[…] to me how any foreign secretary could know if the spooks decided to deceive him/her. There are, as always, interesting snippets. ‘When Britain’s application to join the EEC was finally accepted he was allowed to place some of his personnel on the personal staffs of British commissioners, making George Thomson’s private office in Strasbourg […]
[…] at a time when the Wilson governments were having a difficult time on almost any front you care to mention: Northern Ireland, inflation, unions, rising unemployment, the EEC referendum – not to mention the smear campaigns and various psy-ops running against them. As the closest person to Wilson, what she did mattered. If Donoughue […]
[…] material shows no signs of drying-up and the sales remain constant. Still unmentionable Michael Cockrell’s entertaining look back at the 1975 referendum on membership of the then EEC, ‘How We Fell for Europe’ (BBC2, 4 June 2005) got most of it right but flunked the role of the secret state in it. Of IRD’s […]
[…] De Gaulle, unable to conduct any indepedent foreign policy at all. Frankly, this is rubbish on the basis of the Treaty of Rome.’ From this mildly pro- EEC position Gaitskell, in his final conference speech on 3 October 1962, switched to saying membership would ‘mean the end of a thousand years of history’. The […]
[…] in the 1980s!) Nor does he mention Northern Ireland. Starting his historical sketch in 1979 he can omit the biggest post-war domestic lie, Heath’s claim that the EEC was merely a free trade area, and the events of the 1973-77 period (whose effects were still felt in the 1980s) when the Tory right, briefed […]
[…] Heath’s wishes prevailed in 1972-3 when, without telling his party or his cabinet, he decided to try and reconstruct the British economy to make it fit for EEC entry. In Heath’s day the major co-conspirator in the project was the Cabinet Secretary Sir William Armstrong. With Blair it was his chief media wallah, Alistair […]
[…] this off but once he had done so the Halifax/Butler point of view largely disappeared from UK politics to re-emerge, it could be argued, in various anti- EEC campaigns from the 1960’s onwards. One has to say that the PRO records show Churchill possessing great moral authority:……. Nazism and Hitler were uniquely evil….Britain must […]
[…] Heath years. His account confirms the analysis I offer of this period in chapter 1 of The Rise of New Labour. Obsessed with British entry into the EEC, Heath embarked upon his ‘dash for growth’, and turned the bankers loose. Having worked in the City, Nott saw immediately how disastrous the so-called Competition and […]
[PDF file]: […] 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 […]
[PDF file]: […] integration as it was set out in the 1958 Treaty of Rome. At that time Nye Bevan argued that the Common Market or European Economic Community ( EEC) elevated ‘the marketplace to the status now enjoyed by the various European Parliaments’. Socialism and democracy had been rejected in favour of free trade: there was […]
