It is (if one minds about that) a travesty of democracy. Britain’s application to join the Common Market must, if it succeeds, radically affect the lives of all her citizens for generations to come: but the citizens are being, and apparently will be, given no opportunity to express. their wishes one way or the other. Since the leaders of all three political parties are committed to taking Britain into Europe if they can, the electorate, even if there were an election tomorrow, would have no means of voting against it. At the last two elections people might reasonably have supposed that a vote for the Labor Party was a vote against the Common Market. Harold Wilson himself had said there was “no question at present” of a British application to join. “We are not entitled,” as he put it on a previous occasion, “to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for some imaginary advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf.” It would be a rash voter—but I’m afraid there were a lot of rash voters —who took Mr. Wilson’s word for anything ever. His conversion seems, characteristically, to stem less from any fresh thinking about the Common Market than from personal ambition. He has been frustrated in a whole series of attempts to play the Great International Statesman. He was rebuffed as a Vietnam peacemaker, politely ignored as an honest broker between Moscow and Washington, rudely defied by Rhodesia, insulted by Black Africans and lectured by Swiss bankers. But here, he thinks, is an opportunity, perhaps the only remaining opportunity, for a spectacular initiative. He sees himself, not only as having transformed Britain, but becoming the most important figure on the European stage. “After all,” he’s reported to have said, “I am 25 years younger than de Gaulle.” Like most professional socialists, he is a democrat in theory rather than practice; that is, he believes that, when the people happen to disagree with him, they are suffering from shortsightedness, and must be dragooned into doing what’s best for them. If there were a referendum in Britain on whether or not to join the Common Market, public opinion polls suggest that the result would > be approximately fifty-fifty. Not that most people even now have any very clear notion of what’s at stake. A television audience was asked recently if it could think of any subject more boring than the Common Market—and no one could. The arguments are too complex, the consequences, whether of going in or of staying out, seem too remote and too uncertain.
Perhaps in this respect at least Mr. Wilson is right, and this isn’t a suitable question—is too important a question, cynics might say—to put te the electorate. Allow me, then, simply to state a personal view. While Mr. Wilson has been converted in one direction, I have been converted in the other. When Britain was trying to get into the Common Market before, I thought, rather reluctantly, that the attempt was justified, that on balance Britain ought to go in. The competition of European industry would, I hoped, stimulate Britain’s sluggish economy and shake up the labor unions, and. the capitalist assumptions of the Common Market might curb Britain’s drift to socialism. These arguments probably still apply, but are now outweighed, in my opinion, by larger considerations. It has become much clearer than it was then that Europe, under General de Gaulle’s influence (but not, I think, solely because of his influence), is being conceived increasingly in anti-American Third Force terms. The price of Britain’s admission would almost certainly include a further “dissociation” from the war in Vietnam; a war which I believe, and which the British government is on record as believing, to be a just and necessary one. And this would be only the beginning. As one newspaper said, “de Gaulle will be watching Mr. Wilson very closely for positive proof that he is now putting European political goals before the demands of the Atlantic Alliance.” Exactly. And this seems to me the wrong order of priorities. The advocates of Britain-in-Europe tend to say that there’s no alternative; that Britain must have access to a larger economic unit and, since the Commonwealth is no longer a live option, this means Europe. But, of course, there is an alternative, and, to me, a much more attractive one: an Atlantic Free Trade Area. This idea has been discussed, almost in clandestine whispers, among private groups in Canada, America and Britain: and, since last autumn, a special interdepartmental committee of British civil servants has been examining the possibilities, as a fallback position in case the door to Europe should be slammed again. The mere existence of this committee was deliberately kept quiet, for fear that it might prejudice Britain’s approach to the Common Market. The American government too has preferred to try to bundle Britain into Europe, like a rich man hoping to get an impoverished relative off his hands. But in my view an Atlantic Free Trade Area ought not to be considered a second best at all. Quite the contrary. The suggestion, though nothing has been very precisely formulated, is for an association consisting initially of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but open also to Japan and the EFTA nations and perhaps later to other industrialized countries as well. And, in the longest perspective, it could and should be linked with she Common Market. In this form it may seem an unrealistically grandiose vision. But the kaleidoscope of international groupings is currently being shaken into new patterns as we watch. Among the most significant was surely the meeting of Vietnam allies which followed the SEATO conference. Australia and New Zealand are being drawn closer into the American orbit: if Britain abandons her traditional links with them in order to go into the Common Market, they will be forced, for their own economic and strategic protection, to move closer still: and they can expect some reward from the American government for the role they are playing in Vietnam. Here then is the nucleus, already in being, of a new English-speaking community, bound together by common interests and a common cause. This is the community of which I want Britain to be a part. If the price of entry is just the opposite to de Gaulle’s, then let Britain pay it; let Britain send a division of troops to Vietnam now. Both honor and expediency would be well served. The British government has chosen what I believe to be the wrong course, wrong for Britain and wrong for the Western Alliance as a whole. But, if the application to join the Common Market fails, these very interesting alternatives will begin to be seriously explored. And fail it may. If I were looking at matters from Europe’s point of view, I wouldn’t be at all keen to let the ambitious Mr. Wilson inside my gates. Those of us who still believe, not in a Third Force, but in a strengthened Atlantic community, must rely on the hope expressed in a recent cartoon by Osbert Lancaster. It shows a respectable French matron gazing appalled at an unkempt mini-skirted chick from Swinging London. “Pray God,” she exclaims, “that the General does not weaken!”
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