"None other than Margaret Thatcher"

To quote David P. from an earlier comments section about Nick Robinson's Europe: Them or Us, Part Two:

I'm finally watching this now, and I see that this episode's theme is "It's Thatcher's Fault!" A whole lot of energy placing blame squarely on her shoulders, and painting her in a rather bad light. Nobody said it outright, but the subtext was that Thatcher handled it all badly and was a bit of a hypocrite. Nice touch showing Nigel Lawson describing one speech as xenophobic. It possibly even caused her downfall. 

I find it curious that Robinson's approach is to convince Right-wingers that the EU is not only something conservatives can support (Churchill introduced the vision, what's your problem?), but the two main reasons it might not be as beneficial as possible for Britain are: It's the fault of Little Englanders that Britain wasn't in from the beginning, and Thatcher is to blame for eroding national sovereignty, so conservatives can't really complain about Socialist Europe. Never mind that Eurocrat after Eurocrat featured kept saying that the money paid into the EU isn't really Britain's money, it's theirs.

That was very much my impression too. And to show why, here's Nick Robinson's commentary in full - from Mrs. Thatcher's arrival in power to the signing of the Single European Act, with all the "It's Thatcher's Fault!" bits highlighted:

So, who was it who would sign up to the changes which transform the Common Market? None other than Margaret Thatcher. Now seen as the Euro-sceptic's pin-up, she was staunchly pro-European when she first came to power.  

Dublin was Mrs Thatcher's first big summit. She arrived with a demand for what became known as Mrs Thatcher's Billion, the gap between what Britain paid in and what we got out. Broadly speaking, for every £2 we contribute, we get £1 back. That leaves us with a net contribution of £1,000 million next year to the community, and rising in the future. Some saw this as a sort of late entry fee for joining the European club after its rules had been drawn up. Mrs Thatcher complained that Britain, along with Germany, was footing the bill for everyone else. Her fellow leaders didn't much like being lectured by the new girl.  

The response of the European smoothies was far from diplomatic. The summit went from bad to worse. 

The leaders gathered for a glum photo call. Dublin had set the tone. From then on, year after year, summit after summit, the budget row rumbled on. Again and again, Mrs Thatcher would insist that Britain should get our money back. Eventually, five years later, in Fontainebleau, she swung that famous handbag and did get a rebate of some of her billion, but at what cost? 

It was not, though, an idea from the French or the Germans that would turn Margaret Thatcher against Europe. It was, ironically, an idea that emerged from her very own handbag. She wanted to make it easier for companies to do business across Europe, to turn the Common Market into a single market. The problem was, that would involve watering down the power of governments to block, or veto, proposals they didn't like. The grand ambition of a Europe without frontiers had become logjammed. Countries were looking after their own, protecting their industries not respecting the rules. At national borders, cash was king. 

Margaret Thatcher's ambition was not just to do away with coffee money, but to lift all other barriers to free trade.  

The man in charge of securing the powers Brussels needed to enforce and police the single market was the European Commission's new president, Jacques Delors, a French socialist. For Delors, a single market was just as much about the rights of workers as business - the message he would take to Thatcher's enemies in the trade unions.  

But it was another Delors plan that would outrage Mrs Thatcher's supporters. He wanted to revive the idea of a single European currency. (Sun headline: Up Yours Delors) Ironically, he'd been backed by her to be the top man in Brussels, but theirs was a relationship which quickly soured. After one summit in London, she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways.  

To keep Delors and his grand schemes under control, Thatcher sent one of her own Cabinet to Brussels. Arthur Cockfield was a former taxman. Thatcher thought he was a pen pusher, who would be prepared to do her bidding, but Cockfield went native, backing his new boss, Jacques Delors, instead. He explained to Thatcher that the single market meant harmonising VAT. 

Delors's plans where the most significant changes to the European Community ever made. Back then, there were only ten members at the table. Now, there are almost three times that number. But what they, what she, agreed in Luxembourg, didn't just expand what Europe did, it limited any country's veto power to block it by expanding so-called majority voting.  

She swallowed hard and signed up, but how would she persuade her MPs to do the same? Simple - brief reporters that nothing much had changed at all.  

The law enacting the transfer of so many powers from Westminster to Brussels, the Single European Act, was rushed through the Commons at top speed. The debates lasted just a few days, many MPs scarcely knew what they were voting on.  

For decades, opponents of Britain's membership of the European club have claimed that it involves sacrificing our sovereignty, giving away the power of Parliament to decide what's right for us. Over just six nights, it was the House of Commons itself which voted to surrender the British veto on proposals coming from Brussels on a wide swathe of policy. And whose lead were they following? Margaret Thatcher's.

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Christopher Booker, at the Sunday Telegraph, argues that Mrs. Thatcher was deceived and that the evidence for this has emerged since the series this series was so closely based on: 1996's The Poisoned Chalice. He contends that Nick Robinson & Co. ignored that here.

And he also argues that Nick Robinson & Co. also misused The Poisoned Chalice by omitting a vital interview (and watching it for myself, yes, that bit did get dropped).

Here's Mr. Booker:

The second treaty, already planned in the mid-Eighties, was that signed six years later at Maastricht, transforming the European Community into the “European Union”, with its own currency, foreign and defence policies and, again, much more. Not only did Robinson say nothing of all this, but he tellingly omitted a remarkable interview in The Poisoned Chalice with Jacques Delors, who recalled how, on becoming president of the European Commission in 1985, he proposed “three themes: a common defence policy, a single currency, a change to the institutions which would lead to political integration”. 

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As with the first episode of this much-admired series, where the much-liked Nick Robinson & Co. presented Churchill as 'the Father of a United Europe, history does seem to have been re-written somewhat here to make Mrs. Thatcher 'the Mother of the European Union'.

Quite why this has been done I'm not sure, unless it really is to try and convince Conservative-voting types to get behind the EU because the EU is a fundamentally Churchillian/Thatcherite invention.

Is that what's going on here?

"It would have been unneighbourly"

I thought the following was a particularly interesting section from the second episode of Nick Robinson's Europe: Them or Us. 

The 'takeaway message' from it (for me) was that it was the Blair government's fault that such huge numbers of new EU citizens flooded into the UK to that Labour government's (apparent) complete surprise. Other EU countries chose not to allow such influxes into their countries - and we could have done the same. Even the Polish government didn't expect us to allow it. So it wasn't the EU's fault; it was our own incompetent government's. 

NICK ROBINSON: The EU would gain 100 million new citizens with new rights to live and travel and work where they liked, with consequences for them, and us too.

NEWSREADER: Poland, early morning October 2004. A group of men are gathering, ready to come to Britain. Last May, their country joined the European Union. Now they have the right to work here. 

POLISH WORKER: I'm happy that I am leaving to work. Work normally, for normal money.

RADEK SIKORSKI, Polish Defence Minister 2005: I was very pleasantly surprised that Britain didn't take advantage of its right to impose a seven-year transitional period. 

JACK STRAW: We got evidence that if we lifted the immediate restrictions on free movement, rather than having a phase-in period of seven years, the net effect on migration to the UK would only be 13,000. 

TONY BLAIR: Here were hundreds of thousands of people, rather than what we thought, so it was a big, big difference. 

NICK ROBINSON: Germany didn't allow Poles and other East Europeans to work in their country for seven years. It was a power Tony Blair's government had, but chose not to use. One of Blair's ministers said, it would have been unneighbourly. 

TONY BLAIR: I personally don't think we have suffered from these people coming in. I think on the contrary. They've come in. They are hard-working, determined, committed people, and have really worked hard in this country. 

JACK STRAW: The research was wrong and our judgement based on the research was heroically wrong. 

Further reading

For more on Nick Robinson's Europe: Them or Us - in the light of an earlier post here, Did Nick Robinson re-write history? - Kathy Gyngell has written a powerful piece for News-watch which sets Nick R's dramatic re-casting of historical reality in a much fuller context: Them or Us? (Re-Visited).

The historical detail she outlines about the French 'Frangleterre' proposal that Nick R presented as Churchill's plan provides yet more evidence that the BBC man veered a long way from the truth.

This, again, was what Nick Robinson told BBC viewers:

There's one interview we haven't got, it's with the man who in many ways was the father of a united Europe. No, he wasn't a Frenchman, he wasn't a German, he wasn't a Belgian, he was, in fact, the British Bulldog himself, Winston Churchill. In the desperate days of June 1940, Britain's new wartime leader's first instinct was to go for full political union, quite unthinkable today. Churchill's plan, in a last-ditch effort to stop France falling to the Nazis, was that Britain and France would become a single country, an indissoluble union with one war cabinet running defence and the economy on both sides of the Channel. The British Cabinet backed it, but with one prophetic exception, they simply couldn't stomach the idea of a single currency. Days later France fell, and with it, at that stage, the idea of political union. 

And this is what actually appears to have happened:

In order to show how risible – and deeply skewed – this interpretation is, the genesis and handling of the ‘Frangleterre’ idea needs unpicking.  It was born in June 1940 after Dunkirk fell and as the Nazi Blitzkrieg was heading towards France. The French cabinet was panicked and divided; prime minister Reynaud wanted resistance to continue while figures such as Petain were contemplating suing for ‘peace’. In this fearsome crucible, de Gaulle spoke to Jean Monnet (widely seen as the ‘father’ of the Treaty of Rome), who was then working in London with the War Cabinet on the North Atlantic supply route. Monnet had been developing ideas of a supra-national European Union since for at least two decades, and he proposed a daring plan: Franco-Anglo unification to fight on. De Gaulle decided he would put the idea to Churchill. Churchill himself was deeply cynical, but he had only recently become prime minister and knew he must put it to the War Cabinet as a whole. That happened the following day, and much to Churchill’s surprise, it was accepted as a possible way forward. Two provisos were added – that it would only be for the duration of the war, and there would be no unification of currencies. De Gaulle then took the proposal back to the French cabinet. It was rejected almost immediately. The reality was that many ministers believed the invasion of Britain by Hitler was only months away, and they were deeply angry at what they saw as the British collapse at Dunkirk. In the discussions that followed, Reynaud resigned and Petain took his place; within days the French cabinet was suing for peace with the Nazis. 

The reality is that the ‘Frangleterre’ idea never stood the remotest chance of being accepted, and even if it had been, would have been only for the duration of the battle to defeat the Nazis. Robinson projected, in suggesting that it was the root of European integration – a provocative, deliberate, one-sided view of history. It is impossible to tell what was actually in Churchill’s mind in 1940 as the country he loved with a passion appeared to be rapid collapse towards Nazi domination. The paper trail left behind suggests that the War Cabinet backing of this half-baked Monnet plan for ‘Frangleterre’ was based only on expediency, and consider-all-options – however potty – desperation. Dunkirk had fallen; the horrors of the Nazi Blitzkrieg had been unleashed towards France and the United Kingdom, and both the British War Cabinet and de Gaulle were prepared to look at any options to prevent both invasion and the formidable might of the French navy falling into Nazi hands. 

Kathy's conclusion is:

Nick Robinson is a former BBC political editor. It is deeply troubling that he should project such bias, at any time – but especially during the EU referendum. It seems that he deliberately chose to amplify the ‘Churchill is father of European unity’ concept. Clearly, no one at the BBC can see that bias. It is evidence of a deep institutional pro-EU mindset. 

Correction: The article at News-watch was actually by David Keighley. Gremlins are to blame for Kathy's name appearing there. Winston Churchill didn't write the piece though, despite anything Nick Robinson might tell you.

Further update: David's updated News-watch piece (as Alan at Biased BBC spotted) contains a restated charge against Nick Robinson: that "he doctored some of the original commentary to make it fit with the EU’s hagiography about its formation."

That's a very good way of putting it (though I'm far too mild-mannered to ever express it like that) .

And, yes, I'm now even more convinced than ever: Nick Robinson definitely radically doctored the original commentary in a pro-EU direction.

This is outrageously clear BBC bias...

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..though we seem to be pretty much alone in recognising this.

I keep hearing people praising it (even some who aren't usually friendly towards the BBC) and I suspect, via my own elderly father, that there might be lots of people (though probably not many Scots Nats) who really like Nick Robinson. And I actually like Nick Robinson too...

...and yet, that's probably why much-liked, easy-to-trust Nick Robinson might well get away with this, despite the high-powered complaints going in about it.

Did Nick Robinson re-write history?

After a tip-off from News-watch's David Keighley, I've begun comparing Nick Robinson's Europe: Them or Us with the 1996 BBC series it drew upon for its treasure trove of archive material - The Poisoned Chalice.

I'm only five or so minutes into the 1996 series (with about 195 minutes to go), but I've already been brought up short....

Nick Robinson's programme itself must have brought many people up short with this early passage, suggesting that Winston Churchill was the father of a united Europe and that the Great British Bulldog became its father in the early days of World World Two:

Nick Robinson (presenter): This wonderful treasure trove of interviews with the key decision-makers filmed 20 years ago, many of whom of course are no longer with us, gives us a real insight into the decision that we now face. 

There's one interview we haven't got, it's with the man who in many ways was the father of a united Europe. No, he wasn't a Frenchman, he wasn't a German, he wasn't a Belgian, he was, in fact, the British Bulldog himself, Winston Churchill. 

In the desperate days of June 1940, Britain's new wartime leader's first instinct was to go for full political union, quite unthinkable today. Churchill's plan, in a last-ditch effort to stop France falling to the Nazis, was that Britain and France would become a single country, an indissoluble union with one war cabinet running defence and the economy on both sides of the Channel. 

The British Cabinet backed it, but with one prophetic exception, they simply couldn't stomach the idea of a single currency. Days later France fell, and with it, at that stage, the idea of political union. 

So, it was "Churchill's plan", according to Nick, for "an indissoluble union" with France. Please bear that in mind and then compare what Nick said with what was said on the 1996 BBC programme (on which this 2016 programme drew so heavily):  

Michael Elliott (presenter): There was a time, not so long ago, when Britain welcomed the idea of European union. In June 1940 London was bracing itself for the fall of France to the Nazis. General Charles de Gaulle came to London to put an astonishing rescue plan to Winston Churchill: Britain and France should unite as a single nation. 

Robert Makins (Foreign Office, 1940): When he arrived he was taken straight into the cabinet room and, of course, we we all agog to know what it was all about, and we were afterwards informed that he had come over with a proposal that there should be a union between France and Britain. with common citizenship. 

Michael Elliott: The scheme had been dreamed up by Jean Monnet, a civil servant who would later become the Father of the European Community. 

Jean Monnet (reading from his draft declaration): The government of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain. Every British subject will become a citizen of France. 

Michael Elliott: Monnet's draft was agreed in a hurry by Churchill and the war cabinet, with one prophetic proviso. They couldn't stomach his proposal for a single currency. In any case, it all came to naught. The French cabinet turned down Monnet's plan a few hours later.

According to the 1996 programme then, it wasn't Churchill's plan at all. It was Jean Monnet and Charles de Gaulle's plan, and Winston only accepted it "in a hurry". 

Two obvious questions arise from that: Why then did Nick Robinson present the Anglo-French 'indissoluble union' plan as being Churchill's when it wasn't? And why did he suggest Churchill ought to be considered the true father of Europe, rather than Monnet?

Those are serious questions I think. I'll keep looking into this, and then see if I can get them answered.

Them and Us

The first part of Nick Robinson's new two-part series, Europe: Them or Us, began last night. 

Given that I didn't know what to write about it after having watched it, I thought I'd follow Sue's example and review the newspaper reviews in order to get my own critical juices flowing...

...except that I failed to find any such reviews (except for one in the Evening Standard which pulled off the splendid feat of being both very short and full of errors).

But my juices seem to be flowing now (well, I've got a cold), so....

Much of Part One of Europe: Them of Us was based on archive material landmark from a 1996 series called The Poisoned Chalice. Nick Robinson provided the link-up commentary. 

While I was watching it, though fascinated by it from start to finish, the thought struck me that The Poisoned Chalice must have represented where the BBC stood in 1996. 

For about the first three-quarters of this programme, the archive voices came overwhelmingly from the pro-EU-membership camp until, with about a quarter of an hour left, there was a sudden flurry of anti-EU-membership voices (on the no-buses-then-three-buses-all-at-once principle?).

The anti-EU voices were bit players back in 1996, it seems. And they were bit players here in 2016 too. 

The illustrative archive voices were overwhelmingly pro-EU and, so, Nick Robinson's commentary couldn't help but trace their disappointments and delights during the up-down couple of decades leading up to the UK's entry into the EEC in 1973. 

That's not to say, however, that Nick's commentary was biased. He was essentially stitching together interviews from that 1996 BBC documentary here. But, as David Keighley argues at News-watch, Nick gave us a narrative that the EU (and what lead up the EU) was essentially about peace, in the wake of WW2, and that is a contested narrative...

...not that you'd know that from Nick Robinson's piece.

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All the above must be cast in the light of how BBC viewers - including me - must have taken Nick's narrative. 

What I took from Nick's narrative was that Churchill was probably in favour of a United States of Europe but equivocal on whether the UK should be inside it.

Then that - a point Nick Robinson repeatedly reinforced - the charge that Britain again and again (early on) missed the chance to mould the growing European Union in its own image, and has, therefore, lost out by not being pro-EU enough....

...a section typified by this segment with a rare post-1996 voice:

NICK ROBINSON: That fateful decision, taken in a rush by a group of junior ministers, was only the first of many on which British politicians decided we were different. We could sit things out, we could wait for it all to go wrong. The result was that the rules of the European club were drawn up to suit them and not us. That's something that has bedevilled Britain's relationship with Europe ever since.  

TONY BLAIR: Britain's problem with Europe is that we didn't invent it and weren't there at the origin. And as a result of that, we've always felt that Europe was something kind of done to us and something that we were always...somewhat on the fringe of. 

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The real test of Nick Robinson and the BBC's impartiality will, of course, come next week - in part two. Many will be watching that very closely.

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There were, as you might expect, quite a number of interesting facts and vignettes here. I'll end this post with a few of them...

On De Gaulle's 'Non' to Britain joining the EU:

NR: Macmillan's charm offensive had failed. De Gaulle spelt out why to his Cabinet, in words noted down by his Information Minister.
ALAIN PEYREFITTE French Minister of Information, 1952: It’s not a matter of sentiment, but of facts and figures. He then concluded in a jocular way by recalling a song by Edith Piaf. Realising that Macmillan was a bit sad because of what he’d said, de Gaulle could only sing to him: Ne Pleurez Pas, Milord!
NR: Macmillan didn't actually cry in front of his French hosts but, on the way home, he was in tears. 

On Heath's 'Gastronomic diplomacy':

NR: Heath hadn't just mastered the detail - a man often seen as stiff and icy switched on his biggest smile. He'd cooked up a plan to win over French hearts by appealing to their stomachs. Ambassador Soames, a well-known bon viveur, invited the President and his wife to leave the presidential palace and join Heath for lunch at the British Embassy instead. A good deal would be easy to swallow after a good meal.
MICHEL JOBERT: Gastronomic diplomacy is vital. And the most deplorable are the Americans, without a doubt.  For a French person it’s worrying to put it mildly.  But with Soames at the embassy we knew there was no risk, and indeed there wasn’t.
TIMOTHY KITSON Heath’s parliamentary private secretary 1971: And I remember we had salmon with a mayonnaise... with a mint mayonnaise to start with. Actually, it was a sea trout which had come down from Scotland. We had English lamb, I think it was, and we had some seriously spectacular wines. Which was, I think, a '55 claret and a '35 port, and I think we had Chateau d'Yquem, with a very exciting sweet. All in real Soames style. 

On the goings-on in the Conservative Party at the time:

HUGH ROSSI Conservative Whip 1972: Those who would support the government through thick and thin, because they were Europeans in their outlook, we called ‘the robust’. And we indicated them on our daily list with a blue sign, a blue tick. On the other extreme, would be those who we could never persuade and they would have some good reasons, some bad reasons for voting against the government and we gave them the collective title of ‘the shits’ and we marked them off with a brown pencil. And then in the middle, there was a larger group than the others, which we called ‘the wets’. And it was a term, in fact, invented by the then Chief Whip Francis Pym.