ABSTRACT
Commentators, wrought with a sense of disappointment that the radical promise of opposition was jettisoned once in office, have been quick to criticise the foreign policy of the Labour governments 1964-70. Some authors have argued that Harold Wilson lacked strategy. He lurched from one crisis to another, with little sense of where the country must head, interested only in domestic political tactics.1 Others have intimated that the new government’s policy was obsessed with grandeur and deluded notions of Britain’s power and influence.2 These debates are relevant in discussion of Wilson’s policy towards the EEC. In one perspective, writers suspect that Wilson recognised the need for EEC membership as early as 1964, yet obscured his intent for domestic political reasons.3 Another interpretation regards Labour’s journey towards EEC membership as a question of ‘collapsing alternatives’, an unwelcome change in direction as the government acknowledged the unreality of their global stance.4
