In December 2016, Keir Starmer stood to address an audience in London’s financial district. At the time, the Conservative government was in the midst of its efforts to get Britain out of the European Union (EU). While recently appointed to navigate the Labour Party's own course on ‘Brexit’ as shadow secretary of state for exiting the EU, Starmer himself had long been recognized as an unapologetic supporter of continued membership. Shortly after the referendum held in June that same year, he even went so far as to describe the Leave result as ‘catastrophic for the UK, for our communities and for the next generation’. It was thus not entirely unexpected that despite both the outcome of the referendum and the perceived coolness of then party leader Jeremy Corbyn towards membership, Starmer chose to tell the crowd huddled in the City of his intention to ‘fight’ against any policy that ‘tears us apart from our EU partners’. Labour, he argued, should instead ‘be at the centre’ of efforts to promote ‘a Brexit model which maintains and protects our ability to successfully trade goods and deliver services with and to the EU’. Over the following months this determination would slowly transform into a belief that a second referendum should be held on any withdrawal agreement. A strong hint of as much came when Starmer spoke at Labour's annual conference in September 2018. And come the next summer he could be found arguing not simply that the party should ‘be very clear’ about the need for a second referendum but also that it ought to start ‘making the case’ for rejoining the EU as a full member.

As the contributions to this volume have shown, the history of Labour Party relations with, and views towards, European integration has been far from harmonious. A core strength of a biographical approach lies in showing the remarkable breadth of this history. In several chapters, views towards membership of Europe's supranational institutions remained remarkably steadfast, whether among supporters, critics or the more ambivalent. Yet we have also witnessed changing views – and not always in the direction expected. For sure, some sceptics softened their outlook, particularly in the late 1980s and 1990s. Other, more ardent, sceptics even showed signs of wavering, albeit without completely reversing their positions. But the direction of travel was not all one way. Rather, this volume includes examples of one-time proponents of closer integration becoming more critical over time. Likewise, it includes figures who engaged in a constant mental tug of war over the positives and negatives of membership, their views changing repeatedly. All this cautions against adopting a teleological interpretation of the history of the Labour Party and European integration; that is to say, a ‘road to Brexit’ story where over the course of several decades the UK is depicted as steadily evolving into a Eurosceptic enclave par excellence. The party's positions were, and are, evidently too multifaceted to fall into this sort of categorization. To describe the party's views of integration as complex, ambiguous, perhaps even messy, might be read as trite – but this messiness is itself a valuable observation.

On 3 October 1962, Hugh Gaitskell rose to address Labour's annual conference in Brighton. By then leader for nearly a decade, Gaitskell’s memories of these yearly seaside gatherings were not especially fond. Proceedings in 1959 and 1960 had in particular left Gaitskell licking wounds inflicted from Labour's political divisions over Clause IV and disarmament. Coming into Brighton, there were unfortunate hints of yet another storm brewing, this time surrounding Britain's membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). Gaitskell, it is true, had officially adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude, refusing to support or reject entry until the terms of the Conservative government's negotiations were known. But in the weeks before his speech, speculation had grown that he intended to abandon this impartial stance. Gaitskell, however, was quick to dispel such rumours. He told one colleague that his forthcoming speech would ‘do everything … to avoid misrepresentation and even misunderstanding’ of his position. He likewise reassured trade union allies that he would use his address to ‘speak to my friends’ – most, if not all, of whom were sympathetic to the European cause. And just hours before taking to the podium, Gaitskell insisted to his deputy, George Brown, that he would not abandon his neutral approach.

In the event, the 84-minute speech became one of Gaitskell's most controversial. While acknowledging that membership was ‘a crucial, complex and difficult issue’, he dismissed as ‘rubbish’ claims as to the economic benefits of entering when ‘the arguments are no more than evenly balanced’ and could even undermine the ‘special’ economic relationship with the Scandinavians which, like Britain, stood outside the EEC.

The first few months of the new Labour government soon proved a disappointment for the SD. On the eve of the British general election of 15 October 1964 it had been confidently expected that a Labour victory would see the pace of EFTA reform increase dramatically. And as Wilson settled into Downing Street the SD foreign minister still felt able to tell his colleagues that, EEC membership aside, the incoming Labour administration ‘could be considered an improvement with regard to international questions’. Such sentiments quickly fell by the wayside, however, when on 26 October Wilson took to the airwaves to announce the introduction of the 15 per cent import surcharge. In Number 10 as in Whitehall more generally it was perhaps understandably felt that a levy on all manufactured and semi-manufactured goods except foodstuffs, tobacco and raw materials was a legitimate response to a grave economic problem. After all, Britain's balance of payments deficit, known to have ballooned under the Conservatives, was now forecast to be as high as £800 million for 1964 alone. Intervention, however drastic, thus seemed justified. Labour ministers likewise decided that, while not without problems, a surcharge was a far preferable alternative to deflation and devaluation. But in Copenhagen and other, similarly irate EFTA capitals, the surcharge was immediately interpreted as a sign that Labour did not intend to take the Seven seriously. The opening section of this chapter must therefore examine the fallout of the surcharge decision and the implications of the policy for Labour and the SD. It then goes on to look at how throughout 1965 the SD attempted to tie the surcharge question to the broader issues of EFTA reform and EEC membership in order to modify Labour's position, before finally explaining how a shift in Labour policy in the first half 1966 set the scene for fresh applications to join the Community a year later.

Responding to the surcharge

Harold Wilson had barely been in Downing Street an hour when he was told of the state of Britain's finances. During the election campaign the Labour leader had claimed the Conservatives were running a payments deficit of around £400 million a year.

Neither Labour nor the SD was under any illusion that a free trade area would easily be accepted by the French. As early as March 1958, the Labour national executive had concluded that Paris was unlikely to take the FTA seriously now the Community was fully operational. These doubts were only strengthened when in June de Gaulle returned to power and soon made clear French support for the EEC. It took just over a month, until a meeting of the NEC on 21 July, for Labour formally to conclude that the FTA negotiations were now far more likely than not to collapse. Jens Otto Krag meanwhile accurately captured the mood of impending defeat in a meeting of Nordic governments in late September. Western European states, Krag recognised, faced ‘changing conditions’ now de Gaulle occupied the Élysée Palace, and it was unclear if the FTA proposal would survive them.

Despite these gloomy assessments, in the months preceding Soustelle's press conference, neither party was yet ready to abandon its support of the free trade plan. It helped of course that Labour and the SD each continued officially to rule out membership of the nascent EEC. Without much else by way of an alternative European policy it therefore made logical sense publicly to support the FTA while allowing matters to take their course. It also helped that failure of the negotiations, while expected, appeared by no means certain. The SD government had in fact been encouraged by a somewhat abstract agreement on tariffs submitted in mid-March by Guido Carli, the Italian minister for foreign trade, seen as proof that EEC members did remain eager to achieve progress on a Europe-wide trade area. And as late as 5 November Krag indicated that he was still hopeful that Britain and France, always the two dominant actors in the negotiations, would reach a compromise. But far more important than either of these aspects was that both Labour and the SD remained genuinely supportive of the FTA in and of itself. The mixture of expected economic benefits offered by a Europe-wide trade area and the political advantages of a solution based on the intergovernmental OEEC that had first made the FTA desirable in mid-1956, remained as attractive in late 1958. No other framework could come close to meeting the various political and economic requirements of the two groups.

Confirmation of quite how keen was de Gaulle to obstruct enlargement of the EEC came on 16 May. In the first of two press conferences that would dictate the fate of the membership bids, the French president spoke at length about the ‘formidable’ obstacles facing British entry. None of what was said, admittedly, amounted to an outright non. De Gaulle himself claimed somewhat confusingly that ‘there could not be, and, moreover, has never been, any question of a veto’. And confirming earlier SD doubts, he did also seem to leave open the possibility that Britain and Denmark might be allowed to join first as associate members before negotiating full entry at a later date. But his insistence that British membership would upset ‘the equilibrium of the Common Market’, and would in the process risk the functioning of the CAP, left many wondering whether this was not a veto in all but name.

Unlike in 1963, however, it took a second press conference on 27 November for the French president finally to confirm that enlargement would in his mind pose such a danger to the Community, its institutions and its existing policies that he had little choice but to veto. The first part of this chapter must therefore concentrate on the way in which Labour and the SD each responded to the two press conferences by first refusing to take no for an answer and later choosing to keep the applications on the table. It will in other words confirm that neither party was prepared publicly to accept that either the so-called velvet veto of May 1967 or the actual veto delivered six months later sounded the end of the membership bids.

Beneath these sentiments, though, existed a clear frustration on the part of the SD that Denmark's hopes of joining the Six had once again been jettisoned by maintaining so close a relationship with Britain. And this was matched by the consternation of some in Labour with the virtues of retaining a bid for membership with de Gaulle having so spectacularly once again rejected the British. The second half of the chapter must therefore review both the decision by Krag to pursue a Nordic alternative to the Six and the disputed Labour response to the veto.