An Island Apart Europe: Them or Us

In or out? Stay or go? Remain or leave?

As the arguments rage about our future with the European Union,

one simple fact is inescapable,

we're separated from continental Europe by geography

and, yes, history too.

Britain has always benefited through being somewhat separate.

We do feel, you know, different.

Partly the island nation, partly the history.

When Britain does want to lead in Europe,

it almost always can.

You cannot have the same role

as in the 19th century, so...

For decades, one question has divided the public,

has split parties, has felled prime ministers,

has baffled and angered our neighbours.

Is Europe something that we are part of, or is Europe something separate?

Is it...is it them or is it us?

It is both...

but we're special.

And let's recognise that,

let's not be ashamed of that, let's be proud of it.

I think we see the EU as them.

And I think, actually, this is not just us, this is now...

Go to France, go to Germany, go to the Netherlands

and talk about the EU and it's "them," it's Brussels.

If people were just arriving at the door of their villa in Spain,

I think the "us" is quite powerful.

But when they get back home, sneakily,

although they've been told they really shouldn't do it,

it's a bit racist and nasty,

erm, they do think there's a difference between them and us.

It is the people, you, who must now decide

whether Europe does mean them or us.

The referendum in June will be the biggest decision

this country has taken for decades.

In the past, the critical judgments

were largely made by our political leaders, their advisers,

civil servants and diplomats,

usually in private, rarely in public.

This is the story of what they did and why.

It's mighty hard to peer into the future,

to know precisely what life will be like

if we choose to leave or to remain in the European Union.

But one thing we can do is look at how we got here in the first place,

to hear from those people whose decisions got us here.

I like some bony bits in personality, some prickly bits.

-It was a coup d'etat.

-It was following it step by step.

They always left us options open.

Oui, c'etait une sorte de trahison.

It won't do! It won't do!

There were one or two - how shall I put it? - disobliging remarks.

Oh, of course, but they were wrong.

This wonderful treasure trove

of interviews with the key decision-makers filmed 20 years ago,

many of whom of course are no longer with us,

gives us a real insight into the decision that we now face.

There's one interview we haven't got,

it's with the man who in many ways was the father of a united Europe.

No, he wasn't a Frenchman, he wasn't a German, he wasn't a Belgian,

he was, in fact, the British Bulldog himself,

Winston Churchill.

In the desperate days of June 1940,

Britain's new wartime leader's first instinct

was to go for full political union, quite unthinkable today.

Churchill's plan, in a last-ditch effort to stop France

falling to the Nazis,

was that Britain and France would become a single country,

an indissoluble union with one war cabinet

running defence and the economy on both sides of the Channel.

The British Cabinet backed it,

but with one prophetic exception,

they simply couldn't stomach the idea of a single currency.

Days later France fell,

and with it, at that stage, the idea of political union.

CHEERING

Straight after the war, Churchill gave the idea

of a united Europe another push.

'20,000 people packed the Dam, or centre of Amsterdam,

'to give a welcome to Winston Churchill.

'And the new song, Europe Unite,

'was sung as he drove past on his way through the city.'

CROWD SING EUROPE UNITE

But it wasn't clear exactly what he meant by European union.

CHEERING

We cannot aim at anything less than the union of Europe as a whole.

And we look forward with confidence to the day

when that union will be achieved.

He had rather a simplest view of it.

I always likened him to Moses,

who pointed the way to the Promised Land,

but he never actually led the children of Israel into...into it,

because he was old, but he did point the way

and fired the zeal and enthusiasm of others.

Please, lift your two fingers once more

for the V-sign, the sign of victory,

but now the sign of winning the peace.

CHEERING

Churchill was never clear about what Britain's role should be.

Should we be partners or sponsors? Players or spectators?

Should we get involved,

or simply encourage the grand project of unifying a continent?

APPLAUSE

Messieurs et mesdames...prenez garde...

LAUGHTER

..je vais parler francais.

CHEERING

He was ambiguous about Britain's role, but in the post-war talks

he was very clear that the old enemy must be part of the club.

APPLAUSE

He looked round rather like a bull,

an old bull fighting...

and he said, "I don't see any Germans.

"You know, you can't make Europe without Germany."

And there was no applause anywhere.

A deep disillusion. Here was their hero...praising the Germans.

And it was as if he'd broken wind in public.

So Churchill was clear, Europe couldn't be built without Germany,

but with or without Britain?

We've always tended to see ourselves as different.

After all, we won the war, they lost it or were conquered.

We had friends all over the world, they did not.

We were suspicious of politicians' grand dreams,

they clung on to them as they tried to recover.

In the early 1950s, France had cast aside

the nightmare of its recent past and was dreaming of the future.

'There is more glamorous elegance to a square foot in the Champs-Elysees

'than to a square mile anywhere else on Earth.

'In the season of high fashion,

'it becomes, how would you say, an open-air studio.'

The French were, how would you say,

drawing up designs not just for the Champs-Elysees,

but for an entire continent.

The political equivalent of Christian Dior

was France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, a man with a plan.

'World interest focuses on the Quai d'Orsay,

as six European nations, including Western Germany,

meet for their first working session

on the Schuman Plan for pooling steel and coal.

Pooling steel and coal production? Sounds exciting.

..as of vital importance to the future of the European idea.

They were vital because they were the ingredients of war.

The plan's real aim was to prevent another one.

'Our respondents know that this is a front-page story.'

-Look, Schuman's just started to speak.

-Oh, Lord! Off we go.

"Oh, Lord! They're making Europe without us!"

SCHUMAN SPEAKS FRENCH

'France's Foreign Minister Robert Schuman

'is the author of the bold, imaginative plan

'which bears his name.

'It is the key to the future of Europe,

'economic as well as political.'

The plan aimed to bind together old enemies,

France with a Germany now led by Konrad Adenauer.

It was as much about war and peace as coal and steel,

politics as much as economics.

-ADENAUER SPEAKS GERMAN

-Let us act rapidly,

because tomorrow it might be too late.

APPLAUSE

'But Britain, notable absentee, has not yet made up her mind.

'Her absence begs the question, can the Schuman Plan possibly succeed?'

Britain had the chance to join from the start.

The very day his plan was announced,

Schuman sent his right-hand man, Jean Monnet, to London,

in the hope Britain would sign up.

But in the draft wording was a phrase which revealed

it was the beginning of a grand European design.

It's a phrase still toxic today.

"Oh," he said, "I've got it here."

And he took out of his pocket a piece of paper

and gave it to us to read.

And this was the essence of the Schuman Plan.

And it said a condition of joining

would be that we would accept the principle of a federal Europe.

We said, "We don't think

"that the government will be able to accept this.

"Are we to understand that if we don't agree to this,

"you don't want us in?"

And he said, "Yes, that is the position."

The idea of a federal Europe,

one with powerful central institutions,

didn't appeal to the British government.

For three weeks, ministers sat on the fence

until they were given 24 hours to make up their minds.

I was just planning to go home from the Treasury at eight o'clock,

and my secretary told me that a message had been received

from the French that unless we had agreed to accept the whole thing

by eight o'clock the following evening,

we should be excluded from all further discussions.

It was almost an ultimatum, so to speak,

"We want a reply by such and such a date."

Well, I said to my private secretary,

"I can't believe such a message has been sent by the French government,"

which up to that moment we assumed

were a friendly and civilised government.

And she said, "Well, that's just what all the ministers have said,

"so we're wiring back to Paris."

The French wired back that this really was make your mind up time,

which posed a bit of a problem.

The Prime Minister was away,

the Foreign Secretary was in hospital,

and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was ill as well.

A Cabinet meeting was held, rather a second 11.

There were two possible courses,

one was to send a protest to this uncivilised diplomatic behaviour,

and the other was to ignore it.

We gave what was essentially a negative reply.

And the reply was somewhat delayed,

partly on account of the ministerial situation

and partly because it was a very serious matter.

Europe didn't wait for Britain to jump aboard,

France, Germany and four other founder countries

went full steam ahead, leaving us behind.

Monnet made it clear to us, he said,

"We must have Britain. You can't build Europe without Britain.

"But you will not get the British unless you first create facts.

"Britain," he always used to say, "will never act on a hypothesis,

"it will only act on facts."

We came out of the war with the fact,

although to some extent an illusion, of being a victor state.

We had so many other interests worldwide.

So I think it's not surprising that we didn't go barging in.

And I'm rather surprised that we've gone in as far as we have.

That fateful decision, taken in a rush by a group of junior ministers,

was only the first of many

on which British politicians decided we were different.

We could sit things out, we could wait for it all to go wrong.

The result was that the rules of the European club

were drawn up to suit them and not us.

That's something that has bedevilled Britain's relationship with Europe ever since.

Britain's problem with Europe is that we didn't invent it

and weren't there at the origin.

And as a result of that, we've always felt that Europe

was something kind of done to us

and something that we were always...somewhat on the fringe of.

MUSIC: Chorus Of The Hebrew Slaves by Verdi

Britain was to get a second chance

as a result of what happened on the fringe at the other side of Europe.

Messina on the island of Sicily

now boasts of being the birthplace of a united Europe.

Back in 1955, it played host to the ministers

of the European coal and steel community,

who dreamt of doing so much more.

They wanted to fuse their economies into a common market,

to create common European institutions

to harmonise their social policies.

We thought it was little more than a dream.

People didn't really believe that Europe

was going to be a going concern, I remember it so well,

because Europe had made a hash of things so often.

The story is that the government had said

that Messina was too outlandish a place to send a British civil servant to.

Whether that's true or not, I can't tell you,

but that was certainly the feeling in those days...

that Britain was outside.

Britain did choose to stay on the outside

when invited to further talks in Brussels

about how to turn the Messina dream into reality.

We could have had the leadership of Europe on our own terms,

if we'd started a little bit earlier,

but we didn't and we missed the bus.

There was this yearning for British leadership.

Every time they dreamed up something,

in the famous words of Mrs Thatcher, we said, "No, no, no!"

And we wouldn't have anything to do with it.

And this was one of the reasons

why I begged to go to those early discussions.

Rather than sending a senior minister, or indeed any minister,

we sent Mr Russell Bretherton,

a middle-ranking official from the Board of Trade.

His contributions to discussions were mainly giving the impression

that he was trying to sow doubt about what we were doing.

Asking questions such as,

"You do not really believe that a customs union

"would be possible among countries like you?"

And, "You do not really believe that it would ever be possible

"to create a common agricultural market?" I mean, that sort of contribution.

He was sucking a pipe most of the time, but...

And looking at us

like he was a teacher of a naughty class of children.

He bowed out, on instructions from London, of course,

saying that London thought that they knew now enough

about what the validity was of the proposal,

that he had come to the conclusion that it would never work

and that, therefore, there was no sense in him wasting any more time and energy.

We didn't bother about it,

because he had not been playing a very active role.

And we thought maybe he'd come back tomorrow,

but he didn't come back and we never saw him again.

MUSIC: Chorus Of The Hebrew Slaves by Verdi

Once again, the six went ahead without Britain.

In 1957, they signed the Treaty of Rome

to create the European Economic Community

on what was the seat of power in Ancient Rome.

This was no mere common market.

The moment of emotion was the day we signed the treaty in Rome.

There is what's left of the Roman Empire

and we all felt that we all belonged

to the same cult of the same civilisation.

We felt very strongly to be home.

One young German MP, who would go on to lead his country,

was so dismayed by Britain's absence

that he couldn't bring himself to vote to ratify the treaty.

Britain was not in it and I thought this was a major mistake.

I was a convinced European,

but if Britain was not a member, I thought it would go wrong,

and, therefore, I did abstain.

'For thousands of years,

'frontiers have dominated the life of continental Europe.

'And at the frontier most things come to a stop.

'And now this age-old system is being changed.'

This is where many of today's arguments

about freedom of movement and free trade began.

Back in the 1950s, you had to queue up at customs,

have your passport checked every time you drove across the border

between continental countries.

Lorries had to wait for hours at a time.

The big idea enshrined in the Treaty of Rome

was that citizens of the new European club

should be free, not just to buy and sell and shift money across frontiers,

but to move freely as well.

'In the Common Market the barriers are gradually coming down,

'the barriers to trade, the barriers to the free movement...'

Western Europe began to recover from the war faster than anyone had expected.

'And Europe is on the way to unity on the trade winds of change.

'At the speed she's going,

'the European Community will be rid of all artificial barriers to trade by 1970.'

But Britain was in no rush to change the old ways.

We had a new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan,

who embodied British ambivalence to Europe.

He'd served in Churchill's wartime government

and built a close relationship with the leader of the Free French, General de Gaulle.

But Macmillan had become alarmed

by the rapid economic growth of Western Europe, particularly Germany.

He reckoned at first that Britain could only score

if we knobbled Europe's new club.

Macmillan was completely hostile.

He said, "You're going to ruin our trade.

"This is the end of our trade.

"We cannot accept that. And I'm going to fight you."

Macmillan wasn't to fight for very long,

he was to lead the country through an extraordinary U-turn in its attitude to Europe.

Why is revealed in these government papers,

held in the National Archives at Kew.

In a memo written before the Common Market was formed,

before Macmillan was Prime Minister, he writes,

"It may be very dangerous to us.

"For perhaps Messina," those talks that set up the Common Market,

"will come off after all and that will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany,

"and used as an instrument for the revival of German power through economic means.

"It is really giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent."

He signs off, "I don't want this matter to slide.

"I believe it may be one of the most difficult

"that we have to deal with in the next few years. HM."

HM was eventually to conclude that if you can't beat them, join them.

The change itself came enormously suddenly.

The ground had been shifting below,

but the buildings had not shifted on top.

And suddenly, in June 1960,

Macmillan circulated to Cabinet colleagues

a note asking for their departments' views

about the advantages and the disadvantages

of joining the Community. And, I think,

to most people in Whitehall this struck like a thunderbolt.

'Goodbye, England. You wave and you're off for the day,

'off to the continent for a day of wine and wonders

'and back in time for a goodnight cup of cocoa.'

Soon British diplomats were waving goodbye to England,

popping over to the Continent to get negotiating.

'There'll be land ahoy. A foreign land, France,

'yet so close to our own country

'that a passport really does seem a most absurd formality.'

The minister Macmillan put in charge

would become the leading man in Britain's European drama.

His name was Edward Heath.

His challenge, to find ways to bring the British economy

and British trade into line with the rules of the Common Market,

which we'd had no part in writing.

That meant ending the special deals we'd had with the Commonwealth.

He and his team spent 15 long months in Brussels,

haggling over everything from cars to fish to poultry.

We couldn't open the windows because the traffic and the trams

made too much of a noise outside.

The atmosphere inside the room, the physical atmosphere,

was quite appalling.

You have to remember that in those days,

probably 50, 60, 70% of the people attending the conference smoked like chimneys.

And, of those, probably one third smoked cigars.

And the impact of that on the human frame

was at times nearly intolerable.

'In Brussels, Mr Heath has fashioned for himself a political stature

'he's never quite achieved before.

'People ask if he might not be the next prime minister but one.'

Macmillan took a back seat whilst Ted Heath took over the driving.

I was there the whole time.

Any other minister who was invited and hadn't been there,

and, obviously, couldn't know when he came

what the atmosphere was like,

what things had to be avoided, what things could be pressed.

And, therefore, in order to avoid any difficulties

arising from their position, it was much better I should keep the whole thing under control.

'The whole future balance of power is being discussed here

'in terms of the relative number of eggs laid by hens

'in Denmark and France.'

There was always friction with the Ministry of Agriculture.

Ted explained in political terms that the moment of truth had come,

that the nonsense had got to stop,

that big concessions had now got to be made.

And he then said, "Now, what are they?"

And he began extracting these concessions, personally, one by one.

On the home front, a battle began for public support,

a little like today's, a little.

'This programme is going to be about Britain and Europe.

'It's one of the great issues of the day.

'And rightly so, for much depends upon it.'

'Why have we entered into these negotiations

'with the European Economic Community?

'There are powerful political and economic reasons

'why we have done so.'

It was not said that the Community had no political content

but it was argued, and argued very strongly,

that it was a primarily economic community.

Now, actually, that is not true.

I think that some of the people who said that knew it was not true.

Opponents of the Common Market argued then, as they do now,

that being in the European club would undermine our sovereignty.

Leading the charge, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Europe now became the great party-splitter.

For we are not just a part of Europe, at least not yet.

We have a different history.

We have ties and links which run across the whole world.

If this is the idea,

the end of Britain as an independent nation state -

I make no apology for repeating it - the end of 1,000 years of history,

you may say, "All right, let it end,"

but, my goodness,

it's a decision that needs a little care and thought.

APPLAUSE

To find that our hero was actually saying that the Common Market

represented the end of 1,000 years of British history,

that our borders were not on the Rhine,

they were on the Himalayas, and so forth, was a terrible shock.

I mean, it was actually a kind of personal agony.

I'd had a very long lunch with him in the Garrick Club,

about two to three weeks beforehand,

in which we'd tried to reach common ground,

and we'd gone until about 4.30pm.

Everybody else had gone,

and he was pacing up and down in the small back room there,

but the more we talked, the further apart we got,

so, in that sense, it wasn't a shock to me, except that I...

As he made various points of "1,000 years of history",

I thought, "Oh, Christ, it's even worse than I thought."

It was a Tory, 68-year-old Harold Macmillan,

who came to see Europe as this country's modern future

and asked to be let in.

First, though,

he needed to woo France's President Charles de Gaulle,

to persuade him to say "oui" to Britain joining.

Negotiations in Brussels seemed to be going well,

but the summit at Rambouillet was to give Macmillan a shock.

MAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH

MUSIC: Milord by Edith Piaf

Macmillan's charm offensive had failed.

De Gaulle spelt out why to his Cabinet,

in words noted down by his Information Minister.

# Mais vous pleurez, Milord

# Ca, je l'aurais jamais cru... #

Macmillan didn't actually cry in front of his French hosts

but, on the way home, he was in tears.

He kept de Gaulle's rebuff to himself,

leaving Heath and his team to soldier on in Brussels.

# Allez riez, Milord

# Allez chantez, Milord... #

"No disaster at Rambouillet. It passed off OK."

That's the message that we read.

Well, we read it wrong.

A few days later, de Gaulle went public to

"squash" - his word - Britain's Common Market application,

at an electrifying press conference in Paris.

800 journalists hung on his every word.

LAUGHTER

The mood in the delegation was of fury -

fury at the arrogance of the man.

My reaction was, "This is going to be front page news

"in every newspaper in the world."

It was like thunder had struck in the room.

We were all flabbergasted.

Each phrase was a new nail in the coffin of the negotiations

and I think only by the end of it did we all realise that this was,

in fact, tantamount to a veto.

# Mais vous pleurez, Milord... #

Macmillan's silent agony at the betrayal by a wartime colleague

finally boiled over.

If there was an objection in principle,

we should surely have been told so from the start.

'A staggering blow is dealt to

'Western unity in this council hall

'in Brussels, when France blackballs Britain from the Common Market.'

The formal veto came from de Gaulle's Foreign Minister,

Maurice Couve de Murville, who, only two weeks before,

had convinced Ted Heath that British entry would not be blocked.

Couve laid the blame entirely on the British.

That we were...

We refused to accept community disciplines here and there

and so on.

You asked about my own reaction.

I had thought, when we went in there,

that Couve de Murville was going to have

a very embarrassing, difficult passage,

explaining the inexplicable.

But, in fact, I felt exceedingly angry as time went by.

I thought that what he was saying was so outrageous,

any sympathy I might have had for him quickly evaporated.

Edward Heath, then unbelievably calm,

took up Couve's points, one by one.

He didn't say, "This is an outrageous travesty," and so on.

In judicial fashion, really -

the learned, QC-type approach -

he destroyed all these arguments,

pointing out that we had agreed to this. We had agreed to that.

We had agreed to that.

He completely demolished Couve's argument.

The French were very definitely "them"

but, on this occasion,

the other five member states almost became "us".

The British delegation got up to go

and all the five ministers -

not Couve, but the representatives of the other member states -

all lined up to congratulate...

At least, it's... I say that, and it's a slip of the tongue,

but it's an interesting slip of the tongue.

Because it was... It was a very warm farewell.

These hard-nosed, very experienced old hands,

I was surprised to see so many of them visibly moved,

and moved to the point of tears.

Do you accept it was a betrayal by the French?

Oui, c'est vrai.

I can still see Couve de Murville,

at the far end of the table on the right, back to the window,

sort of laughing with...

In retrospect, I think they must have found it acutely embarrassing.

# Thank God for Englishmen

# And not Common Market scum

# For why should we be pally with the wogs who started Calais?

# Old de Gaulle may be ten feet tall and think he's Napoleon

# But the French wash every three days on bidets

# The Herrenvolk are a standing joke with their shorts and hairy knees

# And the poor old Dutch do nothing much

# But smell very faintly of cheese

# An Italian beau always says hello

# With a squeeze of the finger and thumb... #

Thank you.

# So thank God for Englishmen

# And not Common Market

# Not Common Market

# Not Common Market scum. #

We tend to forget our failures -

we forget our humiliations, in the sense it was a humiliation -

so it's wiped from the public memory.

Nevertheless, to my mind, it was the moment,

that day in January 1963, when Britain turned towards Europe.

The United Kingdom had made its decision for Europe.

From that moment on, whatever the frustrations,

there could be no going back.

There's nothing like being barred from a club to make you

desperate to join it.

It took a "non" from the old enemy across the Channel

to persuade the British to say yes to Europe,

and Ted Heath, the man thwarted by de Gaulle,

became obsessed with overturning the French veto.

He said that our membership of the Common Market would only work

with the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people -

perhaps that's where the trouble began.

-CHEERING

-Our purpose is not to divide

but to unite.

I'm worn out. I've been shopping for six hours.

What have you bought?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

A complete waste of time!

-Wicked, isn't it?

-Wicked?

It'll be worse when we join the Common Market.

That nice Mr Heath would never allow that!

HE PLAYS ORGAN

That night, Mr Heath was a man of deeply-held passions -

for music, for sailing, but, above all, for Europe.

He wanted to be the maestro who would lead his country

into the European ensemble.

In the 1930s, he'd seen for himself the horrors of Nazi Germany.

In the war, he took part in the D-Day landings.

He believed that only a united Europe,

with Britain at its heart, could prevent another war.

De Gaulle's successor as French President, Georges Pompidou,

was ready to listen.

Heath had already struck up a friendship with

Pompidou's right-hand man.

Heath asked Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Christopher Soames,

who was Britain's ambassador to France,

to open secret talks with Pompidou.

His task was to prevent another French veto.

One aspect of it was the astonishing fact that

President Pompidou conducted

these very important talks without the knowledge of

either his own Prime Minister, Chaban-Delmas,

or his Foreign Secretary, Maurice Schumann.

It seems quite extraordinary, but it was so.

After six months of talking,

the two sides were ready for a leaders' summit in Paris,

its aim, to erase the painful memories of a decade earlier -

to convert that French "non" into an enthusiastic "oui".

I knew that, to settle all of this,

it had to be the French President who did it,

and the only person who could, with the French President,

was myself as Prime Minister.

At the Elysee Palace, scene of the vital talks on

the Common Market,

between the French President Monsieur Pompidou

and our Prime Minister.

The talks are regarded as the final make-or-break attempt to

get Britain into the European Economic Community.

Ted Heath was a very thorough man,

and I remember him sitting out,

and people coming and talking to him

about New Zealand butter,

talking to him about the sterling area,

talking about the financial arrangements...

Talking to him so that he really absorbed into himself

the detail of the discussion.

Heath hadn't just mastered the detail -

a man often seen as stiff and icy switched on his biggest smile.

He'd cooked up a plan to win over French hearts

by appealing to their stomachs.

Ambassador Soames, a well-known bon viveur,

invited the President and his wife to leave the presidential palace

and join Heath for lunch at the British Embassy instead.

A good deal would be easy to swallow after a good meal.

And I remember we had salmon with a mayonnaise...

with a mint mayonnaise to start with.

Actually, it was a sea trout which had come down from Scotland.

We had English lamb, I think it was,

and we had some seriously spectacular wines.

Which was, I think, a '55 claret and a '35 port,

and I think we had Chateau d'Yquem, with a very exciting sweet.

All in real Soames style.

Inside the embassy, if there'd been any doubt about the prevailing

atmosphere between the two heads of government,

that was dispelled at once in the way they reacted to each other.

It seemed to bear out this evening's headline,

in English, in the Paris newspaper France Soir,

"Pompidou-Heath Smiling Day."

The two leaders returned to the Elysee Palace for

a historic press conference, in a room still remembered by many.

This was the very room in which de Gaulle had pronounced the veto

and, when Pompidou made his famous remark,

"There are those who say that France is determined to exclude Britain,

"and there are those who say that Britain is...

"does not have a European vocation,

"and you see before you two men who are convinced of the contrary"...

Ils sont convaincus du cointraire.

..it was a marvellous moment.

I had no idea he was going to

say anything of that kind,

and, at this moment, I...

When I had recovered myself, because I was moved by this,

I looked at the correspondents

and there were many wet eyes in the room.

Macmillan's tears of pain had been replaced by tears of joy.

How's it going, Prime Minister?

The French veto was a thing of the past.

CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS All that was left to do was to

settle those negotiations

in Brussels about the little things, like the cost of food and money(!)

We were left, simply, at the end,

with New Zealand dairy products,

taking cheese and milk together,

and our contribution to the budgets.

On the third day of a marathon session, the deal was done.

The great windows at the end of the council chamber were blood red

with the dawn, and people began to clap

and we felt that there had been a turning point in history

and then the champagne was produced.

Beautiful. Lovely.

You can turn it into a loving cup...

Ca commence bien.

You can have the other side of the glass.

But there were those back home who weren't in love with Europe.

'Tower Bridge was opened when a mini armada of England's fishermen

'sailed their boats up the Thames to protest against the

'government's fishing terms for entering into the Common Market.

'The men were making the trip upriver because they believe that Mr Rippon,

'Britain's chief Common Market negotiator, is selling them down the river.'

It all went very well.

I mean, there was general approval of what had been achieved.

Obviously, critics were still saying we'd given away too much,

but the general impression was that it was all right. It was virtually over.

Far from it. Getting a deal in Europe is one thing,

getting a deal in the House of Commons is quite another.

A Prime Minister faced with a divided party simply needs

the votes of MPs in other parties. Sound familiar?

Ted Heath in the '70s faced the same problem as David Cameron does today.

He, too, faced accusations of using tricks and ruses.

The first of which was to say to Tory MPs,

you can vote how you like on Europe.

His real intention was to reach out to Labour's pro-Europeans

to tell them - vote with your conscience, vote with me.

It was a plan dreamt up just down the road in Downing Street,

by the Tory Chief Whip Francis Pym.

Our overall majority in the Commons was only 25

and we had something like 18 determined anti-marketeers,

so that our majority on this issue,

if the Labour Party were united against us, was clearly extremely vulnerable.

But the Labour Party was split.

While most of its MPs were anti, some of its senior figures

were passionately devoted to the cause of taking Britain into Europe.

It is an opportunity which offers great benefits for us

and great benefits for Europe as a whole.

Harold Wilson, Labour's leader, did what so many have done over the years,

he fudged and waffled and played for time.

I'm not going to say we should go in whatever the terms,

I'm not going to say we should stay out.

We must wait for the terms.

But once the terms were known, Wilson had to come off the fence.

In fact, he was pushed off it by a speech given by his own

Shadow Foreign Secretary James Callaghan.

If we have to prove our Europeanism by accepting that French is the

dominant language in the Community,

then my answer is quite clear

and I will say it in French in order to prevent any misunderstanding.

Non. Merci beaucoup.

LAUGHTER

But it was Heath who had the last laugh.

'The great Parliamentary debate on Europe was fought for six days

'on the floor of the House.

'Many MPs have described it as the greatest debate in Britain's

'parliamentary history.'

Dozens of Labour MPs broke ranks with their leader, voting with

a Tory prime minister, and their consciences, to say yes to Europe.

We watched, sort of, hawk-like as each person broke away

and came into the lobby and everybody was being watched

very closely to see what way they went and how they voted.

But we had a sense, almost, I think, of solidarity that made it

actually quite hard not to vote in the yes lobby.

And then the tellers came in

and this enormous majority was announced.

Mainly because Roy Jenkins had had the courage to lead 68 Labour MPs

into the Ayes lobby to vote for it.

And there was pandemonium on the Labour benches.

RAUCOUS SHOUTING

It's one of the few times, I think ever, I've heard

in the House of Commons bad language being used.

You know, it's not the kind of thing you normally do.

But bad language was used that night!

I remember someone crying out at Roy Jenkins, "Fascist bastard."

It was an ugly moment.

There were one or two - how should I put it? - disobliging remarks.

'The parliamentary vote was in favour of joining the six

'with a majority of 112 for the government.'

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

To celebrate, Harold Macmillan, the man who the French had snubbed,

lit a bonfire on the white cliffs of Dover.

Just as they'd done in Churchill's day to celebrate victory in Europe.

Heath headed to Brussels to sign the treaty which would bind

the UK into the European Economic community.

It created quite a splash.

Well, I remember, you know, we marched into the great gathering,

when somebody threw a bottle of ink over Ted Heath.

Most unfortunate - not normal ink, but Indian ink, black and sticky -

very accurately by a German lady.

Mr Heath was thrust into a lift and somebody pressed a button

and he disappeared.

It's almost unbelievable, but it took about quarter of an hour to find him.

The problem was, to clean up the Prime Minister.

The ink had gone over his head as well,

in his hair and one side of his face

and it was very difficult to shift.

An hour behind schedule, Heath arrived to sign the treaty.

He was well aware that before it could become law, he would face

many more hours of parliamentary debates and manoeuvres.

At least he knew that his young, loyal MPs were sharing in the celebrations.

I supported Ted Heath

and I supported him wholeheartedly...

..in the eventual signing of the treaty.

Well, we can all be foolish in our youth.

It's much better to be foolish in your youth

and discover wisdom in your old age than the other way around!

But there were others on the Tory benches who saw the whole

European adventure as not just foolish but a threat.

Enoch Powell had backed Heath's efforts to get us in in the 1960s.

Now, though, he savaged the Prime Minister for betraying his nation.

I do not believe

that this nation, which has maintained and defended

its independence for 1,000 years,

will now submit to see it merged or lost.

Nor did I become a member

of our sovereign parliament in order to consent

to that sovereignty being abated or transferred.

Heath believed that by sharing sovereignty in Europe,

Britain's influence in the world would grow.

But he knew Powell and his small band of supporters could link up with Labour.

They could wreck the legislation required to enshrine

the treaty in British law.

So, he kept the European Communities Bill very short.

It may have been far-reaching, but it had just 12 clauses,

making the wreckers' job harder.

The simplicity of the bill overwhelmed all that saw it.

I think the government was as delighted with it

as the opposition was horrified by it.

But of course we can stop them.

The mountain of legislation required for that purpose can be held up

in Parliament until we get what British democracy requires -

the right to choose.

The opposition had thought that it might be a 1,000 clause bill.

Of course, but they were wrong...

..and those who were opposed to it, like Michael Foot,

wanted to have the greatest possible excuse for holding up the whole

thing for years and wrecking it.

That's why they demanded 1,000 clauses.

There was no justification for it.

Now all that was needed was to make sure that Tory MPs stayed loyal,

another job for the party whips.

Those who would support the government through thick and thin,

because they were Europeans in their outlook, we called "the robust".

And we indicated them on our daily list with a blue sign, a blue tick.

On the other extreme, would be those who we could never persuade

and they would have some good reasons, some bad reasons

for voting against the government and we gave them the

collective title of "the shits"

and we marked them off with a brown pencil.

And then in the middle, there was a larger group than the others,

which we called "the wets".

And it was a term, in fact, invented by the then Chief Whip Francis Pym.

Any loss of a vote or any setback

in the course of this passage was a blow to the whole

standing of the government and the whole position.

So, the stakes just could not have been higher.

But with anti-Common Market demonstrators on the streets,

accusing Heath of betraying Britain, he needed every vote he could get.

Pro-Market Labour rebels didn't have the nerve to keep

defying their party en bloc.

So, Heath's party managers had one more ruse,

they did secret deals with sympathetic Labour MPs.

The Labour Party knew, and those pro-Europeans in the Labour Party

knew, that I wasn't asking for anything excessive

but I had my back to the wall and when we needed a bit of help,

they provided it and they knew we were not asking for anything excessive.

We always knew and the whips knew, that if they were wanted, they would come.

How did you know that?

In the usual way.

A secret back channel was arranged between the government

and pro-Common Market Labour MPs.

For years afterwards, those in the know still didn't want to talk openly about it.

There was no collusion in which I was involved,

but the government was never defeated.

I think I was, sort of, kept away from anything like that.

People disappeared, they went to films, they just didn't show up and so forth.

There was quite a bit of quiet understanding that there were

certain amendments where it was better for people to just find

themselves speaking at a meeting in Little Gainsborough or something

so that they wouldn't be there.

Details of the secret channel were kept by a little-known

Labour backbencher, John Roper, in a big red book.

Its pages enabled him to guarantee there would be just enough

Labour abstentions for Heath's government to win every vote.

The tactic was to try and ensure that we got the bill through,

but without having a phalanx of 20-25 Labour pro-Europeans

who were abstaining right through the bill.

I knew the people who I could rely on and I knew others who

I could turn to when it was necessary.

It was a secret, it was a secret arrangement.

I mean, everybody knew what was happening, how it was happening

nobody quite knew, and that seemed to me very satisfactory.

It was enough to seal Britain's membership of the European Community, now the EU.

It was not enough to silence those dismayed that we'd joined

without the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people.

In Brussels, British residents saw in the New Year with

a celebration of the fact that Europe now meant "us", not "them".

'Officially, we became members at midnight local time,

'but to make doubly sure they kept things going for another hour

'until midnight Greenwich Time sounded in London.'

I don't think people understood, they didn't care,

they didn't take any notice of a bill being passed

which solemnly renounced the supremacy of

Parliament in legislation in control of finance and which subordinated

the courts of this country to the courts of the European Community.

But we were imbued with the idea that we were building something big,

something important for the future of Europe

and for the future of the world, and inevitably, there are changes which

come then and that was something, a price which we had to pay.

It was a coup d'etat by a political class who didn't believe

in popular sovereignty, that's what it was, it was a coup d'etat.

The power was seized by parliamentarians,

they seized power that didn't belong to them

and they used it to take away the rights from those they represented. That's how I saw it.

Ted was right when they said you can only do a thing like this with

the full-hearted consent of the people, but he knew he hadn't got it.

And this is coming home to roost upon his successors.

After the long years of haggling and all the politicking,

all we had to do was hand over our signed membership documents.

'But even here the ceremony was in a low-key.

'The letters were accepted by one of the departmental directors general

on the 15th floor landing.

In little more than a year, Britain would be questioning

its European membership and as we'll hear in next week's programme,

planning a referendum very like the one we're having now.

-Happy New Year.

-Happy New Year.

There was no plan then to give the people their say,

instead the Queen was escorted by her prime minister

to his Fanfare For Europe.

A grand celebration at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

Europe was now officially us.

Let us pause to consider the English,

because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, this -

that to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club

there is.

A club to which benighted bounders of Frenchmen and Germans

and Italians et cetera, cannot even aspire to belong,

because they don't even speak English.

LAUGHTER

Behind the scenes, the European dream had already moved on.

Europe's founders were now contemplating the next step

in ever closer union - economic and monetary union.

In other words, a single currency.

Even before he celebrated with the Queen, Heath knew things

were about to change.

I was across at Number Ten when the message came in

from Pompidou setting the agenda for the meeting

and the centrepoint of it was a move towards economic and monetary union,

which Pompidou suggested we should aim at for 1980

and we saw this.

Heath then came in and read the message and made no comment.

And then Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary,

also came in - read it -

and he looked across at Ted Heath and said,

"I don't think the House will like this very much, Ted."

Is that what Alec Home said?

To which Heath said, "But that, Alec, is what it's all about."

Hm.

Well, that's what it WAS about...

..and we'd have got it.

# We've got to get in to get on

# You must move ahead or we fall behind

# Nothing in life stays the same

# We got to get in to get on. #