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The Guardian, 1 January 1973.
The Guardian, 1 January 1973. Photograph: The Guardian
The Guardian, 1 January 1973. Photograph: The Guardian

We're in: the UK enters Europe - archive, 1 January 1973

This article is more than 4 years old

Guardian reporting from the day the United Kingdom officially became a member of the EU

We’re in – but without the fireworks

by David Mckie and Dennis Barker
1 January 1973

Britain passed peacefully into Europe at midnight last night without any special celebrations. It was difficult to tell that anything of importance had occurred, and a date which will be entered in the history books as long as histories of Britain are written, was taken by most people as a matter of course.

The principal party political figures maintained their familiar postures of hope and optimism or head-shaking despair. Mr Heath was starting back from Ottawa, where he had gone for the funeral of Mr Lester Pearson, at about the time that Britain, along with Denmark and Ireland, officially became members of the European Community.

In a spate of pre-recorded interviews, he expressed his own hope and satisfaction at the successful outcome of the long march towards Europe with which he had himself been so closely associated for so long.

Yesterday the latest opinion poll on the Market, by Opinion Research Centre for the BBC, suggested that 38 per cent were happy about embarking on what Mr Heath depicted as an exciting adventure, while 39 per cent would prefer to get off. Twenty-three per cent had no opinion at all.

But the worry on the effect on prices continues. The Consumers’ Union announced it will hold a regular weekly check on food prices, and the Farmers’ Union said that during the last five years while the price review procedure lasts the major preoccupation of farmers would be commercial organisation.

English newspapers announce the UK’s entry into the EEC, 1 January 1973. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Pragmatism
Mr Heath believed that enthusiasm for the market existed predominantly among the young. Elsewhere he detected no more than good old British pragmatism. He had been impressed by people he had met who did not expect immediate benefit for themselves but looked forward to a better life for their children and grandchildren:

I think in their phlegmatic and pragmatic way the British are now waiting for action and as we in the Community together take action then I think more and more they will respond to it. Of course whenever there is change people have fears and it may be particularly characteristic of the British that they are conservative by nature, which has stood us very well in many difficult times, and so they fear change particularly. But they are also very practical and when they see the need for it they face up to it. If you allow yourself to be bedevilled by your fears, you are paralysed by them. The only future lies in energetically seizing opportunities.

Mr Wilson, however, saw nothing to celebrate when we were going in without that full-hearted consent of the British people which Mr Heath had made a condition of entry and when the price of admission was “utterly crippling.” He defended the Labour decision not to attend the European Assembly. The real power lay not there but with the Council of Ministers and the only place to try to exert influence on them was through the British Parliament.

The Market would be an issue in the next election, but only one of several others would be prices, housing, jobs, “and very conceivably big aspects of foreign policy, like Vietnam, if this tragedy continues.” Labour would be pledged to renegotiation and this would be followed by consultation with the people, either through a referendum, or a further election.

Labour’s most notable dissenter, Mr Roy Jenkins, wanted to see Britain pressing for great changes in the Community, especially changes to improve the distribution of wealth, the amenities of life, Community aid to the Third World and the democratisation of European institutions.

Mr Enoch Powell, the Conservatives’ best known rebel, said: “The new year, merely marks the commencement of a further and more vigorous phase of the campaign to ensure that in the matter of Britain and the European Community, the preponderant wish of the British people that Britain should not be a member on present terms is heeded.”

The TUC, long dubious about entry, said that the one conspicuous omission from the celebrations was any real attempt to answer the serious questions raised about British entry. The safeguards they had called for had not been obtained.

The official pageantry was not launched in time for the appointed hour of destiny. The Government’s Fanfare for Europe, in which among other attractions, an Irish folk group will perform in the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn and Lord Montagu’s motor cars go to Brussels, does not begin until Wednesday.

Continue reading.

Royal Mail stamps issued in 1973 to commemorate the UK joining the EEC. Photograph: Royal Mail

A fanfare without an echo

by Richard Norton-Taylor
1 January 1973

Brussels, 31 December
The Union Jack will be raised outside European Commission headquarters tomorrow morning alongside the flags of Britain’s eight Common Market partners. At about the same time a British diplomat will deliver a letter containing the Government’s assent to the first decisions taken by the enlarged Community confirmation of the appointments to the new 13-man commission and to the European Court of Justice, and technical changes in the Treaty of Accession to take into account Norway’s “no” to entry.

Shortly afterwards, the diplomat will drive through Brussels’s empty streets in his official Daimler to read a message from Mr Heath to an enterprising group from Doncaster who are determined to be at EEC headquarters on entry day. They will gather in the Queen Victoria pub, just across the road from the Commission building, with the Prime Minister’s message their only consolation for their disappointment that little else is happening here.

The Common Market has a busy year ahead. But the Treaty of Accession enters into force at midnight tonight (the Continent is an unharmonised hour ahead of Britain) at the beginning of the Continental holiday. The trumpets of Mr Heath’s Fanfare for Europe will find no echo here.

From tomorrow, Britain will adopt the EEC provisions for the free movement of labour and grant unrestricted access to Community citizens; British companies will be liable to pay fines if the European Commission considers they have broken EEC rules on free and fair competition; Britain will start contributing to the Community budget, and will be eligible for payments from the European Social Fund and the European Investment Bank; duties on British coal exports to the rest of the Common Market will be abolished; and Britain will not be able to negotiate new independent trade agreements with other countries.

Britain will begin to adopt the EEC’s common agricultural policy on February 1 – the first of the deadlines in a Common Market year that is full of them, relating to economic and monetary union, the powers of the European Parliament, and proposals for new Joint policies in the fields of Social, industrial, environmental, and trading activities.

Edward Heath speech at EEC entry celebration banquet. Source:YouTube.

Editorial: Into Europe, andante

1 January 1973

“If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” Well, it’s a pity that the Fanfare for Europe is not more harmonious, but in politics as in music dissonance has always been inevitable if the Second Fiddles play a different tune. In this case it must be acknowledged that a large part of the country is not ecstatic about the score. The journey into Europe will be bumpy and discordant.

That is sad, but not disastrous. What will be disastrous is if Britain devotes the next two, three, or four years to introspective champing over the issue: “Who went wrong when?” Among the most human and least attractive phrases in the English language is “I told you so.” There will be much scope for such a Great Recriminative Debate. The transition period will not be all Beaujolais and boules. Change is always painful, and although the change arising from membership of the European Community will not be as sudden or all-pervasive as either its zealots or its most fiery critics believe, there will be enough change to cause trouble if people are determined.

Surely enough inconclusive balance sheets have now been drawn up, worried over, and discarded. If every change in prices, costs, wages, taxation, growth, and unemployment is to be put under the microscope to separate its European from its non-European elements, the effect on British politics and possibly on Britain’s role in Europe and the world will be corrosive. Can we remember in the next few years that in the past few years prices have been rising sharply, unemployment has been worse than at any time since the war, and the balance of payments has recently showed signs of dipping into the same old trough from which only Labour’s painful post-devaluation squeeze temporarily rescued it? And can we remember that all this happened before we entered Europe?

Can we remember also that it was partly in the hope of rescuing Britain from growing political aimlessness and economic lassitude that governments of the two parties have in turn sought membership of the Community? Labour is entitled, if it regains power, to seek changes, particularly with the benefit of experience. The Community is, and needs to be, an evolving institution. Even the Common Agricultural Policy may not be written on tablets of stone.

One temptation should be avoided, however; to prepare a future Labour Government’s negotiating position by seeking, month after month, to prove that membership of the Community has created all Britain’s ills. We enter Europe with the reputation of being a nation of shopkeepers; we would be unwise to present ourselves as a nation of second-hand-car dealers. Above all we should avoid creating a new, semi-permanent rift in British society, between pro and anti Europeans Britain has much to contribute to the new Europe’s main need – for effective democratic control of a bureaucracy that grows in power all the time. In making that contribution we may even give our own parliamentary institutions a new injection of vigour and some relief from the staleness that long unsolved problems have created at Westminster.

Guardian coverage, 1 January 1973. Click to see full page.

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