ON the day that Brexit finally becomes reality, it’s interesting to look back to June 1975, when the country voted by a two-to-one majority to remain in the Common Market - 17.3 million in favour to 8.4 million against. Scotland, too, declared a resounding Yes, though the three-to-two majority here was slightly less than the national result. Prime Minister Harold Wilson immediately declared that “14 years of national argument” were over.
In his memoir, Final Term, Wilson details the background to the referendum: how his Conservative predecessor, Ted Heath, had taken Britain into the EEC on January 1, 1973, and how the Labour Party had disagreed sharply (as, indeed, had the country) with the terms that Heath had negotiated, without a mandate.
Wilson wanted to re-negotiate, but not all of his party was enthusiastic in the first place. “In all my thirteen years as Leader of the Party”, he says, “I had no more difficult task than keeping the party together on this issue, particularly in our Opposition years, 1970-74.” Labour MPs during those four years, he adds, were against entry – many of them regardless of the terms, a smaller number opposed simply to the terms.
Europe was a key issue in the October 1974 General Election. Wilson won; and in February 1975 a government White Paper announced plans for an EEC referendum. The Herald reported that “friction over Britain’s future in the Common Market was aggravated more than it was healed” by the announcement. "Anti-Marketeers were loud in their protests that the referendum was being rigged against them [because of the proposed wording on the ballot paper], and Scotland again became the political battleground as a result of the Government’s proposal for all the votes to be counted centrally” in London.
The referendum campaign was full of debates and marches and impassioned argument. Many families were divided. SNP MP Winnie Ewing said that while EEC “high heidyins” had told her that Scotland’s role in Europe was to be the leader of the “downtrodden regions of Calabria”, she personally could see a “golden future” for Scotland with a standard of living equal to those in Sweden and Norway, neither of which was in the EEC. Wilson was heckled at a Glasgow rally. The Scottish Secretary of State, Willie Ross, urged Scots to vote No. Chancellor Denis Healey described as “bunk” Tony Benn’s claim that Europe had cost Britain 500,000 jobs.
Once the result had been declared, Wilson said the sheer size of the majority “... means that all of those who have had reservations about Britain’s commitment should now join wholeheartedly with our partners in Europe, and our friends everywhere to meet the challenge confronting the whole nation.”
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