Volume 1: Reflections of the Participants, Mark Baimbridge (ed.)
Volume 2: Current Analysis and Lessons for the Future, Mark Baimbridge, Philip Wyman and Andrew Mullen (eds.)
Exeter (UK) and Charlottesville (USA): Imprint Academic, 2006,
single volumes £17.95 (uk ) and $34.90 (US)
Andrew Mullen, who has written about the EU in these columns, brought these to my attention. Given my prejudices against the EU I am always going to be sympathetic to work by anti-EU academics. Sad to say, then, that these two volumes are really not very interesting. Volume 1, the memories of people involved in the 1975 referendum, contains almost nothing that we didn’t know already. The familiar story is re-told: the ‘anti’ campaign had little money and, because they were composed of the Labour left and Tory right, had difficulty working together; they didn’t produce a professional-looking campaign and were portrayed by the media as a group of oddballs. Meanwhile the ‘pros’, containing all the centrists who had been promoted by the media as the ‘sensible’ people, had tons of money and some covert help from the British secret state in the shape of IRD. The only bits of interest are an entertaining account by Alan Sked of his career as a eurosceptic and this snippet from former Conservative MP Richard Body:
‘Carefully selected people were invited to luncheon and dinner ……..to hear speakers give what they claimed to be confidential briefings “off the record”. The real reason which could not be told publicly for our entry to the common market was because our intelligence service had learned the Soviet Unions had plans to invade Western Europe and these would be carried out once the trade unions in Western Europe led by a Communist Fifth Column had fomented widespread strikes to prevent the invasion being resisted.’
Some years ago Body made claims about the CIA involvement in the campaign but, when I wrote to him, he had no evidence. He presents none here for this striking claim about – I presume – the actions of IRD, and my guess is he has no evidence of these ‘briefings’ either. (What would ‘evidence’ look like?)
The second volume is a series of essays – Labour and Europe; Conservatives and Europe; economics and Europe; public opinion and Europe etc. – which survey the subject of the UK’s involvement in the EU project since the war. If there is anything new and significant in this second volume I missed it; but I did merely skim it.