Quotes from Robert Saunders

In 1955 Australia and Canada supplied 61 per cent of British wheat imports, while Australia and New Zealand contributed 60 per cent of its meat imports. By contrast, the Six remained a net importer of food until 1958.47 As late as 1960, two-thirds of British exports and perhaps 90 per cent of capital investment went outside Europe.48

The past is a foreign country, which maintains its independence with the same fierce determination as any 'Brexiteer'.

They were fighting for the honour of the Eldon League, a student dining club whose motto was 'forwards into the past', to determine its position on the European Community.

The combatants, 'monocled and bespatted', mounted a horse-drawn carriage and rode in triumph down Constitution Hill, the Mall and Trafalgar Square. Speaking as imperial grand prior of the League, Hamilton reportedly told journalists that the organisation 'views with unabashed antipathy all forms of democracy, especially the referendum'. 'We oppose anything that is common, whether it be consultation of the common people or the Common Market.

Yet the 'post-national' ambitions of the new Community should not be exaggerated. The European Community was fundamentally a creation of national governments. Every step was the work of national politicians, engaged in a process of national reconstruction, for which they were responsible to their own domestic constituencies

The genius of the European project, expressed first in the ECSC and subsequently in the EEC, was that it harnessed cross-border integration to the pursuit of national self-interest, rather than setting these forces against one another.

In explaining why the UK was not a signatory to these agreements, the question is not why it turned its back on Europe, but why Britain's own combination of idealism, fear and self-interest produced a different policy calculation – and why that changed in the years that followed.

8 In a speech at the opening of the European Research Institute in 2001, Tony Blair summarised 'the history of our engagement with Europe' as 'one of opportunities missed in the name of illusions – and Britain suffering as a result'.

As Peregrine Worsthorne argued in the Sunday Telegraph, British democracy did not require governments always to do what the people wanted; it simply required them to face the judgement of the people for the decisions they had made. This, he argued, not only promoted more considered government – for ministers would take the blame for failed policies at an election, however popular they might have been at the time; it also protected democracy itself from opprobrium.

The danger was that referendums might promote irresponsible government, in which ministers promised referendums for party purposes while disclaiming responsibility for the results. 'The new doctrine', Thatcher complained, was 'to pass the buck to the people'.

As he put it in 1975, Labour was 'neither in favour of being in Europe on principle, or being out of the Common Market on principle'.130 Unable to commit either to membership or to withdrawal, Labour had contained its contradictions within what might be termed 'Schrödinger's Cabinet': a body that was simultaneously pro-Market and anti-Market, until such time as the wave function of Wilsonian ambiguity was collapsed.