LONDON — In June 1975, Jeremy Corbyn was living in a dingy one-bedroom flat in Haringey, north London, with his first wife, Jane, and a tabby cat called Harold Wilson.
The moggie was named for the then Labour prime minister, for whom the couple felt some affection, having met while working as activists on Wilson’s election campaign the previous year.
Corbyn is often linked to mentors on the left, such as Labour grandees Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn. But his regard for the tricksy Wilson is underappreciated and worth revisiting as Corbyn faces increasing pressure from party activists deeply unhappy over his stance on Brexit.
The current Labour leader cut his political teeth during the 1966 general election, when, as a member of the Young Socialists, the youth wing of the Labour Party, he campaigned for Wilson in his local constituency, the Shropshire swing seat of The Wrekin.
Where Corbyn paid lip service to Remain in 2016, he has now vowed to sit out a future referendum altogether, going further even than Wilson in 1975.
So overjoyed was he by the reelection of the Labour government that as dawn broke on the morning following the count, he and a group of friends climbed the 400-meter summit of The Wrekin (the large hill for which the constituency is named) to sing the Labour party’s anthem, “The Red Flag.”
So it is perhaps no surprise that, as Corbyn faces one of his most difficult Labour conferences since his election as party leader four years ago, he has decided to emulate his hero Wilson during the first European referendum of June 1975.
The ‘capitalist club’
In October of the previous year, Labour had fought the general election on a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum once its renegotiation with the European Economic Community (EEC) — the precursor to the European Union — was complete.
The pledge was taken not at the urging of the public, which polls showed was largely happy with the first 20 months of British membership, but to placate a Labour Party suspicious of the Tory-negotiated terms of entry.
Many on the left were concerned at the prospect of such a huge open market, which, they felt, could only help the forces of capitalism.
Members of Corbyn’s wing of the party also feared the other member states, largely ruled at the time by centrist and center-right parties, would prove to be a roadblock for socialist projects by a future left-wing British government.
Jeremy Corbyn attends the annual Labour Party Conference on September 19, 2019 in Brighton | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“Corbyn (along with myself and many others on the left) opposed it because we saw the EEC as a capitalist club,” as the Corbyn-sympathetic writer Francis Beckett wrote in the New Statesman in May.
With the Labour Party divided on the issue, Wilson agreed to an unprecedented breach of collective Cabinet responsibility: Ministers would be permitted to campaign on either side of the referendum debate. Six of the 23-strong Cabinet chose to back “No” (to continued British membership), including heavyweights such as Benn, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot and Peter Shore.
Like them, Corbyn favored quitting the EEC in 1975, telling journalists on the eve of his election as leader 20 years later: “’I did vote and I voted ‘No.’”
And it wouldn’t be a one-off. As an MP he voted against the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union in 1993, against the Lisbon Treaty that forms the current constitutional basis of the EU in 2008, and for a referendum on British membership of the EU as far back as 2011 — breaking the Labour whip to do so.
But by the time that referendum was held in 2016, Corbyn was now leader of a party that, in the intervening New Labour decades, had become far more Euro-friendly — certainly compared with 1975.
Lofty neutrality
Euroskepticism was largely the preserve of the right, the “fruitcakes and loonies” as David Cameron memorably once called U.K. Independence Party members. The vast majority of mainstream U.K. politicians had teamed up to campaign to remain in the EU.
Corbyn was not yet bold enough to actively move the Labour Party toward a Leave position, or even to advocate for a Wilson-style compromise, so he did what he often does when forced to act in a way he dislikes: He sulked.
British former Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1976. Jeremy Corbyn’s regard for the tricksy Harold Wilson is underappreciated and worth revisiting | Central Press/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Old comrades including Tariq Ali have confirmed that Corbyn would have supported Leave had he not been the party’s leader. Instead, he kept as low a profile as possible, at one point disappearing on holiday at the height of the campaign.
In his memoirs, published last week, Cameron laments Corbyn’s lack of enthusiasm, implying it may have had an impact on the referendum result. “[W]hen I looked to the red team on my left, the leadership, particularly Jeremy Corbyn, just wasn’t there,” he told the Times.
Alan Johnson, who was tasked with leading Labour’s Remain campaign, found his work repeatedly thwarted by Corbyn’s failure to attend campaign events, and the leadership’s insistence in watering-down the few speeches and articles he did release. (Corbyn’s chief of staff, Seumas Milne, is as much a Euroskeptic as Corbyn.)
Corbyn’s indifference led directly to the greatest threat he ever faced to his leadership, when, following the shocking referendum result, there was a mass walkout of two-thirds of his shadow Cabinet and a no-confidence vote in his leadership.
But the Europhiles failed in their bid to unseat the leader, and three years on, little has changed in Team Corbyn’s approach to the EU. Indeed, if anything attitudes have hardened.
Where Corbyn paid lip service to Remain in 2016, he has now vowed to sit out a future referendum altogether, going further even than Wilson in 1975.
Promising that as prime minister he would negotiate a “sensible” deal with the EU before putting it to the public in a referendum, he wrote in the Guardian: “I will pledge to carry out whatever the people decide, as a Labour prime minister.”
In opting for lofty neutrality, Corbyn has put himself at odds with his longtime ally John McDonnell, his Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer and his Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, as well as the vast majority of Labour MPs, activists, members and, indeed, voters.
But more important to him, he has remained true to the ideals he held dear when he stroked Harold Wilson the cat while plotting of the downfall of capitalism in his flat in Haringey.
And he is doing so with an act of political tightrope walking that would have made the real Harold Wilson proud.
Rosa Prince is the author of “Comrade Corbyn, A Very Unlikely Coup” (Biteback Publishing, February 2016).
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