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Private Notes
Nick Robinson explores the troubled history of the UK's relationship with Europe. The critical decision Britain's voters are about to take in the referendum is the culmination of decades of agonizing debate about Britain's place in Europe, and its often lethal effect on British politics. The first episode examines why British governments first shunned the new Common Market then begged to join it. It explores the decisive part played by three British prime ministers - Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. After being humiliated by the French president when Britain first applied to join, Heath triumphantly took the UK into the Common Market ten years later. But the seeds of today's problems were already being sown. The unfamiliar story emerges from a series of special interviews with Heath and two of his successors, Tony Blair and David Cameron, as well as other key British players and the main civil servants and diplomats involved on both sides of the English Channel.
This second programme goes behind the closed doors of Whitehall and Brussels to hear from the decision-makers about the twists and turns in Britain's relationship with the EEC, now EU.
It examines the way the first European referendum was fought 40 years ago, and the changes in the European project since then. After the British people gave their consent in 1975 to Harold Wilson's referendum, successive governments have battled to maintain that consent, from Margaret Thatcher's rebate battle to John Major's Black Wednesday and Maastrict rebels to Tony Blair's position on joining the European single currency, the rise of UKIP, and to the current debate following David Cameron's proposal of an in-out referendum this June.
