ABSTRACT
After the return of the Labour Party to power in 1974, the essential outlines of British policy towards the Soviet bloc remained unchanged. Both the Wilson and the Callaghan governments sought to play a constructive role in East-West relations-Wilson made his much publicized trip to Moscow in 1975, for example, where he agreed a £1 billion trade and credits package-but it was becoming increasingly clear even then that the détente process was in serious trouble. As criticism of that process mounted in the West and the rhetoric about a ‘new’ or ‘second’ cold war began to be voiced by a rising New Right on both sides of the Atlantic, there was even less opportunity for Britain to play a significant détente role in the second half of the 1970s than there had been in the first. Indeed, the profound ambivalence towards the whole process of East-West détente, which had been a feature of the British approach since the beginning of that decade, was if anything more marked after 1974. The potential costs rather than the benefits of East-West détente appeared to exercise the British the more and they dictated a very cautious approach.
