Image: Newspapers on the day Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Rights: Paul Townsend/Flickr, CC 2.0
It is now a commonplace among supporters of our membership of the EU that, on the Remain side in the referendum, there was a disastrous absence of emotional appeal. I did not understand it then, and I do not understand it now. Europe has always been important to me, because it has shaped me. Europe has been threaded through my life, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously, since my birth.
My father had to seek out a new career during the Second World War, having seen his Swansea pharmacy and his home destroyed in the blitz. My earliest memories of political events, as a 12-year-old, were around Britain’s Suez debacle and, in the same year, the Soviet invasion of Hungary. As a teenage schoolboy my first overseas visit was to Rome in 1960 to see the Olympic Games, having had first to measure out a meagre ration of foreign currency. In the sixties, as a student at Oxford, and long before de Gaulle’s veto on our membership, I heard Edward Heath lecture persuasively on Europe. The same year student friends and I drove across Europe in a battered van through what was then Yugoslavia to Greece. The plight of the Balkans and of Greece meant so much more as a result.
