Saying 'Yes' to Europe

The longest-running, most politically divisive issue in recent British history was put to rest last week. By a landslide margin of more than 2 to 1, British voters decided to stay within the European Economic Community. Despite some fears that there might be a low turnout, leading to an inconclusive result, an estimated 65% of Britons went to the polls and 17,378,581 of them said yes to Europe. Even in Northern Ireland, where the Rev. Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church had warned that "a vote for the Common Market is a vote for ecumenism, Rome, dictatorship and anti-Christ," the pro-EEC cause won by a 52.1% majority. For Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had staked his political future on the referendum, the vote was a resounding personal triumph. Indeed, London's pro-Labor Daily Mirror suggested that Wilson may now become "the most powerful peacetime Prime Minister of the century."

Statisticuffs. The Prime Minister tried to keep the national temper cool by his deliberately low-key championship of the Common Market cause; he almost seemed intent on boring his countrymen into voting yes. The referendum campaign nevertheless caught fire in its final days, generating as much confusion as clarity. Pro-and anti-Marketeers continued to engage in what the Duke of Edinburgh called a "bout of statisticuffs." Each side drew upon the same meager data to make contradictory claims about the impact of EEC membership upon the British economy. While anti-Europeans argued that a yes vote would be the death knell for British sovereignty, former Prime Minister Edward Heath, a tireless pro-Europe campaigner, hailed the EEC as a peace bond between France and Germany; he appeared to imply that if Britain withdrew, Europe's traditional archfoes might soon have another go at one another.

Among the more inspired bits of rhetoric was Anthropologist Edmund Leach's charge that anti-Marketeers were misty-minded isolationists who showed "the same degree of contact with rational probability as a New Guinea cargo cult." On the other side, angry leftist Playwright John Osborne denounced the EEC as "the last desperate dream of dull, dim tradesmen without vision, imagination or self-respect, feeling for life or history."

The likely negative results of a pull-out (more pressure on the pound, reduced investment by the multinationals, and strained relations with the Continent) were far easier to discern than the positive impact of staying in the EEC. The most persistent economic argument in favor of British membership is based on what is commonly known as the cold-shower gambit: that the stimulus of tariff-free access to the EEC's huge market (nearly 260 million consumers), combined with increased competition from European imports, will help revitalize British industry. The sheer challenge might force Britain to break out of the debilitating cycle of low productivity, low investment and high wage demands that has led to the nation's mounting trade deficit (an estimated $6.2 billion for 1975). But as the Guardian's Economic Columnist Frances Cairncross has pointed out, "If you give a cold shower to a man with a weak heart, sometimes he dies." Complicating the argument is a recent report by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, which says that the effect of EEC membership on Britain's trade deficit over the past two years has been "very small" and that available statistics "tell us nothing about longer-run effects."

Politically, the most significant side effect of the referendum was the way it has shaken up the traditional alignment of British party politics. Throughout the two-month campaign, Wilson was virtually isolated from the power base that supported him through twelve years as party chief. Most of the major trade-union leaders, the party's national executive committee and more than half of the Labor M.P.s publicly opposed the Prune Minister on the issue. Wilson and such fellow Labor pro-Europeans as Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and Education Minister Reginald Prentice were forced into an informal coalition with Conservative and Liberal Party leaders, who almost unanimously supported the pro-Market cause.

Party Dogfight. Several of the strange political bedfellows seemed to like the experience. Said Prentice: "The Common Market campaign has united the majority of realistic and moderate politicians of all three parties. It has been a refreshing experience for us to work together in a common cause. I believe our cooperation has been welcomed by millions of people throughout Britain who have become fed up with the traditional party dogfight." When that encomium to cross-party cooperation brought shrill cries for his dismissal from left-wing Laborites, Prentice made it clear that he was not proposing a coalition government in any formal sense. Even so, he now stands in danger of being drummed out of the Cabinet by Wilson as a gesture of "evenhandedness" to the left.

Indirectly, the large pro-Market vote gives Wilson a popular mandate to take firm measures to tackle Britain's disastrous 25% inflation. Before the referendum, he was handicapped in dealing with the nation's economic problems--particularly with the politically sensitive issue of wage restraint--by the Labor Party divisions over the EEC. Even now Wilson cannot afford to purge the union-backed left, but the referendum has seriously undermined its claim to speak for "the people." (In South Yorkshire, the strongest Labor county in Britain and the scene of the most intensive union-backed antiMarket campaign, the vote was 63.4% pro-Market.) With his authority thus strengthened in dealing with the unions, Wilson is shortly expected to reshuffle his Cabinet in a way that will reinforce the position of Labor moderates on economic policy.

Among the left-wing Laborites who defied Wilson on the Market issue, Industry Minister Anthony Wedgwood Benn stands in greatest danger of being hoist with his own petard. It was Benn who in 1972 first proposed the Common Market referendum. At the time, opinion polls were reporting a solid 2-to-1 antiMarket majority. Benn saw the referendum as an ideal vehicle to propel himself into leadership of a populist left-wing movement that would assert its supremacy over the pro-Market establishment in the Labor Party. With the help of enormous and largely hostile press publicity, he turned the referendum into a plebiscite on himself as well as the EEC. It now seems that Benn overplayed his hand. A recent poll among Labor voters gives Benn a -2 popularity rating compared with a +67 rating for Wilson.

Healing Wounds. Wilson, however, has reportedly decided not to dismiss Benn from his Cabinet; to do so would only aggravate the party wounds that Wilson now hopes to heal. But to restore confidence in his government's ability to check inflation, Wilson will probably shift Benn--whose proposals to step up public ownership of industry have made him anathema to Britain's business and financial community--to a less economically powerful Cabinet ministry.

In European capitals, where the British results were received on the 31st anniversary of Dday, there was relief over the mercifully decisive end to a debate that had kept the EEC in a state of suspended animation for the past 15 months. As Roy Jenkins observed, D-day marked "Britain's re-entry into Europe . . . Now we are staying in."

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