ABSTRACT
The popular retelling of the history of post-war Britain, whether in fiction or documentary, evokes deceptively vivid images of each decade. The 1960s revolve around social revolution, fashion, music, Mini Cooper cars and miniskirted models in a period of brash optimism. The state of the British economy was the key issue in the general election campaign of 1970. The ‘technological revolution’ hailed by Harold Wilson in 1963 had seemingly bypassed Britain, and trade with the Commonwealth nations was in steady decline. Edward Heath argued ‘that Britain would inevitably be drawn towards a Community with a market of 200 million people’. But his arguments did not stop there. For the Conservative Party and for Britain as a whole, membership of the European Economic Community represented a ‘new beginning’, turning away from the historical attachment to Empire and ‘establishing new policies of competition and efficiency’.
