The 1950s – when the UK might (should?) have been in

During the 1950s there were several counterfactual (“what if?”) moments in the United Kingdom’s relationship with the emerging European integration process. In each case, public opinion, to the extent that it was felt to be a consideration, was assumed rather than gauged, let alone taken into account. This was perfectly normal at the time. Opinion polling was in its infancy (UK political parties would not start using opinion polls until the end of the decade) and expressions of the public’s opinion were largely limited to general elections. On 2 June 1950, for example, when the Labour Cabinet drew up its response to the 7 May 1950 Schuman Declaration, it declared that

Sir Oliver Franks, then head of the UK’s delegation to the Committee of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC), argued in his 1954 Reith Lectures that British popular opinion “did not have the sentiment of actively belonging to Western Europe” (Franks 1955: 43–7). A senior Treasury official, Sir Edwin Plowden, would later write that there had been “no possibility of persuading the British people or any British government at that time to enter into The Coal and Steel Community on the terms laid down by the French” (Plowden 1989: 93). Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison’s reported remark that “the Durham miners won’t wear it” suggests that, rather than public opinion in general, it was the opinion of one significant public actor – the National Union of Mineworkers, which would be viscerally opposed to any change in the new nationalized status of the coal industry and had direct control over 40 Labour MPs – which had concentrated minds.