I thought I’d begin if I may with a very short thumbnail history, then I want to talk a little bit about the kind of problems that now confront us, and thirdly address directly something which is of interest to the Fabian Society, which is the idea of whether there should now be an in-or-out referendum.

Let me begin by saying right away that my history with the European union goes back a very long way.  In an extraordinary way the most visionary period with regards Britain’s relationship to Europe was of course the end of, and the immediate aftermath to the Second World War. The opportunities at that time were absolutely immense. Winston Churchill made a famous speech in The Hague in 1948 where he talked about one united Europe, something that today Conservative admirers of him rapidly forget.  

At the same time there were of course the great international organisations being established, most important of all the Marshall Plan, which gave a huge opportunity to Britain to take the leadership in Europe. Ernest Bevan as some of you will remember from reading about it, not of course from being there took almost immediately the response on the Marshall Plan, recognised its extraordinary significance, and immediately convened a group of European countries, almost all of them devastated by the war and occupied or defeated and brought them into the European end of the Marshall Plan.

Within a matter of not more than two or three years the Marshall Plan was operating in almost all of Western Europe, brought in Germany and began the process of building up the initial European institutions the first of which was of course the European Coal and Steel Community, which was the invention of the French Foreign Secretary. The reason it was called coal and steel (today it would be called I imagine, Internet and Cybernet) was because coal and steel were seen as the instruments and the essential ingredients of a defence policy and of an armaments strategy. Coal and steel under European control was the first step towards saying ‘there isn’t going to be a war in Western Europe ever again’. We built up really quickly at that time. I still remember some of the remarkable experiments that were taking place at that time, recreational societies between Britain and Germany as early as 1949, which built up friendships between students, between politicians and between statesman and began to create an atmosphere of extraordinary trust between new Germany and the United Kingdom. It is worth thinking, just for a moment that this was four years after the end of the Second World War, after we had been bitterly killing one another, that politicians particularly young ones, were meeting to build a different kind of Europe.

We moved ahead very fast; in 1949 the creation of NATO into which many European countries came; in 1950 the first steps towards a European Community; in 1954 the European Treaty and so it went, on and on. At every stage in this process through until the 1960s it was always in Europe the United Kingdom was expected to be the leader. It was more or less offered leadership on a plate. The Germans knew they couldn’t because the memories were too recent, the French also couldn’t at that time because they were deeply divided about who was to blame for the Vichy regime and so forth. The Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Belgiums were passionately keen that Britain should take the lead. We of course decided not to and in a famous memorandum from a very senior civil servant in the Foreign Office at the time, which said and I quote almost exactly, this is an experiment that will fail, the Europeans will fall out among themselves we would be very much unwise to have anything to do with it. So do didn’t; Anthony Eden decided that there wouldn’t be a British brigade in Europe which was part of a European defence structure, there would be the British army on the Rhine.

Let’s fast forward. The next great opportunity for British leadership came when Edward Heath managed to make a very close friendship with [Georges] Pompidou in the immediate aftermath of two vetoes by [Charles] De Gaulle. De Gaulle vetoed the United Kingdom twice. He was not completely unwise. The reason he gave is that we were a Trojan horse for the United States, and I can understand why he reached that conclusion. Think again of the 1960s Vietnam and all the rest of it. So that chance too, although it was taken forward by Edward Heath, was delayed for some years until Edward Heath himself became Prime Minister. Automatically the Labour Party did what it always had done: been in favour of Europe when it’s out and somewhat against when it’s in.

And so it happened in the 1960s in which I was of course by that time a junior minister, but there were deep divisions within the Labour Party and the left-wing in particular (and some parts of the right-wing) argued very strongly that Britain should have no closer relationship with Europe. Whether it had felt it on the 1972 Ted Heath proposal, that Britain should not join but stay in Europe, because there had already been an agreement signed between him, Pompidou and Adenauer, but because he wanted to see that there would be a stronger popular support for this, it was widely believe that the Labour Party would be in very great difficulties. Harold Wilson, who was one of the cleverest, most manipulative politicians I ever met, came up with Tony Benn’s proposal that there should be a referendum.

A referendum I beg you remember, is time and again the escape hatch for politicians who can’t find agreement within their own government. You took it to the people and then of course you largely leave it to interests and financial power to determine the outcome. Referenda, contrary to popular belief are not usually particularly democratic instruments, with a few exceptions in countries with long traditions like Switzerland or ghastly traditions like California, where time and again what happens is the referendum actually ties the hands of government. The reason California today is a bankrupt state is because every time there has been a referendum on property tax it has been lost and property tax hasn’t increased as a proportion of the value of property for over for over 20 years.

Let’s leap then to the referendum. I still remember as I was very much involved with the yes campaign, it had several remarkable characteristics. For heaven’s sake if you have another referendum adopt these characteristics. The first one was every single household in Britain got a Yes letter; every single household in Britain got a No letter and every single household in Britain got a letter from the government (a very measured and cautious letter because this was 1975 and Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister, very narrowly, by a fingernail, suggesting that probably yes was better than no, but not making any claim that would embarrass anybody within the Labour government, which was fiercely divided of course). To everybody’s amazement and partly I have to admit because there was more money on the Yes side but that wasn’t the only reason, every single region of the United Kingdom with the single exception of Shetland and Orkney’s voted yes, often not by a very big margin but the overall margin in the country as a whole including Scotland and Wales, which is important to remember was 3 to 2 in favour of staying in the European Community. A pretty decisive result and a much, much better result than either Scotland or Wales had when they put devolution to their people.

Within four years, and I remember my desperate frustration at this which is what eventually drove me out of the Labour Party, in 1979 after the defeat of Labour in the General Election, John Silkin announced the starting of a No movement which would reject the outcome of the referendum and by 1980 the Labour Party conference agreed. They decided we should leave the European Community. I still remember how deeply furious I was about this. I had gone along with the referendum thinking that at least for some years, maybe not more than 10, but at least for 10 years we’d be able to  be constructive in Europe, see what the potential was for British influence and then all of a sudden we were right back in the civil wars again.

Bear that in mind when you talk about an in-or-out referendum; it decides nothing in the long term. In the short term it gives you an opportunity to change the ground rules a pit, to get an educational campaign, to get a voice like The Independent in the media, but it doesn’t actually end the argument and it probably never will. All it can do is to swing the balance of influence towards the pro side and away from the anti side.

So by 1980 we were back in the wars again. Mrs Thatcher is clever and no lover of Europe which she regarded as either harsh and helmeted Germans or silly, frivolous French. One exception was for Mitterrand, who always used to give her white roses when he came to London. The only European leader who did, which meant by the end of that time she was completely bewitched by Mitterrand, and many of course an English girl was bewitched by an attractive French man. I’ll just break off one moment to tell you one little story. I don’t know if any of you know the famous description of Mrs Thatcher by Francois Mitterrand, but I’ll tell it to you because it’s a wonderful and true story. He was asked by several fellow Frenchmen why he found Mrs Thatcher so amazingly bewitching. He said ‘She has the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”

We now come to the period where the Conservatives more or less hold the reins. They didn’t actually create as much destruction in the European community as many of use expected. The reason again was a Frenchman, Monsieur Delors who offered the British government three ways forward, because he knew he had to get momentum going. The three ways that he proposed were defence and security, foreign policy and a single market. You won’t be surprised by which one Mrs Thatcher chose, and having chosen became completely devoted to it, because the single market became the motto written on the banners of the Thatcherites and the Conservative Party all through the 1980s and through the early 1990s. Though John Major of course had extreme difficulty holding on to it, because he wasn’t Margaret Thatcher and he had a deeply divided Conservative cabinet as indeed we do again today.

Let’s fast forward then, to the last part of what I want to say which is about today. I hope I’ve made the point as strongly as I can that time and again an extraordinary offer from the rest of Western Europe to the United Kingdom has been either rejected, shelved, forgotten. It has been a contemptible story, an extraordinary story of a country still so in love with its past that it can’t see its future, because in my opinion the main reason for this has been the dream of the old imperial past on the part of government after government. Labour I’m afraid as well as Conservative and we’ve got to get away from it, it’s gone. It wasn’t very good anyway but it’s gone and we’ve got to adapt to a new world.

Anyway, what about now? Well we’ve missed all those opportunities and I think we’re now looking at the very last one. It may not even be the last one it may already have gone. Let’s take the optimistic view for a minute and say it’s the very last one. What is that opportunity? Well to be fair to the Conservatives and the coalition, they have softened the language a lot. They have talked in much more diplomatic terms. We are told that Mr Cameron has the same kind of relationship with Angela Merkel as Francois Mitterrand had with Mrs Thatcher, not quite true but still they are good mates. We now have a situation where the Euro zone is already creating a whole new dimension of integration. That new dimension of integration is the only way out of the Euro zone crisis and incidentally, before you swallow, I’m sure you won’t, the Daily Mail on the subject of the Euro zone crisis, its just worth mentioning that our growth rate is lower than the Euro zone, our debt is higher. On every single major economic criteria the United Kingdom in truth is doing less well then the Euro zone even as it drags Greece, Portugal and Ireland behind it. A fact we have carefully concealed from ourselves and from you.

The European leaders meet on March 11^th. They will set out their proposals for how to create a micro-economic system under which all the countries concerned would agree budgets would be discussed in advance of being presented to their people, in such a way that extreme, ludicrous budgets, silly expenditure and for that matter the rewarding of criminals, a serious issue certainly in Greece, will be ruled out by the other countries. Of course it means, let’s not kid ourselves, that Germany and France will be extraordinarily powerful, but it doesn’t have to stay that way and they will pull the Marshall countries out behind them and that will save them from what will otherwise be the terrible fate of the international markets would otherwise give them. Ireland today has an interest rate of 5.8%, that’s a killer interest rate. You cannot sustain that kind of situation for very long.

What will we do? Well we’ll do one of a few things. We’ll either smile benignly, stay out of course and then when called upon to help as to be fair to the government we were over Ireland, be mildly helpful. Of course it will depend on how deeply the British banks are indebted by the collapse of another state. We weren’t loving Ireland, we just had so many British shareholders and banks involved in the Allied Irish banks we had to save them otherwise we’d all have bankrupted ourselves on a personal level.

Or we may the other thing, and this is where I bring in my final point. The new bill, the European Bill, is of course primarily a sop to the Conservative Eurosceptics. It doesn’t mean a thing by the by, all those lovely lists of things we’re going to have a referendum on are all currently subject to veto. I’ll say that again: all the lists of things about the transfer of powers, about the additional powers for the EU which are listed in the bill, every single one of those is subject to unanimous voting and could therefore be stopped by the government of the day. It’s another case of handing the rough bit over to the referendum because you don’t particularly want to make the decision yourself. If we get then a proposal for some amendment to the Lisbon treaty, only to do with the Euro zone, that suggests that what we need to now do is accept a subsidiary measure that will be for the Euro zone only with micro-economic co-operative control, we will probably under the bill have to either veto it or put it to a referendum. Imagine, you’re Germany, you’re France, you’re Holland, you are taking the responsibility for this, you are paying the bills for this, sustaining somehow or other these countries. All of a sudden the UK, not even part of it, comes along and says ‘sorry, we can’t have anything to do with this we’re out of it’. This will be I think the final blow, or if not the final blow the one that finally means Britain are out of it. I’ll finish with a quotation, one comes from that amazingly honest book, The Verdict, some of you may have read it, by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. This is what it has to say about Europe and the Labour Party: “Under Labour, the UK became more marginal in the councils of Europe.” That was Tony Blair.

Now to your proposal, or perhaps your possum proposal for an in-or-out referendum on Europe. Of course you can have a referendum, of course the probability is that it would be won, although perhaps by a more narrow margin than in 1975, but you’re only just beginning because then you have to take on the education of all of us because we are woefully ignorant about the European Community, you have to take on these large slices of the media that are dedicated to destroying our relationship with Europe. I don’t know why but read the Daily Mail on any day of the week and you’ll see what I mean by dedication. Finally ask yourself, how we deal with climate change, organised crime, the drug trade, people trafficking, the Middle East crisis, relations with China, closer relations with Russia, disarmament. We are out on our own, just one little-sized country in the Atlantic. That is a hopeless menu for the future.