Within the Conservative Party, debate about Europe focused increasingly on direct elections. I received regular reports on Party opinion. A group of MPs led by Neil Marten argued a powerful case against having direct elections at all. A larger group of MPs reluctantly accepted that the pass had been sold and that the real question was when the elections should take place and under what electoral system. A third group was keen to create a real European Parliament to provide a check on the actions of the Council of Ministers and the Commission. Luckily, the divisions on the Government side were at least as large as on ours, and we were able to unite in blaming them for the delay in bringing the requisite legislation before the House. Equally satisfactorily, the Government proposal to use proportional representation, a gesture to sustain the Lib-Lab Pact, was soundly defeated in December 1977. Consequently, the first direct elections took place — under a first-past-the-post system — in 1979 when I was Prime Minister.
The pressure for political integration was to have its economic counterpart. The first ambitious plans for European economic and monetary union were embodied in the so-called ‘Snake’ set up in 1972. Britain had joined under Ted as one earnest of his iron-clad commitment to Europe; he had to pull out within six weeks. But the economic planners were only stimulated by failure, and at the end of 1978 the European Monetary System (EMS) was agreed and eight of the nine Community currencies joined. Britain alone stayed out. Her Majesty’s Opposition under my leadership would have been less than human not to take advantage of this as evidence that sterling was too weak to join as a result of Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. That was a fair enough tactical position, but it was more difficult to judge what a Conservative Government itself should do.
At the end of October 1978 Geoffrey Howe sent me a note outlining the case for and against joining. He felt that if we were now the Government and had committed ourselves to the right financial and economic policies, we would have been able to join. Geoffrey also believed that we needed to maintain the Party’s stock of European goodwill and feared that the alternative meant ‘surrendering the direction of the EEC and its policies to the Franco-German high table’. Nigel Lawson, a junior Treasury spokesman, also sent me a searching analysis at the end of October. He understood that the EMS was seen by the French and Germans as having a political objective, the next stage in the progress of European unity. He shrewdly noted that ‘those who support UK membership of the EMS as part of their devotion to the EEC cause should pause to reflect whether adherence to the discipline which is its sole merit might not in practice prove so unpopular as to make support of continuing EEC membership political suicide’. Nigel’s reluctant conclusion was that we should join anyway: but his ‘best hope’ was that the system would collapse shortly thereafter, not due to the weakness of sterling but because of pressures on other currencies, and that we could then propose some more sensible framework for European economic convergence. I was impressed by the quality of both these analyses. My thinking on this was still evolving, but I decided at this point that we should continue to adopt a positive general approach to the EMS while avoiding making any specific commitments.
The second important European theme — the closer cooperation of the right-of-centre parties — eventually led to the foundation in 1978 of the European Democratic Union (EDU). But this modestly useful organization was less significant than the political impulses which lay behind it. The mid-1970s was a time of advance by the Left, both democratic and non-democratic, in many areas and ways. Communist parties seemed to be on the verge of entering government in Mediterranean Europe. And everywhere the Left was encouraged by the feeling that history and Soviet military power were pushing the world in its direction. This was something which could only ultimately be combated and reversed by NATO decisions and under reinvigorated American leadership. In the meantime, the European Right had to fight a fierce battle on the political front.
Nowhere was it fiercer than in Portugal. Within weeks of my becoming Leader I had a long talk with Professor Diogo Freitas do Amaral, the leader of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), the only party to the right of the ruling coalition. He was a gentle intellectual, clearly involved in politics for the highest motives. He was also, when I saw him, in deep despair. Since the overthrow of the dictatorship of Dr Caetano in April 1974, communists and other radical leftists in the army, in cahoots with the Portuguese Communist Party, had successfully manipulated their way to almost total power. This they used ruthlessly to extinguish opposition. The CDS was denied access to the media and its rallies were broken up by force. Professor do Amaral knew that under these conditions there was no hope of a successful result in the forthcoming elections. He half wondered whether it was worth his going back to Portugal at all. But we both agreed that in spite of all the difficulties he had to return and see it through. He did so. But he was fighting impossible odds. His party received less than 8 per cent of the vote. There would probably be no democracy in Portugal even now if brave men and women like Professor do Amaral had not risen up against the arrogance of the communists in northern Portugal and prevented the forcible attempt to seize the peasants’ land and turn the country into a Cuban-style state. It was a frightening insight into the ambitions and methods of the Left, which were by no means confined to Portugal. Indeed, the British Labour Left, intoxicated by the prospects of a European revolution, supported the communists.
Neighbouring Spain was more fortunate, enjoying a more or less smooth transition from dictatorship after General Franco’s death in November 1975. There, doubtless observing the Portuguese resistance offered to too blatant an attempt to seize power, the Spanish Communist Party from the date of its legalization in 1977 preferred to emulate its Italian and French counterparts by adopting the disguise of ‘Euro-communism’. I always considered Eurocommunism as a tactical ploy to be understood in very much the same way as, to take an earlier parallel, the Popular Fronts in the 1930s. It did indeed show a recognition of the force of liberal public opinion and foreshadowed the coming collapse of communism’s internal self-confidence. But it did not represent any abandonment of the essential goals of Marxism-Leninism. Of course, the only ‘proof’ of this could be found in an assessment of the real attitudes and intentions of the Euro-communist leaderships. But in any case the effect of any advance by Euro-communists was to reduce the willingness and ability of the West to meet the growing Soviet threat; for it would have been unpardonably irresponsible to assume that any government in which a Communist Party shared power could be depended upon in a crisis.
I made these points wherever I went in Europe. But I did so with particular force when I addressed the West German Christian Democrat Union (CDU) Party Conference in Hanover on Tuesday 25 May 1976:
In some European countries we now see communist parties dressed in democratic clothes and speaking with soft voices. Of course, we hope that their oft-proclaimed change of heart is genuine. But every child in Europe knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood and what happened to her in her grandmother’s cottage in the forest. Despite the new look of these communist parties, despite the softness of their voices, we should be on the watch for the teeth and appetite of the wolf.