Robert Saunders > Quotes

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“The past is a foreign country, which maintains its independence with the same fierce determination as any ‘Brexiteer’.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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’.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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’.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“Heath had never pretended that the terms of membership were ideal, for the United Kingdom was a late entrant to a club designed by and for the interests of its existing members. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been settled in the 1960s, under the shelter of the French veto, as had a budget mechanism that would weigh disproportionately on the UK. In Heath's view, it was simply not realistic to think that Britain could rewrite these arrangements from the outside; the priority was to get a seat at the table, so that it could influence the Community from within.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“Heath's politics had been forged in the decade before 1945, when war in Europe had brought the continent to the brink of destruction. As a student in the 1930s, he had travelled through Germany and witnessed a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. He had visited Spain during the Civil War, witnessing at close hand the bombing of Barcelona. During the Second World War he had fought in France and Belgium, before ending the conflict in the shattered city of Hanover. European unity, he believed, was not only an economic necessity but a moral imperative. ‘Only by working together’, he wrote later, could nations ‘uphold the true values of European civilization’.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“The idea that Britain could have led integration in a wholly different direction, had it only shown the imagination, grossly exaggerates Britain's influence, not to mention its ability to override the national interests of other member states. From the Schuman Declaration onwards, the Six were committed to the integration of core industries, a customs union protected by common external tariffs, and common institutions based upon the pooling of economic sovereignty. It was this model, and not some ideal alternative, against which the national interest had to be measured.45”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“It was the weakness of the Continent that explains, in part, the determination of successive American governments to push Britain into the leadership of a continental federation. This would certainly have suited US interests, allowing it to take over Britain's world role (and trade) while passing on an expensive and potentially hazardous engagement in western and central Europe. The benefits for Britain were less clear, for it risked being sucked into a defensive commitment that was beyond its capacity to manage, while weakening ties with its most important markets. The Foreign Office warned in 1948 ‘that a federated Western Europe is becoming the battle cry of a new [American] isolationism’, in which the costs of reconstruction and defence would be offloaded onto the UK.50”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“In this climate, there were three essential tests against which any economic strategy had to be measured: that it restore exports, so that Britain could rebuild its national wealth and finance its overseas commitments; secure cheap food and raw materials for the work of reconstruction; and husband Britain's scarce supply of dollars, by trading so far as possible in sterling. In the decade after the war, all three considerations pointed towards the Commonwealth, not the Continent, as the focus of its international trade.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“The argument was summed up by the Labour MP Roderick MacFarquhar, a leading constitutionalist who later taught at Harvard: While the people elect their representatives to exercise supreme powers on their behalf, they do not elect them to concede some of those powers in perpetuity to a superior outside body. Therefore, if those powers are to be diminished by entry into the Common Market, the British people must give their consent, and that consent can be given only in a referendum, because only through a referendum can the issue be isolated.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain

“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.”
― Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain