On 24 January 1962 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appeared on television to deliver a broad assessment of Britain’s prospects for the coming year. In the midst of a souring economy and ‘pay pause’ controversy, he urged Britons to do ‘a little bit extra’ to ‘earn’ their place in a changing world.¹ He tempered that challenge, however, by offering assurances about the sanctity of Britain’s traditional spheres of influence, its associations with the Commonwealth, the United States and Europe. Audience research exposed this as one of Macmillan’s less convincing party political broadcasts. Amidst complaints about ‘empty platitudes’, one viewer described it...

Analysis of national identity is overwhelmingly a process of deconstruction. But any study acknowledging the complexities of patriotic sentiment must also involve a process of reconstruction. In other words, it is one thing to label manifestations of nationalism as extremist, insular or derived from fallacious assumptions and quite another to examine their pervasiveness and appeal. The following discussion of national identity, envisaged as a series of leitmotifs rather than a rigid analytic structure, is designed to help illuminate the synergy between nationalist thought and anti-Market activism in the chapters that follow. In the process, it addresses the following questions. First,...

Since 17 July 1933 a red cartoon Crusader has adorned every copy of theDaily Express. Bearing a sword and the shield of St George, the Crusader rises from the upper right corner of the headline in tribute to the Empire Free Trade aspirations of its one-time owner, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. TheExpressenhanced the tradition in 1951 by shackling its Crusader in chains. The restraints, Beaverbrook promised, would remain until a Tory Government with an Empire policy governed Britain. The emergence of the Common Market debate in 1961, however, further animated Beaverbrook and Crusader alike. In a renewed...

As Beaverbrook’s campaigners discovered, prominent anti-Market ‘experts’ were scarce and some were in any case reluctant to align themselves with his crusading practices. Some pundits feared compromising their independent voices. For others, Common Market opposition was less a principled certainty than an evolution towards dissent based upon the terms emerging from the negotiation process. Those who joined the debate faced analytical obstacles. Economic and political comparisons, in particular, were complicated by the absence of fixed terms of entry, an embryonic agricultural policy and the relative youth of the Common Market. ‘The calculation of gains and losses is difficult’, E. J....

For all its vocal populism, the anti-Market campaign lacked a unified crusade structure. TheExpresssupplied flags and slogans but did so on its own terms, with its own agenda. Pundits fed rather than led the cause, generally preferring forums of political expression to organisations for political pressure. Conservative anti-Market MPs avoided formal affiliation with extra-parliamentary groups devoted to overturning Government policy. Meanwhile Labour MPs organised their own protest body for the purpose of converting fellow members of the parliamentary party. Hence, grassroots activism was left to its own devices.

In the absence of a dominant organisational structure, anti-Market sentiment...

Though it was not his first politicised statement on the Common Market, Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years of history’ speech at Labour’s 1962 Brighton conference is acknowledged as the definitive partisan moment of the debate. But it was a milestone reached quite late. Up to that point, the Conservative and Labour leaderships had buffered their respective positions with conditional policy statements. A search for ‘terms satisfactory to’ the Commonwealth, EFTA and agriculture, Macmillan pledged, underscored the Government’s negotiating stance.¹ Labour’s reply pushed that logic further, with an independent foreign policy and national economic planning added to its conditions for entry.²

Yet abstention...

Awareness that French intransigence might undermine Britain’s application failed to assuage the Macmillan Government’s frustration when de Gaulle’s veto arrived. According to a BBC report, the 14 January 1963 Elysée press conference left the British delegation ‘very depressed’ and resigned to a ‘bitterly disappointing outcome’.¹ The negotiators forged ahead in vain until the abandonment of talks two weeks later. Macmillan’s diary entry for 28 January compared the General’s ambitions for European ‘hegemony’ to those of Louis XIV and Napoleon. ‘All our policies at home and abroad’, he lamented, ‘are in ruins’.² Deedes described 29 January as ‘one of the worst...