Britain and the EEC: The Withdrawal Option

Abstract

P OLITICAL debate about Britain and the EEC takes place on two levels simultaneously; but whereas on the surface, the arguments between the pro-marketeers of all parties on the one hand and the anti-marketeers on the other appear to have changed little since the era of entry into the EEC in 1973 and the referendum of 1975, and nothing much has changed at parliamentary front-bench level, the terrain on which the debate is fought out is in fact changing dramatically. Within the political parties-and indeed outside them-there is another debate, as yet not fully articulated, for which there is no parallel in or before the early 1970s. A re-examination of traditional attitudes is under way not only among antimarketeers (stimulated by such developments as the spread of deindustrialisation and chronic unemployment throughout Europe and the rise of a European nuclear disarmament movement) but also among the supporters of 'Britain in Europe'. There is undeniable disenchantment with the actual experience of nearly ten years of apparently endless friction and strife between the UK and its partners over the period of British membership. Thus, in the Conservative party and among other traditional supporters of British membership of the Community there is a new interest in recent ideas about different types of membership of the EEC, including those of a 'special' or 'associate' status, as alternatives to the present model of full integration. These have been aired, for example, in the Monday Club pamphlet The Conservative Party and the Common Market and various utterances of members of the European Reform Group. Among the Left, including many long-term supporters of withdrawal, considerable attention is being given to a 'European strategy' which covers the possible transformation of EEC policies and decision-making institutions by a British labour movement working in much closer co-ordination with European labour. Illustrative literature on this side includes a recent article in New Socialist by Francis Cripps and Terry Ward, calling among other things for a stronger European Monetary System and a common EEC industrial policy, and even Bob Rowthorne's article in the April issue of the Communist Party magazine Marxism Today, condemning withdrawal as an 'unrealistic vision [which] rests on a bizarre combination of imperial nostalgia and revolutionary romanticism'. This upsurge of new thinking about Britain's place in the European