On 5 June 1975 – 50 years ago today – voters went to the polls in Britain’s first national referendum. Just two years after joining the European Community, they were voting on whether to leave, a decision that would shape the UK’s economic, political and diplomatic strategy for decades to come. For the first time in British history, a front-rank political question had been taken out of the hands of Parliament and passed directly to the electorate. The Sun thought this “a constitutional monstrosity”. The new Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, called the referendum “a device of dictators and demagogues”, and refused to confirm that she would accept the result. As the first election of the modern era to be fought outside the established party system, the referendum carried the debate into the most unlikely places. In the churches, bishops preached sermons on the religious arguments for membership. In Northern Ireland, terrorist organisations published earnest articles on the implications for the port of Belfast. Tesco issued carrier bags saying “Yes to Europe”, while campaigners mobilised sports-stars and celebrities ranging from Agatha Christie and Barbara Cartland to Captain Mainwaring and Paul McCartney. Looking back on that referendum after the 2016 vote offers both eerie similarities and clanging dissonances. As in 2016, the vote was triggered by a crisis in the governing party; in this case, a Labour government led by Harold Wilson. Like David Cameron, Wilson was a reluctant European, convinced with his head rather than his heart of the case for membership. Like Cameron, he led a party that was bitterly divided on Europe, with a wafer-thin majority, at a time of growing Euroscepticism in the country. And like Cameron, his solution was to renegotiate the terms of membership and put them to the country in a referendum. If the recipe looks familiar, the ingredients could hardly have been more different. In 1975, the most pro-European party was the Conservatives. Ted Heath, its former leader, blazed across the campaign trail like a meteor, arguing for membership with a drive and charisma that had entirely evaded him in office. His successor, Margaret Thatcher, stumped the country demanding a “massive Yes” to Europe, resplendent in a jumper knitted from the flags of all the member-states. Labour was more divided, with figures like Tony Benn and Michael Foot excoriating the Community as a capitalist project. Papers like the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph all backed staying in, while only the Spectator and the Communist Morning Star endorsed withdrawal. Opinion in the constituencies was also very different. The young were more Eurosceptic than the old, women more hostile than men, and the most pro-European nation of the United Kingdom was unquestionably England. Places like Essex and Lincolnshire – bastions of the Leave vote in 2016 – registered votes for membership of 68% and 75% respectively. The nightmare for Unionists was that England would vote to stay in, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to Leave – a direct reversal of the situation decades later. If voting patterns were very different, so too were the issues on which they were founded. Immigration, which loomed so large in 2016, was barely mentioned. There were only nine member-states in 1975, and no one thought West Germans or Belgians would be hurrying to the United Kingdom in search of work. Food prices, by contrast, were central to the campaign, at a time of serious anxiety about Britain’s ability to feed itself. Memories of war hung heavy across the campaign, for 1975 was closer to the end of the First World War than 2016 to the Second. Poppies and doves of peace featured prominently in campaign literature, while posters reminded voters: “Forty million people died in two European wars this century. Better lose a little national sovereignty than a son or daughter.” Another war – the Cold War – also loomed large. Heath claimed that a vote to withdraw “could lead to a Soviet invasion of Europe”, while Out campaigners warned of Communist influence in France and Italy. In the aftermath of Watergate, Vietnam and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, there were doubts about whether the United States could or would defend Europe. Harold Wilson told the cabinet in 1974 that “American leadership had gone”; Europe would now have to do more for its own defence. If one issue dominated over all others, it was a mood of economic crisis. Inflation was above 20 per cent, unemployment was rising and an oil shock in the Middle East had seen power-cuts and shortages across industry. The Chancellor, Denis Healey, thought the economic situation in 1974 “the worst which had ever been faced in peacetime”, while the Industry Secretary, Tony Benn, wrote optimistically that “the final collapse of capitalism might be a matter of weeks away”. No democracy had ever survived such sustained levels of inflation, fuelling concerns that spiralling prices might destroy democratic institutions in the 1970s as surely as in Germany in the 1930s. Not surprisingly, the “In” campaign focused heavily on economic risk, warning of total economic collapse if Britain voted to Leave. Yet it paired that message with more positive arguments, centring on peace, prosperity and patriotism. Pamphlets and leaflets were peppered with Saltires, Union Jacks and Welsh dragons, while posters featured the England cricket captain Colin Cowdrey, the racing driver Jackie Stewart, and the heavyweight boxer Henry Cooper. There were pro-European messages from football managers like Sir Matt Busby and Jock Stein, who had won the European Cup with Manchester United and Celtic. Crucially, these were not just celebrities: they were national champions who had competed in Europe and won. By contrast, the “Out” campaign was underfunded, poorly led and bitterly divided, staffed by people, in the words of one official, “who would not want to be seen dead in the same coffin”. They included some of the most talented figures in British politics – Tony Benn, Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley and Barbara Castle – but these were all quite polarising figures who found it impossible to work together. Benn had called Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech “evil, filthy and obscene”, accusing him of raising the flag “that fluttered… over Dachau and Belsen”. Powell labelled Benn “the enemy within”, one of those “who hate Britain and wish to destroy it”. It was not particularly helpful to the “Out” campaign that the IRA, the National Front, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Democratic Unionist Party all backed leaving, in a striking demonstration of the unlikely alliances that emerged across the campaign. With lavish donations from business and finance, the “In” campaign had more money left over at the end of the referendum than the total spend of “Get Britain Out”. It used that to build a multi-vocal campaign that targeted different messages to different audiences. There were idealistic messages for the young, commitments to women’s rights for feminists, talk of jobs and investment for industrial workers and an emphasis on peace for the wartime generation. Groups like “Actors for Europe”, “Christians for Europe”, “Lawyers for Europe” – even, for one glorious moment before the leadership intervened, “Wombles for Europe” – built a kaleidoscopic case for Europe that could speak to different ideologies and interests. The contrast with the mono-vocal campaign of 2016, with its solitary emphasis on risk, is stark. The result was a landslide for the “In” campaign. At the start of the year, polls had shown strong majorities in favour of withdrawal; yet when the votes were counted, there was a two-to-one majority for staying in. Every part of the UK had voted for membership, with the exception only of Shetland and the Western Isles. On the morning of the result, Harold Wilson told reporters that the European debate was now closed. “Fourteen years of national argument,” he declared, “are over.” Like most prophets in the wake of extraordinary political events, Wilson was mistaken. His own party would go to the country in 1983 promising to leave the European Community, without a further referendum. Pro-Europeans like Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams would spin out of the Labour Party and into the SDP, while Margaret Thatcher would take a flame-thrower to the “Yes to Europe” jumper she had worn in 1975. In 2016, the decision reached four decades earlier would be dramatically reversed, vindicating Powell’s prophecy that a judgement to stay in could only be “provisional”. Yet the 1975 vote mattered. It secured UK membership for more than 40 years, with profound consequences for how Britain’s laws were made, who it traded with, what food Britons ate and where they went on holiday. From 1975 to 2016, membership of the European Community/Union was perhaps the most important fact about British history and the central pillar of Britain’s economic, diplomatic and geopolitical strategy. As 2016 demonstrates, the results of referendums – like general elections – are not irreversible. Half a century after that first vote, the UK finds itself again in an age when European security is under threat, when the US alliance is in doubt, when the world is fracturing into trade blocs, and amid a pervasive sense of economic decline. In such a context, the arguments of the 1970s seem more relevant today than they did a decade earlier. Where that might lead is impossible to predict. As Harold Wilson knew, and Keir Starmer is surely finding out, the past and the present are full of surprises. [See also: The warning of VE Day]