Andy Burnham can learn from Harold Wilson on Europe

De Gaulle's veto did not end Britain's first road to Europe. Burnham's "not now" need not end the next one.

The European question in Britain has never been only about Europe. It has always been about Britain: what sort of country it thinks it is, where its power lies and how long it can afford to deny its post-imperial status in the world.

That is why Andy Burnham’s recent movement on the EU is important. At Labour conference last September, he said he wanted Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. More recently the line became more guarded. He acknowledged a long-term case, but said rejoining would not be his immediate offer. This was reported as a row-back. It may yet prove to be something more useful: the beginning of a strategy.

For that, Andy should study Harold Wilson.

Wilson’s European story is usually remembered as failure. In May 1967, his Labour government applied to join the European Communities. In November, Charles de Gaulle vetoed the opening of negotiations. Wilson lost the 1970 election. Ted Heath took Britain in. Heath got the credit. Wilson got the footnote.

But the footnote is where the lesson lies.

Wilson turned towards Europe because Britain’s faced “contracting options”. The Commonwealth was no longer the economic answer many had pretended it could be. The special relationship brought American support, but on terms increasingly set in Washington. Sterling was under pressure and the European Community economy was growing faster than Britain’s economy. Wilson was reaching an accommodation with a difficult reality, and it took brutal economic truth to convince him that the old world role could not be preserved.

That is the first lesson for Burnham: changed facts require changed politics.

Wilson’s route to that conclusion was neither quick nor tidy. He had been sceptical. He attacked the Conservative terms and worried about Commonwealth interests. The 1964 manifesto still said a British government’s first responsibility was to the Commonwealth, and his government took office with no intention of renewing Macmillan’s failed application.

But he was not doctrinaire. Before he became Labour leader, he had asked whether Britain could afford to stay out of European arrangements. In the 1959 EFTA debate he distinguished Europe’s “dreamers and idealists” from the practical machinery they had created, and he worried that Western Europe would attract investment and leave Britain a scientific backwater.

That history saves Wilson from the charge of opportunism. He shifted because he weighed the costs and benefits and the scales moved.

The comparison with the present is not exact. But they are familiar. Britain has again been told that sovereignty matters more than economic interest. Michael Gove recently argued that Brexit made Britain “a full parliamentary democracy once more” and restored the ability of voters to punish governments for failure. He may be right about the constitutional theory. The political reality is harsher: voters are punishing governments for the economic failure Brexit helped create. Distance from Europe has not made Europe less important. It has made the cost of distance harder to ignore.

Burnham is unusually placed because he is not the obvious carrier of reheated Remain politics. He is a northern politician whose appeal is rooted in place, transport, wages and work. If the European argument is to return as a serious national argument, it cannot sound like a reprimand from London. It has to start where people live. Wilson’s scepticism was his credential. Burnham’s distance from the Remain campaign is his.

The pressure on Wilson was economic before it was anything else. He came to office in 1964 with a majority of four and an £800m balance of payments deficit, and his refusal to devalue left him dependent on the United States. The Commonwealth still mattered emotionally and diplomatically, but in 1950 it had taken nearly half of British exports; by 1970 the figure was below a quarter. Between 1960 and 1965, real GNP per head grew at 3.9% in the six Community states against 2.6% in Britain. Britain sat outside a successful common market, with few compensating gains.

The sterling crisis of July 1966 tipped Wilson from guarded interest into determination. The crash exposed the failure of domestic policy and the danger of relying on America to prop up the pound. George Brown wanted a more radical break: devaluation and retrenchment. Wilson was not ready for that. The European application became a third way between the old fantasy of world power and the humiliation of becoming a diminished regional state.

Wilson and Brown toured the capitals of Europe. Brown recorded that their line grew firmer as the tour went on, until they had virtually decided to make the application. The tour convinced Wilson that membership was desirable and that the application could not be hedged too heavily. Britain would have to accept unwelcome consequences, as the other members had.

Before he could negotiate with Europe, Wilson had to negotiate with his own party. Castle and Crossman described Cabinet meetings in which Wilson finessed his colleagues: reassuring them that no final decision had been taken, wearing them down through long sessions, warning that without the European road Britain could end up as America’s dependant. Tony Benn’s phrase, that they were a “defeated Cabinet”, captured how far economic crisis had narrowed the government’s room for manoeuvre.

In April 1967, the Cabinet came round, and the Commons approved the application by 488 votes to 62. Thirty-six Labour MPs voted against and 50 abstained despite a three-line whip. Six parliamentary private secretaries were sacked. Wilson had contained dissent but at a cost.

De Gaulle’s answer came in two stages. Within days of the announcement, his “velvet” veto of May 1967 signalled that France was unpersuaded. Some contemporaries concluded the application had only ever been a public relations exercise. The record says otherwise. Through the summer and autumn, the Foreign Office planned for a French “non”. Con O’Neill argued that a veto should be the moment for “not taking no for an answer”: if France said no, the Five should keep saying yes, and the application should stay on the Council agenda until the French position changed.

The formal veto came on 27 November 1967, nine days after sterling was devalued by 14.3%. Devaluation was meant to put beyond doubt Britain’s ability to accept the obligations of membership. It did not move de Gaulle, who rejected the opening of negotiations and offered association instead.

Wilson refused to walk away. He answered de Gaulle point by point and told the Commons that the application remained on the table. Cabinet backed the assertive course, and at the Council of Ministers in December the Five sided with the Commission on the need to open negotiations, leaving France isolated. The solidarity was imperfect and the veto held. But Wilson had kept Britain inside the European argument. He could not control de Gaulle. He could control whether Britain gave up.

That is what political seriousness after defeat looks like. And yes, I am thinking this is very unlike David Cameron resigning after the referendum.

This is also why the easy Heath-Wilson contrast fails. Heath deserves credit for taking Britain in on 1 January 1973, but he inherited officials, negotiating briefs, a timetable and relationships prepared under Wilson, who kept the application alive between 1967 and 1970.

And the story has a coda. De Gaulle did not last. He resigned in April 1969, and within eight months the Six had agreed at The Hague to open enlargement negotiations. The door opened because Wilson had refused to let it close, and because the man holding it shut was not permanent. No veto is. The obstacles to Britain’s return, a tired public, a nervous party and a press that treats the question as settled, are political facts, not laws of nature. That is the second lesson: the side that stays at the table outlasts the side that walks away.

The third lesson comes from 1975. By then Labour was divided again, and visibly so. Wilson renegotiated, held a referendum, suspended collective responsibility and allowed ministers to campaign on different sides, and still secured a national decision to remain: 67.2% on a 64% turnout. This was not ideological purity. It was political management. Wilson understood that the leader’s task was not to make every faction feel the same thing. It was to create a process large enough to hold disagreement and still carry the country to a decision.

Burnham does not need to announce immediate rejoining as a test of faith. That would comfort those already persuaded and alarm many who are not. But he cannot allow “not now” to be the end of it.

John Major is useful here. He has said Britain should aim to rejoin the single market within five years, as a step towards the longer-term goal of membership, and he puts a number on Brexit’s damage: an estimated £100bn a year in lost trade and £40bn in lost tax receipts. The figures can be debated. The political point cannot: a serious Conservative tradition once understood Europe as a question of national interest.

That does not make rejoining easy. It makes evasion harder.

The case Burnham could make is not sentimental. It is not a plea to go back to 2015. It is a practical argument about trade, investment, research, security and influence. The old Brexit argument asked voters to choose an identity. The next European argument has to ask a plainer question: what works?

That is the Wilson method. Keep the destination alive. Build the route. Manage the coalition. Tell the truth about the trade-offs. And do not confuse a hostile moment in history with a permanent settlement.

That’s a route back to Europe worth considering.