[…] Tory Party, then made his famous U-turn. This is half-true, at best. It is clear now that Heath had one overriding aim – British entry into the EEC – and everything else played second fiddle to that. In the first year and a half of his government he appeared to believe that the best […]
[…] has ‘hi-jacked’ the issue is nonsense. There has always been a section of the Tory Right which, like a section of the Labour Left, has opposed the EEC and the European Union. Rather uncomfortably they lined up together in the 1975 referendum campaign on EEC membership; just as some of their political antecedents had […]
The CIA In a recent ‘Witness Seminar’ on the 1975 British referendum on entry into the European Economic Community ( EEC), the Conservative MP, Sir Richard Body, who in 1975 was co-chair of the anti-EEC National Referendum Campaign, had this to say: ‘At the very beginning of the campaign two CIA agents came to […]
[…] Europe The social democratic wing of the Labour Party had two key positions: British membership of NATO and retention of British nuclear weapons, and membership of the EEC. After the defeat of CND at the Labour conference of 1961 it was European Economic Community (EEC) membership which became their great cause. With this achieved […]
[…] has been cosying up to America – how likely is it that the FCO would release, and release now, its in-house history of the negotiations with the EEC? Another explanation of why it has been published is this. In my review of Young’s book I pointed out that in giving Young access to the […]
[…] in their imperial fantasies. In writing this book Young has been given access to secret Foreign Office papers, including an in-house history of the negotiations with the EEC. He and his colleagues at the Foreign Office have thus driven a coach and horses through the Official Secrets Act. Somewhere, I suspect, someone on the […]
[…] economic ‘stagflation’ from which Western Europe had been suffering for almost a decade. At the same time there had been little movement towards further integration within the EEC. However, Pehr Gyllenhammar, Volvo’s CEO, started campaigning for an overall scheme ‘to spur growth, and build industry and infrastructure’ in Western Europe. Working with Fiat’s Umberto […]
[…] to provide the youthful European Economic Community with military capability.(1) The essay is notable because it adds another dimension to our grasp of how and why the EEC was formed. Most modern work follows from the thesis developed by Alan Milward and is starting to accept that the EEC developed out of the post-war […]
[…] end, in which in a couple of pages they offer an analysis of NuLab’s origins, tracing them back through the formation of the SDP to the pro- EEC campaign in the referendum of 1975. They see in these groups a common thread: the pretence that tough choices don’t have to be made. They show […]
[…] that ‘After 1964 George Thomson presided over longer-term IRD activities’. (p. 138) George Thomson, later ennobled as Lord Thomson of Monifieth, was one of the leading pro- EEC members of the Wilson Cabinet and a former Chair of the Labour Committee for Europe. He resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1973 when Labour policy […]
