Whispers in the Dark

"He did not know who he was anymore. He had lost his home, his people, and his country."

A few years ago my now almost 90-year old father confided in me that he hardly recognised his home country of Britain anymore and felt alien and alienated in a way that he never before experienced. The country he grew up in and fought for as a young subaltern in the Blues regiment of the Household Cavalry was the same one he in which he spent all his life working and raising a family, paying his taxes to support, and living the life of a responsible, informed and active citizen. A natural conservative, he was without any extremist views, maintained a well-founded but not rabid distrust of Governments and their propensity to meddle and had lived through the 1970s as Chairman of a public company in which as he recalled “we spent much time trying to figure out how to survive the vicious over-regulation and socialist mismanagement of the economy [NB: under both Labour and notionally Conservative governments] , time which would have been better spent thinking of how better to serve our customers and counter the rising competitive threats from overseas entrants to our market.”

He participated in the referendum over whether Britain should enter the European Common Market - a process initiated in 1973 by committed Europhile and then Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath and then ratified by Parliament in 1975 by the ensuing Labour Governments and was in no doubt that his “Yes” vote to the question “Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community?” was both rational and in the best interests of the country, a position with which 67.23% of his fellow citizens enthusiastically concurred. His support of the referendum was in large part based on the fact that the government information leaflets and the heart of the campaign message explicitly set out the case that this was purely an economic arrangement with no commitment whatsoever to enter into any political subjugation of Parliament or the British people to European sovereignty. Naif perhaps, but there you go.

I know this because my father - inveterate hoarder of bumf that he is - still had the referendum pamphlet tucked away in one of his old paper filing boxes and was able to produce it for me. In language that leaves no room for misinterpretation, the pamphlet sets out the rational for “Yes”, highlighting especially the preservation of sovereignty aspects. Within a few years, by 1978, it had become increasingly obvious that there was a very definite intention and enthusiasm to integrate the UK politically into the superstructure of what would eventually become the EU, using the creation of a joint currency or curranecy management mechanism (ERM) as the primary tool.

(still unsurpassed cover of Bernard Connolly’s book ‘The Rotten Heart of Europe’ from 1995)

Indeed, I suspect that part of my father’s generation’s embrace of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership was predicated in no small part by her determination to face down the creeping absorption of the UK into the growing tentacles of the Brussels monster bureaucracy (the other part was,of course, being thoroughly fed up the colossal mismanagement of the economy by previous governments of both colours, hideous levels of inflation and a severe collapse in the quality and reliability of most public services - from rubbish collection to burials to power supply.)

I knew I would end up going on a rant once I started down this particular rabbit-hole, but the point of the story of my father’s 1970s experience and especially that of the referendum was that it marked a watershed moment in his faith and trust and in his government and his feeling that he had been deliberately lied to in order to get his (and the country’s) approval for a process whose true intentions, had they been made public, would have resulted in a markedly different result. Half a century later he is quite clear - on the days when he is clear at all - that that was the moment the rot set in, a rot that eventually would transform the country into one in which the values for which he stood and felt were somehow genetically embedded in his passport, were all but corrupted and where he - and presumably millions of his countrymen - began to feel no longer quite as comfortable in their land as they had previously.