The Ideological Origins Of Socialist Euroscepticism

The British Labour Movement and Euroscepticism 1972-1976: Socialism in One Country.

Preface

I aim to extricate a piece of intellectual terrain that has been lost on large parts of the British media and academia; that the in fighting between sections of the Labour Party over the question of Britain`s membership of the European project was a serious, genuine ideological debate that casted a light upon the nature of grassroots British socialism.

It is a focused, monographic piece. As such, it calls on genuine research drawn from a relatively narrow window of time. It is utilising underused sources such as the `People and Politics` set of films from the British Film Institute and the British Library Sound Archive. In addition there is the use of more traditional but underused sources of Peter Shore`s Papers at the LSE, Michael Foot`s Paper`s in Manchester (including previously unseen correspondence between Foot and Enoch Powell on the nature of anti-Marketeer identity), Tony Benn`s writings, and the Jenkins Papers in Oxford. These form the key texts set against the wider context of Labour Movement sources.

What is clear is that the anti-marketeers thought differently about sovereignty than much of the European left. On the continent, sovereignty was the cause of Europe`s problems, not its saviour. To Foot, sovereignty was the `ark of socialism`. It was no accident that in their approach to European unity since 1945 the socialist parties of Britain and Scandinavia were the most conservative - for they had the most to conserve. On the other hand, pro-marketeers felt that it was neither socialism nor realistic to think one could have sovereignty in the world of today.