Robert Saunders

“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

“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