Q & A with Glyn Ford
The former Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party discusses Labour’s emergence as a pro-European party under Kinnock and why Starmer has to walk a tightrope over Brexit today.
IFTC spoke to Glyn Ford, former MEP for Greater Manchester East and leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party from 1989 to 1993, about how Labour transitioned from opponents of the European Community in 1983 to supporters of deeper integration, including over social policy, under John Smith’s leadership and Keir Starmer’s bind over Europe today.
How does someone go from Geology and Soil Science at Reading University to leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party? Where did you get your start in politics?
GF:
My parents were active in the Labour Party. I come from a coal mining community in the Forest of Dean and so you grew up being active in the Labour Party. I collected the subs from the street on a Saturday or Sunday morning from the age of probably 10 to 14 or something. It wasn’t a surprise that even when I was doing my geology, I was a labour party member.
As for geology—surely it’s coal mining for graduates. (At one stage I had an interview with the NCB [National Coal Board] and was asked how I’d get on with the men. I replied, ’no problem, I’m more worried about the bosses’. I was not offered a post).
I got elected as local councillor in Tameside in 1978. It was really that basis that propelled me. In 1980 I became Chair of the Education Committee, partly because everyone else was frightened of the job because of all these teachers, but I ended up with 3,000 staff and 50 percent of the Tameside budget.
I made a bit of a name for myself locally. If I hadn’t done my local council work, no one would have thought of me becoming and MEP, and I don’t think I’d have thought to myself about becoming an MEP.
The year before your election, Labour’s election manifesto had committed the party to withdrawing from the European Community. How did the party, and your own views, shift from pushing for withdrawal to supporting Maastricht 9 years later?
GF:
I was active in the ‘No’ campaign in the [1975] referendum. So I was sort of on-board.
But I guess two things, a number of people said at the selection meeting that they voted for me because I was the least anti-European candidate out of the six candidates. Secondly, I’d just been a visiting professor in Japan and, my epiphany had not quite arrived, but looking at the UK from a distance of half-way around the world, it did look as if it was increasingly difficult to imagine the UK standing alone.
That didn’t finally catch up with me for a while, but certainly from my science and technology perspective, I was increasingly sceptical about the ability of medium-sized nation states to stand alone in a globalizing world.
Looking at the perspective of the Parliamentary Labour Party, known as the British Labour Group at the time: when I got elected in 1984, I was recruited into the left faction—which I was happy to join. The 1979-84 [European parliamentary] group was controlled by the right wing. Then the left won a lot of seats and took control. We replaced all of the right-wing officers with left-wing officers—apart from Barbara Castle, who promised that she’d stand down after a year. (She also promised that wouldn’t stand again in Greater Manchester North for a second time after she was elected in 1979, so Barbara was a serial changer of her mind.)
But then there was a split in the Broad Left—which probably had about 23 of the 32 MEPs—between those for whom anti-Europeanism was their very reason for living and those that held a rather different view. I was in the [pro-European] group that split away, with David Martin, Carol Tongue, Christine Crawley, people like that. Our attitude to Europe was more pragmatic.
Early on, I was arguing that it would have been the right thing not to join, but now we’re in it’s too late. Not joining was one option, but leaving was a very different option. People were making a good case for not joining, but we’re already in, and they’re not making a good case for leaving.
By 1985, the anti-European majority had started to erode. And it had finally gone when David Martin was elected to replace Alf Lomas as leader of the Labour Group on a left-wing, pro-European platform in 1987 (even then it was on a knife edge). That change was aided and abetted by Neil Kinnock. We worked quite closely with Neil.
What happened with the leaders of the Labour Group? Barbara Castle was there for a year, then it was Alf Lomas, then David Martin, and he lasted a year before being replaced by Barry Seal. So you went from: hangover right wing; hard left, anti-European; left, pro-European; left anti-European. And then you had the [leadership] election I won in 1989, on what I considered to be a left-wing, pro-European position. Or left-wing realist position, in the sense that I thought there was no alternative. You can’t deliver socialism in one country, you need to deliver it in Europe.
It sounds like a mixture of more pro-European individuals winning elections, combined with an overarching Neil Kinnock goal of closer European integration?
GF:
Yeah. I mean, I was very active, because I was the leader, when Kinnock got into [Europe] in a big way. He would come over [to Brussels] and I would arrange meetings with the Italian Communist Party leadership, people like Giorgio Napolitano, who went on to become President of Italy. Kinnock was really into it, really engaged in a serious way, in my view.
Kinnock was a European player, [John] Smith was a European spectator, in that he was pro-European, but it was a bit like supporting Manchester United. He [proclaimed] “I’m pro-European”, then went on and did domestic politics. Whereas Kinnock was getting heavily engaged.
At one stage, this was after the 1992 election, Kinnock almost became leader of what was to become the Party of European Socialists. There was no thought for someone like John Smith doing that.
So the broader party change came after the 1987 policy review?
GF:
Yes, this was around when the changes were starting to take place. I remember I was slightly nervous over reselection in 1989. In the runup to 1989, it was not totally clear that the party would necessarily support my position. The TUC [Trade Unions Congress] had gotten very excited about [President of the European Commission] Jacques Delors, but it was not entirely clear that my local Constituency Labour Parties were going to go the same way. This was a period of—struggle sounds a bit grand—but it was not self-evident at the beginning of the process of where the end was going to be.
How did Europe go from being an issue that had divided Labour to a huge internal problem for the Conservatives?
GF:
It was partly politics. Europe was increasingly looking like a social democratic project. It was the Social Chapter that did it. The image of Europe that Conservatives had was that the single market was a trade bloc. Once it started interfering in social affairs, they didn’t like that very much. And even a hint of moving towards, in a very minor way, common security policy [caused alarm]. It was the politics.
Socialist Parties have always been a minority in Europe but, when I was leader, the Socialist Group was the biggest group in the European Parliament and in the Commission, there was a majority of socialist commissioners. We looked like the future.
After I was elected leader in 1989, one of the first things I was invited to do was to debate Europe with Michael Heseltine at a Sunday Times business breakfast, and I made the claim that Labour was now the party of Europe. The business audience laughed, but they’re not laughing now!
But now Labour is back in a quandary over Europe.
GF:
Keir Starmer’s trying to walk a tightrope. You’ve probably got the majority of Labour Party members in favour of re-joining the EU, but it seems to be a vote-loser amongst the general public.
We’re not even prepared to say that part of the cost of living crisis is because of Brexit. We’re going along with the Tory idea that it’s just COVID, but if you actually look at the rest of Europe, the COVID hit is a lot lower than it is in Britain.
There is a real problem because people think that they can re-join the EU, but they can’t. They can’t re-join the EU that we left. If we re-join there will be no opt outs of anything, so we’ll have to join the single currency. They will certainly demand two referenda with 60-40 majorities, because the last thing the European Union needs is someone coming in and leaving again. We’ll probably have to abolish the House of Lords, because the Copenhagen criteria does not allow countries in that are not properly democratic—if you’re already in, you can get away with that.
The only way you’re going to get to that is with a very profound political crisis in the United Kingdom. About the only thing that will trigger that crisis, in my view, is probably that Scotland leaves in a referendum.
It’s really difficult. The worst thing that could happen to Labour is we actually get elected.
Can’t agree with Glynn that John Smith was a spectator on Europe. Not my experience at all. Unlike reformed anti-Europeans he certainly didn’t feel the need to prove his credentials on the EU. But as both Shadow Chancellor & Leader he maintained very close personal links with Jaques Delors at the Commission & with party leaders such as Michel Rocard, Win Kok & with the SPD with which he co-chaired an economic commission. As Leader he was very active in the PES, supporting an initiative for growth at the time of the Edinburgh Summit & preparation of manifesto for 1994 Euro elections. At the same time he very effectively attacked the Tories for the ERM debacle & had Major on the ropes over the Maastricht Treaty ratification. This was hardly the actions of an EU spectator.