I have scouted for ages for an issue that would allow a comparison of Guardian journalism across time. What might be concluded from a look at print-only, black-and-white coverage alongside today’s converged, paper-and-screens coverage? Was the remembered paper really so much better than today’s, as readers sometimes lament to me? I needed subject matter that was sufficiently prominent, consequential and open to this kind of exercise, even if the samples were separated by decades.
The chance came last week with the UK parliamentary drama over Brexit. The scene resembled the four days in October 1971 when the UK parliament debated and approved Edward Heath’s Conservative government’s “decision of principle to join the European Communities on the basis of arrangements which have been negotiated”. Labour whipped its MPs to vote against; 90 rebelled, and the motion passed 356 to 244. Recriminations swiftly followed. The House of Lords approved by 451 to 58 as “brother passed brother in the Labour party on the way to the lobbies with none of the acrimony of their Commons counterparts”, reported the Guardian.
The project put me in parallel yet weirdly similar worlds. Early mornings and lunchtimes I read the 1971 Hansard and Guardian coverage, and in the evenings I watched today’s UK parliamentarians and followed the Guardian coverage. A connection across the years was Jacob Rees-Mogg because his suits and oratorical style brought to mind the older members of the House of Commons of 1971, and his frontbench lounging recalled the great comic actor Jacques Tati’s character Monsieur Hulot.
More on eerie similarities later. The result of the journalism comparison favoured today’s Guardian, but not because the reporting and commentary of 48 years ago were inferior. On the contrary: for example, the reporters’ compression of a large number of the speeches was superb. The commentary was as robust then as now. Leader writers in 1971 and last week both reached for variations on “Europhobia”; only the sufferers have changed.
Compared with the paper of old, striking differences were the immediacy, variety of voices and richness of content enabled by digital technologies, both for coverage on screens – desk, iPad and smartphone – and in the tabloid-size newspaper. In 1971 and 2019 the Guardian recorded who voted how, but today’s coloured, elegant graphics make the information much more digestible. While contemporary coverage prefers short “pull quotes” rather than summaries of an MP’s whole argument, readers today have within easy reach a livestream, short videos, the MP’s own social media presences and perhaps a podcast interview too. The most powerful element in the comparison was the politics live blog. Almost in real time, contributions to the debate are reported now in a kind of telegraphic way, a snippet or chunk at a time, with hyperlinks to explanatory material – the parliamentary library’s work is of particular value – contradictors, data and the tweeted reactions of interested observers such as other EU players.
Adjusted for the current switch by the two main parties of what were in 1971 called the pro- and anti-marketeer positions, experiencing the two debates in parallel was by turns instructive, amusing and sobering. Public conscience-wrestling is compelling spectacle, and the sincerity with which views on this fundamental issue were held by many MPs of both generations was palpable. Arguments recurred across decades, sometimes in the same words: about sovereignty, treason/surrender, fisheries (a red herring, said one MP), flight of capital, government propaganda, Europe’s negotiators, free movement, and effects on the younger generation and on resident non-UK citizens. Northern Ireland appeared in both debates, despite the changed context. A small news item, by chance on the same page as the parliamentary reports on 29 October 1971, resounds discomfortingly today: “An Irish army officer pointed his sub-machine gun at a British officer during a 90-minute border confrontation yesterday, demanding that he hand over explosives planted to blow up a bridge in disputed territory at Newtownbutler, County Fermanagh. The British withdrew after consulting maps.”
Amid the dross and inevitable repetition was some fine speech-making, some of it multi-purpose and time-proof, such as this from 1971’s secretary of state for employment, Robert Carr. In needling Labour over its attempt to whip obedience to its changed position on Europe, he said: “An occasional revelation, a single journey to Damascus, is respectable, but when a whole party goes in for a package tour the gullibility of onlookers is strained beyond endurance.”
Much of Heath’s 1971 statement anticipating joining could readily serve Boris Johnson soon if he manages to leave: “Now we stand ready to take our first step into a new world full of new opportunities … Let us show ourselves to that new world as we would wish it to see us – confident, proud and strong.”
• Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor
