Posted on 01/09/2023 6:43:37 AM PST by Rummyfan
We joined, we voted to stay, we voted to leave, we left. This year’s 50th anniversary of Britain’s accession to the then Common Market seems a good moment for another look at this half-century detour, marked by persistent collective uncertainty about whether we wanted to join ‘Europe’, stay in it or leave it. Throughout, our national responses have been marked by three things: ‘declinism’, deception (including self-deception) and fear.
On 1 January 1973, Britain (with Ireland and Denmark) formally entered the European Economic Community (EEC). We celebrated with a ‘Fanfare to Europe’, including pop and classical concerts and poetry readings. It followed a campaign in which the leaderships of all the major political parties had agreed on the need to force Britain into ‘Europe’. They were supported by most of the media, most of the intelligentsia and most business lobbies. It had been a decision first made by Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government in 1962, and there was no question of putting it to a popular vote, which might well go the wrong way.
Whitehall’s overwhelming obsession was ‘declinism’. Prime minister Edward Heath’s principal European adviser described Britain as ‘the sinking Titanic’ and the EEC as ‘the lifeboat’. Britain’s chief negotiator, foreign-office mandarin Sir Con O’Neill, put it succinctly, though of course not publicly: the EEC was about power and global influence, and the Americans wanted us in. ‘None of its policies was essential to us; many of them were objectionable’, he said. But outside the fold, ‘our decline towards isolation and comparative insignificance… cannot be arrested’. Britain, he warned, would become merely ‘a greater Sweden’.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiked-online.com ...
At least then they might have manufactured better cars.
Europe is a nasty brutish continent that started two world wars before the USA shut them down.
Now that the US is backing off, expect Europe to return to the 1930’s with neo-colonialism and border wars.
The Swedish makes belong to China and British to Indians.
Finally, there is a contempt and loathing for those seen as the bedrock of Brexit support – the ‘gammons’, the
provincials, the white working class – who cannot be allowed to win.
Welcome to the Democratic/Communist blueprint: Let the working. middle class snivel all they want. In the end, the
snivelers will be supporting the hordes of non-working voters.
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