You would have struggled to find a Leave or Remain poster in a window in Angus during the campaign.
But Arbroath was the scene of a famous speech about fishing quotas and independence just a week before the last Brexit vote in 1975.
Former right-wing MP Enoch Powell’s was invited to speak at the Webster Theatre by Morris Scott who instigated the Save Scotland’s Fishing Industries Campaign from Arbroath.
The local fish merchant managed to attract Powell along with Arne Haugestad, who had just brought down his prime minister Per Borten and the entire Norwegian cabinet.
Powell delivered his argument just a week before British voters backed the UK’s continued membership of the EEC on June 6 by a large majority in the country’s first nationwide referendum.
Powell told voters: “Arbroath is a name associated in the minds of most people with two things: fishing and independence.
“By a strange fortuity the Common Market has linked the two together, so that nowhere could a more appropriate place be found for spelling out, and proving from homely facts, the fundamental nature of the Common Market, into which Britain was shanghai’ed two years ago without that full-hearted consent either of her parliament or of her people, which the very perpetrators of the deed themselves declared was essential.”
Mr Powell warned that in seven years’ time the UK would have “no territorial waters and no fishing grounds of her own”.
He concluded: “Membership of the Common Market places the crucial political decisions which will affect the life of the people of Scotland outside the control of their own representatives.
“However Scotland is to be governed and administered in the future, that cannot be either the desire or the interests of her people.
“There can be nothing in common between the spirit of Brussels and the spirit of Arbroath.”
During the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC he campaigned for a ‘No’ vote but the electorate voted ‘Yes’ by a margin of more than two to one.
