In
the early 1960s --- I have to keep reminding myself that was almost six decades
ago --- British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided he would try to persuade
General de Gaulle, then President of France, that Britain should join the
European Economic Community, that had been established in 1957 by the Treaty of
Rome, and whose members were France,
West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
I was working in London as a
correspondent for The Montreal Star
at the time, and for he following three or four years the question of whether
to join or not to join was one that reverberated at the centre of every British
political decision. It was at this time
that I discovered, thanks to an article I read, the principle of attitude
reinforcement, as it was known to psychologists, which is to say that if you
started out with a presumption that
joining the EEC was a good thing, all arguments you heard thereafter tended
to reinforce your established opinion; similarly, if you started out with a
negative view, all arguments tended to reinforce your negativity.
I was a New Zealander born and bred
who had been working as an immigrant in Canada when the newspaper decided to
send me back to Britain, where I had previously lived for four years, and so I
carried my own prejudices on the subject of joining or not joining the EEC into
almost everything I wrote.
Political passions were aroused then,
as they are now, and I recall Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party,
making some stirring speeches about the Commonwealth connection, saying things
like, “You may say, well, all right, let’s forget the past, but what about
Ypres, Passchendaele, those battlefields
on which our Commonwealth brothers laid down their lives alongside ours? Are we
just to forget those?” Although I was
probably less influenced by what I might call the nostalgia of history than
your average New Zealander, having schooled myself into an anti-imperialist
mindset throughout my youth, and I certainly was no average Canadian who felt
insouciant towards Britain’s actions, such speeches as Gaitskell’s
nevertheless did get into my emotions as
I tried to make up my mind on the subject; and I definitely felt as the
psychologist warned I might feel, that my inclinations against Britain’s
abandoning its connection with us were reinforced by every argument I heard,
until I began to think of the British action as an act of betrayal that it
would be hard to forgive.
Of course, not everyone agreed: I
remember a stirring debate held by two leading members of the Labour Party one
evening, with the bon vivant
pro-European Roy Jenkins, a lover of good wines and all things
Continental, arguing against the ascetic
anti-European Douglas Jay, an equally impressive intellectual, who tended more
towards cheap sherry, and had no particular fondness for France. As their
learned arguments echoed around the rafters of the packed small conference
room, enrapturing their audience, it
seemed at times almost that they were elevating their favourite tipple into the
decision-making factor for EEC membership.
In the middle of it all I had a
beautiful experience: I went down to Dorset, to the very land described by
Thomas Hardy in the opening passage of his novel, The Return of the Native, where a semi-retired scion of the British
upper classes, Sir Piers Debenham, suddenly decided to stand in a by-election
to oppose the Conservative succession, that without his intervention would have
been a slam dunk. This was a man who had spent most of his life planting trees
on Egdon Heath, as Hardy called it, and I remember him going from meeting to
meeting, waving above his head a small red booklet as he cried, “This is the
Treaty of Rome, it deals with the frontiers of Europe. That old silly who
governs us (his way of describing Harold Macmillan) wants us to sign this
Treaty. Those frontiers are a problem for those Europeans. But they are not a problem for us. We have no
need to sign this Treaty of Rome, no need at all, and we must not sign
it.”
The Conservative candidate, Angus
Maude (who had just returned after an unsuccessful stint as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia,
and was expecting South Dorset to be a sinecure for him) treated Sir Piers as a
massively irritating fly to be brushed aside, yet no matter how often he denigrated him by calling
him “a prancing philosopher”, nevertheless the old man was making an argument
from the centre of the British tradition of separation from Europe, and
although he did not win the seat, neither did Maude: Sir Piers got the votes
that allowed the Labour candidate to come up the middle and shut out the
Conservatives for un unimaginable victory. Reacting as I did to the powers of attitude
reinforcement, I was mightily pleased at the unforgettable intervention of Sir
Piers, speaking as he did from the very heart of the British rural tradition.
The British eccentricity built around
the South Dorset by-election was even more pronounced in that the seat fell
vacant on the elevation of the Viscount
Hinchingbrooke to the ancient peerage of Earl of Sandwich. Old Hinch, as
he was popularly called in those days, had been enabled to become a member of
the House of Commons through one of the peculiarities of the British peerage
system, but when once elevated to the full peerage, he had to move to the House
of Lords. Old Hinch was a
dyed-in-the-wool British Tory, a rabid imperialist, pro-Russian, anti-American,
bitterly anti-European, a man who would normally have supported the Conservative
succession into his vacated seat, but who, because of the entry of Sir Piers Debenham
to argue the anti-EEC case, felt obliged to notify Angus Maude that he could not,
in all conscience, support his candidacy. Maude was furious, of course, his
sinecure disappearing before his eyes.
My readers may find it odd, as do I,
that 60 years later, the same issue is still being argued in all its
profundity, in itself a living proof not only that nothing ever changes in
British politics, but that Britain, for all of its having joined the EEC
finally in 1973, never really felt
itself to be a full member, and
has always harboured the wish to cut itself adrift from the Continent.
Those newspaper posters of the 1960s
that I remember so well, said it all: in the course of a major storm, “Continent
cut off,” they proclaimed, as if that land mass over there was a mere appendage
attached to the far more significant island.
Well, as someone has been heard to
remark, “Wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours gai, toujours gai.”
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