Harold Wilson's EEC Application: Inside the Foreign Office, 1964-7

Abstract

The story of how Harold Wilson came to submit Britain's second application to join the EEC is a curious one. The Labour Prime Minister had been a vociferous opponent of Harold Macmillan's attempt to ‘join Europe’ earlier in the decade and spent much of his first years in power seemingly pursuing alternative policy options, most notably a doomed attempt to revitalise the Commonwealth. But at some point in 1966—most probably in the wake of the disastrous July sterling crisis—Wilson seems to have decided that the UK should seek once more to gain admittance to the European Community and turned his formidable party-management skills to the task of persuading a deeply divided Labour government to endorse a second bid for membership. A formal application was submitted in May 1967—only promptly to share the fate of the earlier Macmillan attempt and to be rebuffed by General de Gaulle. This time it would take the French President two press conferences rather than one to persuade the British that France would not permit the enlargement of the EEC: the ‘velvet veto’ of May needed to be followed up by the rather more clear-cut veto of November 1967. But the net effect was to confirm what many observers had suspected all along, namely that Britain's road to EEC membership would be firmly barred until President de Gaulle left office. It would not be until after the General's resignation in 1969 that the second application was revived, and membership negotiations did not begin until after Wilson had lost the General Election in June 1970. Thus, Edward Heath and not Harold Wilson was the British Prime Minister to append his signature to the Treaty of Accession which brought the UK into the EEC.