Voice of the People Europe: Them or Us

Is Europe them or us?

Should this island nation be part of

or separate from the European club?

It's a question we've faced for decades.

We are better off out.

-In.

-Why's that?

-We'd be mugs to come out.

I think we're best left alone out of it altogether.

Personally, I'm very much in favour of it.

I can't see any good coming out of it for the British people.

At least we'll have a say as to what goes on in Europe,

but if we're not in, we won't.

I don't think our sovereignty will be affected.

We should keep out of the common market, cos we've dealt with the Germans twice.

At the moment, all I can see is that it's all talk, talk, talk.

Everyone always says, you know, you've got to listen to the people.

When you listen to the people, you hear different things.

Yes, it's true, some people are virulently anti-Europe,

there are others that aren't.

Now the people will decide our future in Europe,

but it's not for the first time.

Are you prepared to accept the verdict of the people on Thursday?

Today, like four decades ago, we face a historic choice.

This is the story of how and why the British people are being asked

to decide our future in Europe again.

It is the story of a long and turbulent debate,

told with interviews old and new.

This is our generation's moment to have that debate.

For a small minority, on either side, this is a matter of passion.

For most people, it's like the weather -

it's there and they got on with it.

But we've got to settle this issue. Britain has to decide -

the British people have to decide.

It's no excuse afterwards to say, "Well, I couldn't be bothered."

One Prime Minister after another, one party after another,

has sought to resolve our European question. None has so far succeeded.

Indeed, one after another has paid a heavy political price

for trying to do so.

No wonder it's been so very tempting for the politicians to ask

the people to resolve it for them,

to promise to renegotiate our relationship with Europe

and then give us a vote in a referendum.

Sound familiar?

Not today, but more than 40 years ago...

TICKING

# Waterloo - I was defeated you won the war... #

Britain hosted Eurovision in the year which was Ted Heath's Waterloo.

Out went the Tory Prime Minister who'd taken us INTO Europe,

in came Labour's Harold Wilson.

He promised a fundamental renegotiation

to be followed by a referendum,

and he put his Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan in charge.

Callaghan summoned all of Britain's ambassadors

to common market countries.

When they came to the Foreign Office,

he told them how things were going to change.

He called all the ambassadors together,

came in, opened his blue Foreign Office box

and took out eight copies of the Labour Party manifesto,

which he handed round to the ambassadors.

Made a joke about them having to pay for them

and they weren't quite sure whether this was a joke or not -

some were half fumbling for change in their pockets!

And then told them the page on which to open the manifesto,

which they duly did.

And Jim said, "Would you read the paragraphs on Britain in Europe."

They weren't quite sure whether

they were supposed to read these tout ensemble out loud or whether...

but they read them and Jim said,

"I thought you'd like to know, this is our European policy."

We, I suppose, rather cynical Foreign Office people

thought this a bit odd.

-Did you do that?

-I don't think we did do the manifesto, no.

I honestly never got the manifesto out and started reading it.

No, I never did that.

The renegotiation that we were pledged to

by our manifestos in 1974,

binding the next Labour government,

was a "fundamental renegotiation".

Those were the words deliberately inserted.

At the end of the period of renegotiation,

it will be important for us to decide,

both in Europe's interest and in Britain's interest,

whether this is an arrangement that is suitable and agreeable

and worthwhile to both of us.

Callaghan wasted no time,

he headed across the Channel to deliver Labour's election promise.

Jim Callaghan went to Brussels as Foreign Secretary and made

the first speech, which sounded very tough and reassured people.

But then every point was conceded, and at the very end,

the constitutional question, which was the really important one,

were never discussed.

But how do you renegotiate a treaty that Britain has already signed

and other countries don't want to rewrite?

It was a problem then, just as it's been a problem now.

I suspect that he came to the conclusion very early on,

either that a fundamental renegotiation was impractical,

or that it wasn't worth the fury

and the difficulties of disengagement that might follow.

If Britain was to stay in the European Community,

the divided public and a split party would have to be persuaded.

The German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a fellow man of the left,

was invited to address a special Labour Party conference.

It was unclear to me whether Harold Wilson really wanted to

stay inside the community, or was...left his options open.

And I would not have been surprised if he had taken Britain out again.

Eternal greetings of the largest...

But how could the German leader avoid looking like

he was telling the British people what to do?

The anti-Common Market Cabinet minister Barbara Castle

took it upon herself to give Schmidt some friendly advice.

I warned that if Helmut, who could be an aggressive man -

I knew him quite well, of course -

were to take that line,

he would face booing and possibly a slow handclap.

Your comrades on the Continent want you to stay and you, please,

will have to weigh this, if you talk of solidarity.

You have to weigh it.

APPLAUSE

Helmut's speech was absolutely masterly

and I noted in my diary that night

that probably I, an anti-marketeer,

had done more than anybody to help keep Britain in the Common Market.

Schmidt and Wilson met at Chequers to do a deal.

Wilson would back staying in, in return Schmidt would give Wilson

enough concessions to claim his renegotiation had made a difference.

Many believe that today's British and German leaders

have done much the same.

If he was to let Britain stay within the community,

it was necessary to give him some...

er, success in the renegotiations.

On his 59th birthday, Harold Wilson celebrated.

He claimed to have substantially achieved our objectives.

The Common Market would now, he said, be firmly under the political

direction of the governments of member states.

But many saw his deal as a ruse to hold the Labour Party together.

Nothing fundamental came out of the renegotiation.

Nothing fundamental could have come out of the renegotiation.

And it was essentially a brilliant ploy by Harold Wilson to make

the antis feel that their position had been taken seriously

and every possible attempt had been made to meet it -

but, you know, sadly, unfortunately our European colleagues were not

very sympathetic, so there was only a certain amount we could do.

I thought it was very clever, it was a sort of brilliant waltz.

All that remained was to get the thumbs-up

from the British people in a referendum.

Easier said than done.

Public opinion backed saying no by 2-1.

'What do you think of the Common Market?'

I don't think much of it, why?

I mean, what have they got for us? Nothing.

And what have they done for us? Nothing.

It's not doing us any good at the moment,

so I don't see any reason why it should do us any good in the future.

So, how could the country be persuaded to vote yes to Europe?

-The facts.

-The facts.

-It's a good one.

Now, you said sizes - 32, 36 - we must have a 38.

We simply must.

I can't get into one less and it's absolutely vital.

And they're going to have on them, what was it - "Europe or Bust"?

Compared to its well-funded rival, the No campaign looked bust.

Right, well, let's put some pins in showing where we're going to hold these large meetings.

-Starting in the north, with the Newcastle.

-And then we'll move...

'We were massive. I mean, it was a huge organisation.'

There were three of us!

It was a no contest from the start.

They had the ability and they did wage

a very efficient and sophisticated campaign,

because they had the financing to do it.

Over the last few weeks, Conservative,

Liberal and Labour Party leaders

have been travelling the country

talking to all sorts of people in all sorts of places.

Whatever their differences,

on this issue these politicians are united as never before.

The Yes campaign had one more asset.

The new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher,

who, back then, wore her pro-European colours with pride.

We want a jumper parade.

Come on, we want a jumper parade.

It's very fitting that you should keep an all-night vigil under

the statue of Sir Winston Churchill -

the first person to have the great vision

of working together for peace in Europe.

CHEERING

What would HE have made of it all?

Labour's leaders had never been Euro enthusiasts.

They'd hinted they were prepared to leave

but now they warned that the risks were simply too great.

First of all, please make sure that you go

and vote in the Common Market referendum on Thursday.

And secondly, the government asks you to vote Yes,

clearly and unmistakably.

MUSIC: I Do, I Do, I Do by ABBA

On 5th June, the votes of the British jury came in.

# Make your choice But believe me... #

Let's go and see what Bob's got there on his map

which is gradually filling up with green.

Here we are with our 22 counting areas indicated on the map.

If we cast our minds back to 1975, we're still in the period

where Britain is the so-called sick man of Europe.

That year, inflation within the United Kingdom

went up to 27%.

There was industrial strife, there was

a real sense that Britain was becoming a basket case.

The idea of economically being part of something that was doing

better than us really trumped any arguments about sovereignty.

And it's beginning to look as if

we may not have a single No counting area in Britain itself.

The referendum was decisive.

The country said Yes to Europe

and the Common Market by a margin of 2-1.

Now we make way gracefully for Play School.

We'll be back with more results at 4:25.

There was to be no happy ending.

In fact, what followed that referendum more than 40 years ago

felt more like a playground fight.

Those who won said to those who'd lost,

"Get over it, you've had your chance!"

Those who were defeated complained they'd been cheated,

it wasn't fair.

They'd been asked whether we wanted to join a Common Market

and we had ended up joining something that would turn into

something very, very different.

We hear it on the doorsteps all the time.

"I voted to join the Common Market,

"but I worry about what it has become or is becoming."

So, who was it who would sign up to the changes which transform

the Common Market?

None other than Margaret Thatcher.

Now seen as the Euro-sceptic's pin-up,

she was staunchly pro-European when she first came to power.

This was the Europhoria of the Tories and even Mrs Thatcher in '79.

History is rewritten, of course, that she was always opposed to the

European Community, always antagonistic.

She became antagonistic

about how she was treated in Dublin in the autumn of 1979.

Dublin was Mrs Thatcher's first big summit.

She arrived with a demand for what became known

as Mrs Thatcher's Billion,

the gap between what Britain paid in and what we got out.

Broadly speaking, for every £2 we contribute,

we get £1 back.

That leaves us with a net contribution of £1,000 million

next year to the community, and rising in the future.

Some saw this as a sort of late entry fee for joining

the European club after its rules had been drawn up.

Mrs Thatcher complained that Britain, along with Germany,

was footing the bill for everyone else.

Her fellow leaders didn't much like being lectured by the new girl.

The position of Mrs Thatcher was to say,

"I want my money back."

It was not HER money, no.

It was the money she had to pay.

She, several times during this meeting in Dublin,

said she wanted her money back.

And she wanted it now.

Honestly, how irritating... the way she did it.

I made the remark to my friend, she hasn't paid a single penny as yet.

Already she wants her pennies back.

Schmidt and Giscard were fed up, one of them pretending to go to sleep,

the other got very bored.

And I think she prejudiced our case.

They're all so smooth.

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

some things you can argue with

because it's only that way that you get to a solution.

Diplomacy won't necessary bring you to a solution.

The response of the European smoothies was far from diplomatic.

The summit went from bad to worse.

I think they were quite rude to her.

I remember she really was hopping mad they paid no attention

to her interventions and more or less told her to shut up.

Well, it's anybody's guess who has been more discourteous

at that meeting than the other.

The leaders gathered for a glum photo call.

Dublin had set the tone.

From then on, year after year, summit after summit,

the budget row rumbled on.

Again and again, Mrs Thatcher would insist

that Britain should get our money back.

Eventually, five years later, in Fontainebleau,

she swung that famous handbag

and did get a rebate of SOME of her billion,

but at what cost?

I was ashamed to see the British government as a beggar.

And, if a win is to receive a lot of money as a beggar,

it was a victory.

She got far more than she should have got.

On the short run, she won,

but whether a political price had to be paid on the longer run

is very difficult to say.

In the course of that argument, her good relations,

her intention to be

a new constructive spirit to Europe,

if you like, the cause of Conservative Europeanism,

really perished in that argument.

Europe is a community of nations dedicated towards one goal.

May we share the joke, Humphrey?

Oh, Minister, let's look at this objectively.

It is a game played for national interests and always was.

Why do you suppose we went into it?

To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations.

Oh, really?

We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.

LAUGHTER

The whole axis there was France and Germany.

France and Germany,

and what those said, the others tended to agree with.

It was not, though, an idea from the French or the Germans

that would turn Margaret Thatcher against Europe.

It was, ironically, an idea that emerged from her very own handbag.

She wanted to make it easier for companies to do

business across Europe, to turn the Common Market into a single market.

The problem was, that would involve watering down the power

of governments to block, or veto, proposals they didn't like.

The grand ambition of a Europe without frontiers

had become logjammed.

Countries were looking after their own, protecting their industries

not respecting the rules. At national borders, cash was king.

I'll be there for a day or two days.

At times, you might be able to get out of it

with a little coffee money.

What does coffee money mean?

Everybody knows what coffee money means.

Be a bit thick if...

It's a backhander.

Margaret Thatcher's ambition was not just to do away with coffee money,

but to lift all other barriers to free trade.

The historic ambition is to sweep away the frontiers,

visible and invisible, that still separate the nations

of the community.

-NICK CLEGG:

-If you have a marketplace, which is bound by common rules,

then, of course, logic dictates that you can't, sort of,

pick and choose the rules.

If you don't have a set of rules which are incumbent on everyone

to follow, then the whole thing falls apart and that,

ironically, of course,

was at the heart of a British initiative -

the single market.

MUSIC: Don't You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds

The man in charge of securing the powers Brussels needed

to enforce and police the single market

was the European Commission's new president, Jacques Delors,

a French socialist.

For Delors, a single market was just as much

about the rights of workers as business -

the message he would take to Thatcher's enemies

in the trade unions.

Jacques Delors is no pushover.

Or, as we say in French, "Il ne pas un pushover."

LAUGHTER

But it was another Delors plan that would

outrage Mrs Thatcher's supporters.

He wanted to revive the idea of a single European currency.

Ironically, he'd been backed by her to be the top man in Brussels,

but theirs was a relationship which quickly soured.

After one summit in London,

she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways.

No, I think it's much simpler than that.

She answered every question

and never let Delors say a word,

which was not really nice to him.

We did have a brief discussion, obviously...

Our policy on that has not changed.

'She quite simply forgot that Mr Delors was there.'

I missed the beginning of your...

'And then, when she did finally remember,'

Delors, I think, was sufficiently miffed by having

been hitherto ignored and excluded, not to wish to play much part

in the proceedings.

Monsieur Delors, I'm sure you'd like to say something about that.

If not, would you say it anyway?

LAUGHTER

No, no, no, no.

I am obliged to such discretion.

And he looked up, waking up,

he probably hadn't been listening to the English.

It's quite hard to listen in a different language,

and he didn't say anything.

Do you mean you can refuse to talk to them?

LAUGHTER

Well, would you very kindly confirm that what I said

was absolutely strictly accurate and...

LAUGHTER

..that you are looking forward to this and rising...

LAUGHTER

..and rising to the challenge it represents

and you will hope to solve it during your coming two years

-as presidency of the Commission?

-LAUGHTER

I hope.

I hope.

'She misinterpreted his silence and said...'

I had no idea you were such a strong, silent man.

LAUGHTER

'He understood that, and he thought it was addressed at his expense.'

So that both sides had caused each other offence quite inadvertently.

Delors is the kind of guy who is not pleased with this

kind of joke, and he didn't speak.

To keep Delors and his grand schemes under control,

Thatcher sent one of her own Cabinet to Brussels.

Arthur Cockfield was a former taxman.

Thatcher thought he was a pen pusher,

who would be prepared to do her bidding,

but Cockfield went native,

backing his new boss, Jacques Delors, instead.

He explained to Thatcher that the single market meant harmonising VAT.

I got no reply to this

and realising, of course, that I wasn't going to get a reply,

I pressed a little further.

I said, "It was in the Treaty of Rome

"and you ought to have read it before you signed it."

She said, "I didn't sign it."

I said, "I know you didn't,

"but you were a member of the Cabinet which did."

And that also was greeted in total silence.

The way they needed to get that past Mrs Thatcher,

which has become very clear now,

is that Cockfield came back and, with the connivance of others,

sold this directly to her as a market mechanism.

She was never aware and never accepted

how wide the single market was.

Delors' plans where the most significant changes

to the European Community ever made.

Back then, there were only ten members at the table.

Now, there are almost three times that number.

But what they, what she agreed in Luxembourg,

didn't just expand what Europe did,

it limited any country's veto power to block it

by expanding so-called majority voting.

I suppose there are some people who are going to say this

majority voting means that we could be voted down on important subjects?

Yes, but on the other hand, we do need to get some of our trade

and business into the Common Market, which has stopped now because they

won't agreed to certain standards because one person can veto it.

So, we need to stop some of those abuses.

She accepted this very, very big increase in majority voting

because she thought it necessary in order to get the right decisions

taken to complete the single market, and I think she was right.

At the last moment, Mrs Thatcher hesitated about the whole deal.

She swallowed hard and signed up,

but how would she persuade her MPs to do the same?

Simple - brief reporters that nothing much had changed at all.

The Common Market summit ended late last night in Luxembourg

after two long days of debate.

But all that emerged were a few modest reforms

of the Treaty of Rome.

The law enacting the transfer of so many powers

from Westminster to Brussels, the Single European Act,

was rushed through the Commons at top speed.

The debates lasted just a few days,

many MPs scarcely knew what they were voting on.

I can well remember how Mrs Thatcher got that through the Commons.

We started the debates on a Thursday,

and MPs don't like complex debates on Thursday

because they want to go home, and the Whip simply said to us,

"You've got to keep going forever.

"If need be, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

"Keep going until we've got all this through."

I'm not sure that I gave the Single European Act

the close attention that I should have done.

I felt that if Mrs Thatcher,

with her well-known nationalistic views, was happy with the

Single European Act, that I ought to be able to go along with it.

I remember asking her, "Why did you vote for the Single European Act?"

For, surely, that was the beginning of it, of the real

change in the European Union, as far as we were concerned.

She said, "I accept I shouldn't have, I was misled over this."

This woman is totally in control of every facet of policy.

She knew that this was a big expansion of majority voting.

Mrs Thatcher was, in many ways,

the Trojan horse...

..the British veto position, which had been held on to

as long and as vigorously as possible,

was now substantially abandoned by

the one British Prime Minister who took, generally speaking,

the most resolutely critical line against the European Community.

It is a paradox.

For decades, opponents of Britain's membership of the European club

have claimed that it involves sacrificing our sovereignty,

giving away the power of Parliament to decide what's right for us.

Over just six nights, it was the House of Commons itself

which voted to surrender the British veto on proposals

coming from Brussels on a wide swathe of policy.

And whose lead were they following?

Margaret Thatcher's.

It is etched on my heart.

I trusted them, I believed in them,

I believed it was good faith between nations cooperating together.

So, we got our fingers burnt.

Once you got your fingers burnt, you don't go and burn them again.

That pain wouldn't stay hidden

behind the door of Number Ten for long.

Mrs Thatcher prepared a speech that would reveal the

full depth of her fury.

To be delivered in - where else? -

Belgium, in the small town of Bruges.

There had been, initially, a very, sort of,

pro-European Foreign Office draft,

which Margaret Thatcher

had rejected with contempt.

There had been then a new draft, which had

emanated from Number Ten, in which she really spoke from the heart

and it was an extremely xenophobic speech.

And, of course, the Foreign Office had kittens, understandably.

The Foreign Office was increasingly reluctant as the awful truth

of what was going to emerge in Bruges dawned upon it.

And it made some valiant attempts to get the draft changed.

By the time Thatcher arrived in Belgium,

the Foreign Office had managed to get one or two emollient phrases

into the speech, but that wasn't enough.

Mr Chairman, you have invited me to speak

on the subject of Britain and Europe.

Perhaps, I should congratulate you on your courage.

LAUGHTER

If you believe some of the things said

and written about my views on Europe, it must seem rather like

inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence.

LAUGHTER

To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the

centre of a European conglomerate

would be highly damaging.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state

in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level,

with a European superstate exercising a new dominance

from Brussels.

Phrases about the "superstate at the heart of Europe",

"decisions being taken by bureaucracy",

really challenging all the central institutions of the community,

they hadn't been used by heads of government in any country

until that time.

So, they produced a sense of shock and hostility which,

in retrospect, look almost surprising.

Mrs Thatcher feared not just the growing power of Brussels,

but growing German power too.

Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, wanted to reassure her.

He invited her to visit his home village,

just over the border from France.

They'd chew over their differences at his favourite restaurant.

Not for the first time in Britain's relationship with Europe,

food was about to take centre stage.

They had German Saumagen, which is pig's stomach which is stuffed

with all sorts of goodies.

It was a rather heavy meal but it was quite good, actually.

I don't think Mrs Thatcher really relished it very much.

Unfortunately, we had his favourite dish which was pig's stomach

which appealed greatly to him, but didn't appeal very much to

Mrs Thatcher, who chased it rather anxiously around the plate

with her fork and then tried to conceal it under her knife and fork.

I noticed.

I think the entire population had turned out to greet

Margaret Thatcher, and they burst into song as Germans are apt

to do, and I was saddened a little bit, because I don't

think that the Prime Minister was as touched by this scene as I was.

She grew up at a time when Germany was the enemy and Hitler

was invading the Rhineland.

I think that developed in her a feeling that Germany could

never quite be trusted.

Secondly, there was a more recent feeling that Germany

wanted to get its way in Europe - and getting its way was not always

in tune with our interests.

It is quite extraordinary how, 20-odd years later, Germany is now,

you know, by far a long, long way the supreme power within

the European Union.

I think a few years ago, you could say Europe was

dominated by a Franco-German axis

but now on most issues it's dominated by a German-German axis.

Chancellor Kohl was well aware that German power was growing

and that didn't only frighten Mrs Thatcher.

ORGAN PLAYS

He took her to Speyer Cathedral to listen to some Bach.

His message was that closer European integration would mean less

German national power.

She thought precisely the opposite.

In the crypt are the tombs of some of the early Holy Roman emperors.

While Mrs Thatcher was admiring these visions of an earlier

European unity, Chancellor Kohl took me off into a corner and said,

"Look, now she's seen me in my part of Germany by the French border,

"surely she will finally understand that I'm not German, I'm European."

I said, "Well, Chancellor Kohl, I'll do my best."

Off we went back to the aeroplane to take us back to London

and as we went into the plane, Mrs Thatcher sat down,

threw herself back in his seat, kicked off her shoes and said,

"My God, that man is so German."

Germany was about to get not just more powerful

but a whole lot bigger. So too was Europe.

The fall of the Berlin Wall led not just to the reunification

of a country, but of a continent as well.

It began a process that would lead to a dozen new countries

joining the European club and to calls for European integration

to go faster and deeper.

Margaret Thatcher's strident opposition to that, her fears about

the creation of a European superstate, would cost her dear.

Statement, the Prime Minister.

Chairman and President of the Commission,

Mr Delors, said at the press conference the other day

that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body

of the community.

He wanted the commission to be the executive

and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate.

No, no, no!

Her celebrated "no, no, no" was so manifestly a declaration

of defiance and, if you like, of UDI on her part

and...prospectively on Britain's part.

It was that which finally led to my conclusion that

I couldn't stay in the same team any longer.

I find Winston Churchill's perception a good deal more

convincing and more encouraging for the interests of our nation

than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up

by my right honourable friend,

who seems sometimes to look out upon

a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people,

scheming, in her words, to extinguish democracy,

to dissolve our national identities, to lead us through

the back door into a federal Europe.

OPERATIC SINGING

Mrs Thatcher, could I ask you to comment?

Europe had split Margaret Thatcher's party and her Cabinet.

Her downfall began live on camera in Paris.

-REPORTER:

-Do you feel betrayed...?

-Thank you very much.

Being the awkward squad did become counter-productive.

The blitzkrieg approach at the beginning when she was able

to take the others by surprise became progressively less effective.

It wears out a bit.

I think that quite a lot of her colleagues began to regard

it as theatre. I had that quite strong sense.

They liked it and they missed her when she'd gone

because they missed the excitement of it.

Ultimately, it reached the paradoxical

and unfortunate position where she was a great unifying force.

Unifying Europe against Britain's interests,

often very legitimate interests.

You've got to be prepared to do deals

and there was nothing being achieved.

The lady who like to say no might have gone,

but the ideas she wanted to say no to had not.

Not least the long-held European dream that as you travelled across

Europe's borders, you shouldn't worry about whether your wallet or

your purse was filled with pounds or Deutschmarks or drachma or lire.

There should instead be a single European currency.

That dream was to become a nightmare for Margaret Thatcher's successors.

None more so than John Major.

He may have changed the message,

speaking warmly of Britain being at the very heart of Europe,

but at a summit in the Dutch town of Maastricht,

he faced a fight to keep the pound to give Britain an opt-out,

the right to choose whether to join the euro at a later date.

But the pound had ideas of its own.

Lamont concedes defeat.

Britain withdraws from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Markets in chaos. Interest rates are 2% higher.

On Black Wednesday, Britain was dramatically forced

out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the forerunner to the euro.

One adviser to the then Chancellor, Norman Lamont,

still remembers the shock of those events.

There's a moment when I walked across the camera shot which

I'm sure I wasn't meant to do. It wasn't like things are now.

You know, great big podium in the middle of the road

and everything organised.

This was quite rough and ready.

The bit I absolutely recall is the sense I had on that day

and afterwards, in the aftermath of it, was never again should

Britain tie our currency into an arrangement like that.

That had a major impact on young politicians like myself,

young MPs like myself.

That made an enormous impact that we must never again get

halfway in to a...

..a project of European unity that we didn't really believe in.

It made me absolutely believe that all ideas of Britain ever

being part of a single currency, you know, were wrong, are wrong

and for me it's a real never issue.

When John Major agreed the Maastricht Treaty,

he boasted that it was game, set and match.

He had not just kept Britain out of the euro but also out of other

plans for what was now renamed the EU, the European Union.

That's not how many of his own MPs saw it.

A six-month battle would tear his party apart.

I suppose in retrospect we might have considered

whether we should have forced it through very quickly, very speedily.

But I'm not sure on an issue that has that sort of importance

that it would necessarily have been the right thing to do.

I think the scars and bruises of having done that would have

been very real as well.

I think there was an error of judgment in allowing as much

time as people wanted to debate it. Mrs Thatcher knew how to do it.

She shoved through the single act,

basically had us sitting up all night on a Thursday, cut

down the debating time and in theory it was much better for democracy

what was done, but it was probably worse for the Conservative Party.

Tory Euro-sceptic rebels joined forces with the pro-Europe

Labour Party to humiliate the government.

It was quite an exhilarating experience.

Rather like when one was at boarding school in my youth, with

a group of you all beaten together for some minor offence.

It gave one a sort of collective sense of

camaraderie which survives after half a century.

There was a very large majority in the House of Commons for the

agreement that I had reached in Maastricht.

The Labour Party and the Liberal party overwhelmingly supported it

and many people in the Labour Party in the early 1970s had

voted for their principles on Europe.

During the passage of the Maastricht Bill,

the Labour Party did not do that.

They voted for their own political interests

and against the principles that they believed in.

The Labour Party strategy had been to wreck the government

but not wreck the treaty.

We had significantly opened wounds in the Conservative Party from

which I think they will take maybe half a century to recover from.

I think it was very destructive for the Conservative Party,

the row over the Maastricht Treaty, where it just took over

the government between '92 and '97.

A growing number of Conservatives came to the view that all those

warnings about the loss of British sovereignty had been proved right.

Notch by notch, grade by grade, change by change,

we were going in the direction that Peter Shore, Michael Foot,

Wedgwood Benn, all these other characters at the time,

and even Enoch Powell, all said,

"This is the destination. We don't want to be there."

The Tory's European wounds cost them the election that followed

and those wounds had been festering ever since.

In came another new Prime Minister who thought

he could make things better with Europe.

He did, in fact, arrive by aircraft

though given his reception here, you would have thought Tony Blair

had walked on water across the North Sea.

The Dutch were in the presidency of the EU

and they held an informal meeting at Noordwijk on the

North Sea coast, where Tony Blair went very soon after the election.

And, I mean, it was as if Brad Pitt had arrived in town.

# Things can only get better... #

I mean, all these other leaders wanted to have their picture

taken with Tony Blair, so there was a lot of enthusiasm.

That was then...

Yeah, no, look... It was a...

It was obviously... For them, it was a big moment,

where they felt Britain's relationship would be different.

It was a big moment for us cos I felt it could be different, too.

He immediately made it clear he wanted New Labour's new Britain

to take the lead in building a new Europe.

Europe itself has got to be a Europe that refocuses,

that shifts its horizons

so that it's focusing on the things that really matter to the people.

The very basic issues of jobs, and industry, the environment.

Tony Blair arrived young, energetic, extremely good at presentation

and with an enormous majority, and for a couple of years,

he could have done what he wanted.

In fact, those early years were spent wrestling over

whether Britain should scrap the pound

and adopt Europe's new single currency instead.

Politically, the case for joining is overwhelming because politically,

it's best for Britain to be at the centre of Europe.

Economically, it isn't, and that's our problem.

The euro was launched to replace the franc and the Deutschmark

but not the pound.

Once again, Europe celebrated moves

to ever-closer union without Britain.

This was one party, though, most are glad they missed.

The union will now stretch from Estonia on the borders with

Russia in the north, all the way down to Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

One other huge change was coming. The EU welcomed in 12 new members.

..cross-border handshakes to more eccentric euros stunts...

The countries which had been cut off by the Berlin Wall were

queueing up to join.

Slovenian parachutists descended on Italian

and Austrian diplomats high up in their newly opened border.

The EU would gain 100 million new citizens with new rights to

live and travel and work where they liked,

with consequences for them and us, too.

Poland, early morning October 2004.

A group of men are gathering, ready to come to Britain.

Last May, their country joined the European Union.

Now they have the right to work here.

-TRANSLATION:

-I'm happy that I am leaving to work.

Work normally, for normal money.

I was very pleasantly surprised that Britain didn't take

advantage of its right to impose a seven-year transitional period.

We got evidence that if we lifted the immediate restrictions

on free movement, rather than having a phase-in period of seven years,

the net effect on migration to the UK would only be 13,000.

There were hundreds of thousands of people,

rather than what we thought, so it was a big, big difference.

Germany didn't allow Poles

and other East Europeans to work in their country for seven years.

It was a power Tony Blair's government had,

but chose not to use.

One of Blair's ministers said, it would have been unneighbourly.

I personally don't think we have suffered from these people

coming in. I think on the contrary.

They've come in.

They are hard-working, determined, committed people,

and have really worked hard in this country.

The research was wrong

and our judgment based on the research was heroically wrong.

Another consequence of so many new countries joining the EU,

was that its decision-making processes needed an overhaul.

The former French President, Valery Giscard d'Estaing,

was given the job.

He decided to write a new constitution for Europe

with greater powers for its parliament, its own foreign minister

and even its own president.

It was a folie de grandeur by Giscard d'Estaing,

who was full of folies de grandeur.

So, that was why it was ridiculous to call it a constitution.

It would have to be called a constitution but it was...

People who wanted to turn Europe into a sort of country.

It was to put the house in order.

And everyone agreed that we needed

to have something more organised and better defined.

I knew from the very outset

this constitution was going to be very difficult.

I didn't think it was a sensible thing to do, frankly,

and I argued against it.

But the gossip at Westminster was that Tony Blair secretly

coveted the job to become the new president of Europe himself,

after he'd finally handed over Number Ten to Gordon Brown.

It is, of course, rumoured that one Tony Blair may now be

interested in the job.

Now, if that makes us uncomfortable on these benches,

just imagine how it is viewed in Downing Street.

It is the funniest speech I've ever heard in the House of Commons.

Then the awful moment when the motorcade of the

President of Europe sweeps into Downing Street.

The gritted teeth and bitten nails, the Prime Minister

emerging from his door with a smile of intolerable anguish.

The choking sensation as the words "Mr President" are forced...

LAUGHTER DROWNS OUT SPEECH

And then, once in the Cabinet Room,

the melodrama of, "When will you hand over to me all over again?"

The serious question now was

whether the people should be given a referendum on the new constitution.

In public, ministers said no.

In private, Tony Blair and his Foreign Secretary argued about

whether to make a dramatic U-turn.

I found it more and more difficult to make the case that

I was mouthing in public,

and formed the view that we should commit ourselves to a referendum.

I went to a meeting with Tony Blair in Chequers in the early

months of 2004, and put this view to him.

This was not a popular thing for me to say, there was quite a ding-dong.

It was Jack Straw's initiative,

and I think, in a weak moment, Tony Blair agreed.

In the end, it became impossible to resist the public pressure

for a referendum on it, although I conceded it with great misgiving.

Putting his misgivings to one side, Tony Blair went to the

House of Commons to announce

Britain's first referendum on Europe for 30 years.

Once and for all, whether this country, Britain,

wants to be at the centre and heart of European decision-making or not,

time to decide whether our destiny lies as a leading partner

and ally of Europe or on its margins,

let the Euro-sceptics, whose true agenda we will expose,

make their case.

Let the issue be put and let the battle be joined.

I'll never forget the drama of the moment in the House of Commons.

Tony Blair saying, "Let battle be joined."

Les Francais rejettent la constitution europeenne...

But the British people did not get a vote,

because the French got in first.

They threw out the constitution in their own referendum.

And so too did the Dutch, proving again that the public don't

always do what the pundits and the politicians expect them to do.

Well, battle never was joined.

Because the European constitution was defeated in France

and the Netherlands, and no referendum took place.

The European constitution might have died,

and many of its key ideas were simply copied

and bound into a new document, now called the Lisbon Treaty.

They changed some bits,

but in the end, the structure and the fundamental things

were the same.

The same mess of a dish - just reheated and renamed.

I was asked, from time to time, how closely does

this resemble your constitution treaty, which...

the Labour Party promised would be subject to referendum,

and I found it difficult to answer these questions.

On the whole, I kept my trap shut.

Ministers insisted that this new EU treaty was not

the same as the constitution,

so they could sign it without having a referendum on it first.

I was very struck by the extent to which people really

did think they had been lied to, that they

had been promised a referendum,

and then on a pretext,

the promise of the referendum had been withdrawn.

I think that did then create a kind of grievance that wasn't very

readily going to go away.

People, not just Conservatives, I think

many others felt cheated of a referendum, because the

Lisbon Treaty had many similarities to the European constitution.

When people say, "Oh, yeah, but there was a huge explosion

"of feeling about this amongst the British people," I... Bull dust.

I mean, no, there wasn't.

There was a huge explosion of feeling amongst the very

people that have driven the referendum onto the agenda today.

Just like all those who'd come before, Tony Blair's promise that

things would get better in Europe had turned into, well, dust.

After 13 years of Labour came the Coalition, which agreed to hold

a referendum, but only if new powers were being transferred to Brussels.

Its leaders agreed that Europe was like a ticking bomb.

Their aim should simply be to avoid it blowing up in their faces.

The irony, of course, looking back on it, is that David Cameron

and I, I remember, in those sleepless discussions

that took place after

the inconclusive result of the 2010 general election,

we warmly agreed with each other that the one thing

we didn't want to blight the Coalition government,

or to loom particularly large, was the subject of Europe.

Europe as an issue going away? That WAS wishful thinking.

The Eurozone crisis brought protesters out onto the streets there -

and here, Euro-sceptics wanted to shout, "We told you so!"

Quick fag, and then we'll be on our way.

Enter Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, who set out to surf

a wave of disenchantment with a grin and a pint.

I tell you, I've been up half the night, this is absolutely marvellous.

Ukip has acted as a catalyst, in a sense, to force this

debate, in part, to the surface.

Sometimes you need those things, otherwise they become conspiracy

of elites, really, that just don't want to discuss the subject.

There was a legitimate demand fuelling the rise of Ukip,

creating great problems within the Conservative Party.

A completely legitimate demand for a referendum on "In-Out",

-which many of us sympathised with.

-Look, you know, this is...

I'm going to say something that you shouldn't say,

but this stuff about, you know, you've got the elites here, you've got the people here,

a lot of who are driving the people are people,

they're just a different elite, if you want to put it that way.

They've got a different perspective.

'Is this the man who's broken the mould of British politics?'

Go, Nigel, go!

Former city trader, now professional politician,

Farage posed as the scourge of the elites.

We were told that when we had a president,

we'd see a giant, global, political figure.

Remember that job Blair was rumoured to want - President of Europe?

Well, he didn't get it.

It had gone instead to a relatively unknown Belgian,

Herman Van Rompuy, who Nigel Farage now had in his sights.

Well, I'm afraid what we got was you.

And I don't want to be rude, but you have the charisma of a damp rag

and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.

And the question I want to ask, that we're all going to ask, is,

who are you?! I'd never heard of you.

Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you.

Rude? All I did was, I said, "Who are you?! I'd never heard of you."

I would like to ask you, President, who voted for you?

And I think I was basically pointing out, in a...

not aggressive, but a slightly mickey-taking way, the complete lack

of democratic accountability that exists within these institutions.

We don't know you, we don't want you,

and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better.

'For my pains, I was fined,'

and I was told by the President of the Parliament, when he imposed this

fine, "Nigel, you cannot criticise Mr Van Rompuy

"because he hasn't been elected."

I said, "I know, that's the point I was making."

As Ukip won a bigger and bigger share of the vote,

more and more Conservative MPs turned on their leader

and demanded he delivered an "In-Out" referendum.

# Another one bites the dust. #

If you look across the political battlefield in Britain, I think

you could see growing pressure for a referendum.

Parties thinking, "How do we try and put this issue beyond doubt?

"How do we restore the link between Europe, this issue,

"and the British public?" Because it was growing more distant.

So it was that David Cameron made a speech on the EU which could

change Britain's history.

He pledged to renegotiate Britain's relationship with it

and then hold a referendum, just what his predecessor,

Harold Wilson, had done 40 years earlier.

When we have negotiated that new settlement,

we will give the British people a referendum.

As is the nature of these speeches, it is

often just a few phrases or a few sentences which are remembered

afterwards, and it was the shift in his stance as

leader of the Conservative Party, on the issue of the referendum,

for which the Bloomberg speech will be remembered.

The famous Bloomberg speech,

that was all about getting Ukip off his back.

He feared defections on his backbenches. He was right.

To stay in the European Union on these new terms,

or to come out altogether.

It will be an "In-Out" referendum.

David Cameron then found himself in the same boat as Harold Wilson,

dependent on a German chancellor to deliver him

a better deal for Britain in Europe.

Angela Merkel warned Cameron that if he asked for too much,

he'd have to jump ship.

We do now all have a vote on our future in the EU, but not

because of something that's happened in Europe, not the migration crisis,

not because of the problems in the Eurozone,

not because of some new European treaty, but because a British

Prime Minister wants to resolve our future in Europe

once and for all.

But will this referendum resolve anything more than the last one?

A referendum now will clear the air for quite a long time to come.

-But not for ever.

-This is a very, very big moment.

I mean, if Britain votes to leave and does so clearly,

there will be other member states of the European Union saying,

"Do you know what, actually, that's what we want, too."

I'm a democrat, I believe in not just the sovereignty

of Parliament, but the sovereignty of the British people.

I think the time has come when it is right to make this choice.

The trouble with Britain's relations with Europe has always lain

with the politicians and not with the public.

That's been the history of decade after decade after decade,

but nobody ever seems to learn.

Is Europe them or us?

They have failed to resolve that question.

Prenez garde! Je vais parler francais.

CHEERING

We have a different history,

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

Are you prepared to accept the verdict of the people on Thursday?

Is Europe stronger with Britain a member?

-Yes.

-No, no.

Non. Merci beaucoup.

It won't now be the politicians who will decide.