The referendum held in 1975 to determine whether the United Kingdom would remain in the European Community it had joined two years previously has lurched back into public consciousness as a result of the subsequent referendum on this issue, held in June 2016. A first sighting of this largely forgotten, earlier referendum resulted from David Cameron's attempt in 2015 to ape Harold Wilson's ploy of following a very public renegotiation of aspects of Britain's relationship with Europe with a popular vote on the subject. Like that of his predecessor, Cameron's decision was shaped by considerations of party management and the particular difficulties facing any Tory leader in defusing a question that had proved immensely divisive within his own party for the last twenty years.

But 1975 has come back into wider view because of the result of its successor in 2016. And it is now often shrouded in the self-serving mythologies associated with the two primal political perspectives that have emerged in its wake, associated respectively with the uncompromising advocacy of “Remain” and “Leave.” For proponents of the former, the size of the majority secured in 1975 signaled the good sense and rational disposition of Britain's citizens in the past, qualities that many feel have been latterly abandoned. For supporters of the latter view, 1975 was the moment when the betrayal and deceit associated with the political establishment's commitment to the European project were first apparent.

Neither of these characterizations bears much scrutiny, so the appearance of this excellent and meticulously researched study is especially timely. We need a more accurate, historically minded, and less partisan recollection of one of the key early moments in the story of Britain's fraught relationship with the European political and economic unions. In Saunders's volume, we have one. It is, in addition, replete with acute observations, thoughtful analysis of the contexts and dynamics that shaped the 1975 referendum, and some pretty good jokes. It reveals a properly historical imagination at work, as Saunders does not shirk from the fact that his readers are bound to be looking at 1975 through the lens of 2016; but he does not flatter that impulse, and he often works to undermine it. He manages to reconstruct the distinct thinking and dilemmas of some of the leading political characters who put down their party banners for a while and pursued a very different political cause in 1975, often finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with some unlikely allies as they did so.

Saunders does much to challenge the self-serving mythologies about this earlier vote that have taken root in our own moment, and he gently directs his readership toward some of the hard and paradoxical truths about this earlier exercise in direct democracy. He demonstrates that its outcome needs to be understood in relation to a wide array of (mostly contingent) political factors. These included the superior organization and funding of the “Yes” campaign and the relatively clearer sense of strategy that it was—at times—able to forge across its multifarious parts. These included the pretty dire economic context in which the referendum was held, which ensured that repeated warnings about the implications of leaving the European Community had traction. Although not labeled as such in the 1970s, “project fear” was much more effective first time around—a point that appears to have been missed by those reviewers of the book who have declared that it shows how the “Remain” campaign could have won this time. Actually, it demonstrates how different from those of their predecessors were the contexts, challenges, and choices facing those running the 2016 campaign.

Saunders's rich account also shows how “Britain in Europe” managed to combine a broad, and roughly coherent, overarching narrative about the material benefits of membership with the crafting of tailored pitches to very different demographics. It also captured an emerging zeitgeist in seeing the potential for deploying celebrities, Henry Cooper and Mary Peters among them. Finally, the politics of the European Community itself were fairly propitious for the “Remain” case at the time, mainly because visions of currency and monetary union had abated somewhat in that particular moment.

Saunders's account also undermines the judgments of those convinced that the public was effectively duped into voting for European membership because the question of sovereignty and the political nature of the Union were deliberately kept from view by the political elite. In fact, arguments about the influence and power that Britain would gain from the sharing of sovereignty were central to the discourse of some of the leading campaigners for membership. The “Britain in Europe” campaign foregrounded this theme early in the campaign but found these rather abstract ideas hard to sell to an electorate that was so focused on bread-and-butter issues like prices and inflation. And some of the political superstars of the “Leave” campaign—Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, most notably—talked clearly and consistently about what membership entailed for parliamentary sovereignty and the British state, but their arguments were, Saunders suggests, muddied by the very different understandings of what sovereignty was, and why it mattered, that were prevalent in the campaign.

Myth-busting aside, this study is notable for the many informed insights it offers into the figures and bodies that led both campaigns, and its account of the great variety of actors and organizations drawn into the contending camps. And it provides an excellent triptych of chapters on the different campaigns, and the differing political contexts that shaped them, in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. These are fascinating and insightful pieces, but they do serve to highlight one oddity of the book's structure: the absence of a chapter explicitly dedicated to the campaign in England and its constituent parts.

The Britain that turned out to vote for continued membership in 1975 was more xenophobic, more culturally insular, and less educated than that which voted, with more passion and gusto—on both sides of the argument—in 2016. And the “Yes!” to Europe that resulted from the 1975 vote was built upon a base of support that was wide and shallow, not Europhile or deep. The difficult questions and deeper uncertainties about constitution, sovereignty, and national identity that accession was bound to raise for the United Kingdom and its citizens were in no sense dissipated or resolved by this result. They were only temporarily abated.

And, as Saunders shows in a telling epilogue, the European Referendum of this era had the most paradoxical and unpredictable of political legacies. Margaret Thatcher was widely criticized for being ineffective and lackluster in her support for the campaign. Tony Benn was written off by more than one commentator as the biggest political loser of 1975 (aside from Powell, who already had become a political outcast), having staked so much on leading the vote to leave.

And yet, within the next five years, Thatcher was prime minister, and Benn had set about mounting a huge challenge to the politics and leadership of the Labour party, articulating a vision of a radical socialism that has, finally, come to the helm within it. And, longer term, it was Powell's vision of an indivisible model of parliamentary sovereignty, which meant that the United Kingdom could never properly commit to a political union in Europe, that gradually came to prevail within the ranks of the Conservative party. As this impressive study demonstrates, the European question has a unique capacity to throw the familiar certainties and allegiances of British politics up into the air. Its appearance is especially timely, as it seems that we are, once more, waiting to see where the key pieces will fall.