didn't he come on Love Island?
58:18 Tom Holland? He has appeared on The Rest is History a few times.
58:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And he won.
58:22 Tom Holland? Yeah, he did. The salient thing for people to remember about Tony Benn is that he gets stung on the penis by a wasp.
58:29 Dominic Sandbrook? When I was doing the notes, I didn't bother writing it down because I knew you would mention it.
58:33 Tom Holland? Because that's the single most important thing about him.
58:36 Dominic Sandbrook? And he puts it in his diaries.
58:37 Tom Holland? Or stung on the penis by a wasp, as he would actually have put it.
58:41 Dominic Sandbrook? For our non-British listeners, it's going to be hard to express how well-known and how
58:48 Tom Holland? controversial.
58:49 Dominic Sandbrook? How controversial. His political persona was in the seventies and eighties. In all the history of the Labour Party, I think he stands as the politician dearest to the hearts of kind of left wing party activists. And in his pomp in the nineteen seventies, people had no doubt whatsoever that he was the future of British politics. He was an absolutely defining political figure. He's fifty years old, so same age as Margaret Thatcher. He comes from a long line of progressive politicians. His father, Viscount Stansgate, had defected from the Liberals to Labour in the nineteen twenties.
59:29 Tom Holland? And he has to kind of turn down his own peerage, doesn't he?
59:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, renounce his own peerage to carry on as an MP, Benders. And he started out working for Harold Wilson as a technocratic Minister of Technology, among other things. But after they were turfed out in nineteen seventy, he had this, I think, a genuinely, I mean evangelical is the word, he has this kind of evangelical conversion. He's from a long line of, you know, Methodists and whatnot, and he's, it's as though he has been born again. That's the only way to to describe the intensity of it. He becomes an enthusiast for absolutely every conceivable left wing cause, particularly things like workers' control and industrial democracy. He wants to have, for example, to set up a rival, what he calls a working class power
1:00:16 Dominic Sandbrook? structure run by the trade unions that would govern the country alongside Parliament. He wants to ditch nuclear weapons and pull out of NATO. He's fervently anti-European. He sees Europe as a capitalist cartel and it will make it impossible to build socialism in one country. And the funny thing about writing about Tony Benn, I love writing about him, I've written about him a lot in my books, is the paradox that his colleagues universally said, he's an extremely nice man, he's very courteous, he's kind, he's polite, he's charming. And then they would say in the next breath, I hate him.
1:00:53 Dominic Sandbrook? He's, he's a, they would, because they would say he is disloyal, he is narcissistic, he's unctuous, he's hypocritical, he's self-serving, you cannot trust him, all of this kind of stuff. And those two things which seem so contradictory, you know, people, lots of people that he worked with, held both those ideas in their heads at once. By the time Labour got back in 1974, he'd become a complete bogeyman to the British press. Cartoonists commonly drew him either wearing a Nazi uniform or a communist uniform, because they regarded him as a kind of totalitarian in waiting. Wilson doesn't really trust him, but because Wilson has no majority and he cannot
1:01:34 Dominic Sandbrook? afford to alienate the left, he has made Ben his industry secretary. And since coming back to power, Ben has been working on this extraordinary programme of socialist transformation. He wants to force all major companies in Britain to sign planning agreements with the state, and he wants to set up a national enterprise board to take over companies in the public interest. In fact, Ben wanted to use the Emergency Powers Act to take over the 25 biggest companies in Britain straight away and build a new economy on the principle of workers' control. This provoked great horror in the city, and eventually Jim Callaghan and Dennis Healy went to see Howard Wilson and said, you've got to rein this bloke in, he's out of control. His plans were emasculated, and he had to console himself by investing public money
1:02:19 Dominic Sandbrook? in three workers' cooperatives. So one of them was a newspaper in Scotland called the Scottish Daily News that went bust after six months. One of them was a motorbike cooperative in Birmingham that managed to struggle on for eight years. But my favourite by far is this former washing machine factory in Merseyside, which had been occupied by its own workers when it went bust. Ben wanted to give them £4 million of public money, and his own consultants working for the Department of Industry told him this was absolutely insane, don't do it. And when he brought it up in Cabinet, I mean, he describes in his diary, some of the other ministers literally laugh in his face when he tells them his plan.
1:03:01 Tom Holland? I mean, that's what's wonderful about his diaries, isn't it? It's the kind, there's a pooterish
1:03:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:03:06 Tom Holland? Quality.
1:03:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Dennis laughed in my face again.
1:03:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely. Kind of innocence, almost. It's a diary. It's that rare thing of a diary written by a really unreliable narrator. You know, a narrator who's telling you, but one side of the story. But you can completely see the reality of what's happening, which is he's gone through the cabinet. He said, I've got an excellent plan from restaurants money. And they say to him, well, what would the factory make?
1:03:33 Dominic Sandbrook? He says it would make car radiators and orange juice.
1:03:41 Dominic Sandbrook? A great pairing. To quote myself in Seasons in the Sun. History offers few examples of successful factories making both car parts and orange juice. Imagine this one in Cuba. There must be some reason. Maybe there's some crossover in the equipment. If we have any, any listeners who are industrialists, let us know. The bonkers thing about this, Wilson decide, said, I'll give them the money. And they did give them the money. Yeah, anything for quite life. How did it work? They went bust in 1978, didn't, didn't, was not a success. I mean, I would not, I would not buy my orange juice from a factory that I knew. A publicly funded factory that was also making car radiators. I would, I would raise an eyebrow to say that it's.
1:04:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, all this means that by the time of the referendum, Ben is an incredibly controversial figure. He's probably the most abused minister in modern political history. He's making the headlines day after day, and I'll just give you two examples that to give you a sense. One of them, so seventies, the Sunday Times ran a huge cartoon of him. Listeners will steel themselves, showing him as a rapist, dragging off a screaming woman who represents British industry. And Ben is saying, good heavens, everyone knows that when a woman says no, she really means yes. That is very seventies. That's number one. And number two, editorial in the Times. I mean, one of the most, surely one of the most damning editorials ever published in the Times about a single politician. Ben is a dangerous politician who stirs up and exploits political forces
1:05:07 Dominic Sandbrook? that will first bring Britain to economic ruin and then use the rubble as the foundations for a collectivist regime. And basically they're saying he's Alexander Kerensky or somebody. Yeah. He gets death threats in the campaign, but that he's undeterred. He tours the land, giving endless speeches about the threat of Europe. The more he speaks, the more support for his cause falls. You know, he basically puts people off, but that never stops him because he's an evangelist. He's preaching the gospel.
1:05:37 Tom Holland? I mean, he does have this, his famous five questions, isn't it? You know, what, what, what power have you got? And yeah, where did you get it from? And how can I get rid of you? And I can't remember what the other ones are. But, I mean, there is something quite powerful about that.
1:05:51 Dominic Sandbrook? He's a good, brilliant speaker.
1:05:52 Tom Holland? I mean, he's a brilliant speaker and that, that, you know, and he says that, that if you can't remove somebody who has control over your life, then you don't live in a democracy.
1:06:01 Dominic Sandbrook? It's not a bad point.
1:06:02 Tom Holland? And that is probably the single most powerful argument that could be made against the common market.
1:06:08 Dominic Sandbrook? I urge listeners, you can go onto YouTube, you can find loads and loads of his speeches, or indeed Michael Foot, or Enoch Powell, or whatever about Europe. I mean, the three of them, one thing they have in common, whatever you think of their, their politics, they're brilliant speakers. And Tony Benn, I've written about him a lot. I find him a very engaging person to write about. I do think he's deluded, but I think he's, he's clever. He's, he's a wonderfully fluent, amusing, sort of dazzlingly good speaker, actually.
1:06:36 Tom Holland? So that you will have watched all the debates, I guess, that went on for this referendum, and you will have watched lots that went on in 2016.
1:06:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:06:44 Tom Holland? How, how does the standard of the debate compare?
1:06:48 Dominic Sandbrook? There is, there is no comparison whatsoever. The standard in 1975, to say that it's above that of 2016 is to massively undersell it. I mean, the, the level, if you, there's a, this brilliant debate, for example, between Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn that you can see online. I think it is, and there's also Roy Jenkins and Enoch Powell. And the standard of kind of intellectual engagement, of understanding of the issues, what they expect of the audience.
1:07:15 Tom Holland? So what's changed? What, what changed?
1:07:17 Dominic Sandbrook? The media ecosystem changes.
1:07:19 Tom Holland? It's the media, do you think, or all the politicians or what?
1:07:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Both, I think they've both changed simultaneously. I think the, the people going into politics aren't as good and the media demands different things, which makes it impossible for them to communicate at the same length or with the same depth or complexity. And we as, and frankly, we've changed probably as consumers. We, our attention spans are shorter. You know, we don't want to listen to Roy Jenkins speak for 10 minutes on the principle of subsidiarity, or Enoch Powell speaking for 10 minutes about what sovereignty really means. I mean, most people will be bored and would switch off. And that's probably one of the things that's changed. What do the great British people think? They don't care. Simple as that. Polls show Europe doesn't matter to people. They are told again and again by all of these people, especially in the no campaign, Europe is a deadly threat to British sovereignty.
1:08:07 Dominic Sandbrook? So Labour's Cabinet Minister Peter Shaw, he said, if we vote yes and we stay in Europe, in the European Community, it will mean the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended, that we're now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations, as though we'd suffered defeat in war. And people just, they don't want to know, they don't really want to listen. And the paradox of this, and I think this is the really interesting thing, the paradox of this is that all the evidence shows that the British people in the seventies were pretty Eurosceptic. So remember that before we entered, the polls and surveys showed that people were generally against it or indifferent. And after the referendum, polls
1:08:48 Dominic Sandbrook? showed the same thing. So in 1978, 48% said being Europe was bad for Britain and in 25% good. In 1980, so after Margaret Thatcher's become Prime Minister, 60% said they would vote to leave if they were given the chance. So what's different in 1975? I think part of it is the campaign itself. So every newspaper pretty much is overwhelmingly pro-European. You know, the Daily Mail does a big sort of Sambrock crystal ball style piece saying, this is what would happen if we left, there would be no coffee, no wine, no beans or bananas. No oranges. Yeah. Siege, siege Britain, isn't it? Siege Britain, exactly. The big thing, however, is the economic context. This is
1:09:31 Dominic Sandbrook? precisely the point when inflation is ripping through the British economy. You know, wages are rising at 30% a year. There are all these apocalyptic predictions. We're heading into, you know, we're turning into Weimar Germany, we're heading for dictatorship. And most people think, well, against this backdrop, getting out of you, I mean, I don't think they'd have got in in 1975. I think they'd have been more hesitant, they'd have stuck to the status quo. But at this point, Europe is the status quo and they don't want to rock the boat. So always keep a hold of nurse for fear of something worse. So we get towards the election day. Actually, you're asking about the standard of the debate. I mean, the very last action of the, of the campaign, I mean, this tells you so much about the difference, is a two hour debate.
1:10:15 Dominic Sandbrook? At the Oxford Union, which was shown live on the BBC, and it had Ted Heath and Jeremy Thorpe in dinner jackets against Barbara Castle and Peter Shaw. And you can watch a lot of clips of that on YouTube again. And the contrast with 2016 is just so embarrassing and depressing because it's so much better. Anyway, Thursday, the 5th of June, the people vote. And everyone knows the yes campaign are going to win. Wilson votes yes, his wife Mary votes no, his controller Marcia, she also votes no, interestingly. The turnout is about 65%. The results come through the next day, and 67% have voted to stay in. They voted yes. So
1:10:57 Dominic Sandbrook? two thirds majority. Interestingly, the most pro-European places in Britain are the richest and the most conservative. So Buckinghamshire, Surrey and West Sussex. And guess what the least European parts of the country are?
1:11:10 Tom Holland? Uh, Scotland.
1:11:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Scotland. They don't like Europe in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. So interesting and such a contrast with 2016. Also a contrast with 2016. The press are delighted that we've stayed in. So the Daily Mail, "The most crushing victory in British political history. The effect of this thunderous yes will echo down the years."
1:11:34 Tom Holland? Very ironic.
1:11:35 Dominic Sandbrook? They would change their tune. The great hero of the yes campaign is Ted Heath. The Times called him "the Achilles of the European cause." Margaret Thatcher paid a handsome tribute to him in the Commons. She said, "He deserves the campaign honours." How did Ted Heath react?
1:11:50 Tom Holland? Gracelessly.
1:11:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, great. The Times, "Head in hands, stony faced. He made no acknowledgements."
1:11:57 Tom Holland? Oh, he's brilliant.
1:11:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Tony Benn took it really graciously, I have to say. This is, again, a big difference with 2016. Tells you again how politics has changed. There were no calls for a second referendum. There were no allegations of, you know, skullduggery or anything like this. Tony Benn said, "I've just been in receipt of a very big message from the British people, and I read it loud and clear."
1:12:21 Tom Holland? I mean, whatever you say about Tony Benn, he's a massive Democrat. The principle of democracy is fundamental to him.
1:12:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely it is. But it's a disaster for him because he's been humiliated. And a couple of days later, Harold Wilson is able to emasculate him completely, take him away from the Department of Industry and move him to the backwater of energy. And Ben absolutely loses it with Wilson. He describes it in his diaries. What you're doing is capitulating to the CBI, that's the Business Group, to the Tory press and to the Tories. Do you think this is going to save you? You've made a great mistake. They'll be pleased for 24 hours, then they'll turn on you. The thing with Ben is, whenever you slap him down, he will never walk away. He'll always stay in the cabinet at all costs. It will take basically whatever he's given, which he does. So, at least one big issue has been resolved. Or so it seems, because of course, Europe was not quite resolved.
1:13:13 Dominic Sandbrook? But the bigger issue is that Britain is still sliding towards economic disaster. There's a brilliant cartoon a couple of days after the result in The Sun. And it shows Harold Wilson and his ministers as animal tamers at a circus. And they're waving their wips at a little mouse that is labelled referendum sideshow. And behind them is rearing this tiger, teeth bared, fangs bared, labelled economic crisis. And the circus manager very nervously is saying to them, right, lads, now you've finished playing with the mouse. Now you can see why. Inflation is almost 30%. And just a few days after the referendum, the pound begins to slide.
1:13:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And it goes down, down, down, day after day, the pressure mounting on Harold Wilson all the time. And six weeks after the referendum, he tells his press chief, Joe Haynes, that he has come to a dramatic decision, a bombshell that will transform British politics. But what that bombshell is, we will find out next time.
1:14:16 Tom Holland? And if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, then of course, you can hear that right now. Find out what that bombshell decision is. And if you would like to join them, then therestishistory.com awaits you. But in the meanwhile, thank you, Dominic. Thrilling stuff. We will see you next time. Bye bye.
1:14:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Bye bye.
1:14:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Hi everybody, it's Dominic here. So we are in week three, as our Rest is History Club members will surely know, of our mighty series about photography and history with special guest Chris Floyd, one of Britain's leading photographers. In our last two exclusive episodes, we looked at revolutions and we looked at music. But in this week's episode, we're on to something a little bit more enticing. We are looking at the story of fashion. But as I say, this is exclusively for Rest is History members. However, we have a little snippet of it for you right here.
1:15:22 Dominic Sandbrook? These Glenn Lutzford pictures are for Prada, is that right? And what immediately strikes me about them, and to describe them for people who are only listening, they are very cinematic, they feel deliberately old fashioned.
1:15:35 Speaker 04 So they're in a boat, a rowing boat, it looks like. It's on the River Tiber. They had the river shut down for the shoot.
1:15:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Wow.
1:15:41 Speaker 04 It was for the Autumn/Winter 97 Prada campaign. He said they had the money to pay the city of Rome, close off the river. You've got in the background, people setting fire to what I think are bales of hay to create smoke and stuff. He said in his email to me, "An extra note, as I know Dominic has a special place in his heart for the US in 1968. When I was growing up, we didn't have any art books, but my dad would bring one Time Life book home, which I studied in great detail. Specifically, one picture by Time Life photographer Bill Eppridge, his picture of Bobby Kennedy dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. Looking back, it had a film noir quality which I found alluring.
1:16:22 Speaker 04 The man in the picture unknown to nine-year-old me, the contradiction between Bobby's movie star looks in his black suit, yet stricken and obviously in great danger. I'm not sure why it stayed with me, but when I became a photographer, I began to unconsciously replicate it. My Prada pictures were definitely inspired by it. Years later, Bill Eppridge became my neighbour in Connecticut and would come to lunch on occasion and we talked in great detail about this day. Bill told him that he and Bobby became good friends on the campaign trail and he shared many anecdotes from that period." And he said, one, one thing was that during Bobby Kennedy, when he was making his speech.
1:16:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the hotel in LA.
1:17:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, one of his aides whispered to Bill Etbridge, he's going to go out the front door, go and wait for him by the front door. And then at some point later, someone went to Kennedy and said, actually, there's some donors in the kitchen that want to meet you. We've got to go out the back door and meet the donors on the way out. And that's when he was shot in the kitchen. Bill then goes storming back through the hotel and it's Bill Etbridge that took that picture. Um, and he said that although they had become great friends on the campaign, Ethel Kennedy never forgave him for taking pictures instead of helping and she never spoke to him again.
1:17:31 Dominic Sandbrook? That's the issue that photographers always confront, isn't it? You're just a bystander chronicling or are you going to intervene?
1:17:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:17:36 Dominic Sandbrook? And by and large photographers don't intervene, do they?
1:17:38 Speaker 04 No. So out of that comes this beautiful fashion, fashion imagery, which, which I would never have put the two and two together, uh, if he hadn't told me that.
1:17:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, well, it's a reminder of how interlinked all these things are, I suppose.
1:17:53 Dominic Sandbrook? So thank you for listening to that little extract. Now, if you enjoyed what you heard and you want to hear more, you can of course subscribe by going to therestishistory.com and you sign up and you get a host of unbelievable benefits as well. So on that bombshell, thank you very much for listening and goodbye.
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