Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell. Wikicommons/ Judy Cassab. Some rights reserved.It is not often given to one to see one’s political youth replayed decades later. Reading Owen Jones appeal to quit Europe in the Guardian was to bring back so many memories.
The first Labour conference I ever attended as a constituency delegate barely out of university was the 1971 Labour special party conference to adopt a position on entering the EEC. I sat enthralled as the great orators of Labour – Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Denis Healey, and Tony Benn – roared out their contempt for Europe, deploying arguments that Owen uses four decades later.
After all had not Labour’s lost leader, Hugh Gaitskell, the John Smith of his day, felled just before he could enter No 10, declared that to sign the Treaty of Rome ‘meant the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. It would mean the end of a thousand years of history. It would mean the end of the Commonwealth.’
