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This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the opponents of Britain's first attempt to join the European Economic Community (EEC) between the announcement of Harold Macmillan's new policy initiative in July 1961 and General de Gaulle's veto of Britain's application for membership in January 1963. In particular, it examines the role of national identity in shaping both the formulation and articulation of arguments put forward by these opponents of Britain's policy. To date, studies of Britain's unsuccessful bid for entry have focused on high political analysis of diplomacy and policy formulation. In most accounts, only passing reference is made to domestic opposition. This book redresses the balance, providing a complete depiction of the opposition movement and a distinctive approach that proceeds from a ‘low-political’ viewpoint. As such, it emphasizes protest and populism of the kind exercised by, among others, Fleet Street crusaders at the Daily Express, pressure groups such as the Anti-Common Market League and Forward Britain Movement, expert pundits like A.J.P. Taylor, Sir Arthur Bryant and William Pickles, as well as constituency activists, independent parliamentary candidates, pamphleteers, letter writers and maverick MPs. In its consideration of a group largely overlooked in previous accounts, the book provides essential insights into the intellectual, structural, populist and nationalist dimensions of early Euroscepticism.
Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programmes, tried to represent what it meant to be British. It offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organisation of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid ‘dual identities’ characteristic of contemporary Britain.
idealized terms of British national identity: ‘it is the boast of Britons’, one of his characters declares, ‘that from the moment a slave imprints his footstep on our shore, the moment he breathes the air of our land, he becomes free’.20 Paul and Virginia tells the story of two French women who are exiled on Mauritius, each of whom is pregnant, one deserted after the death of her husband and cast out by her aristocratic family; the other abandoned in poverty by the unmarried father of her child. On Mauritius, the two outcast mothers give birth to their children and
special responsibility to its listeners, who together constituted the British nation. For Haley, the BBC was an instrument to reflect, but also to nourish and encourage, the best virtues of the British character. Haley’s memorandum also prioritizes a particular set of ideas about British national identity: British pluck and determination, the 2 The BBC and national identity in Britain, 1922–53 empire, the “island story.” Yet Haley’s words also reflect his fears about the BBC and post-war Britain. The war had seen the apogee of the BBC’s prestige and influence, and
solidarity they also exclude, and persecute the excluded. 2 The ‘ethnic turn’ within recent scholarship on the Irish in Britain advances the interrogation of exclusionary myths of British national identity in important ways, contributing to the reimagining of Britain as a multicultural nation. Where the dominance of the imperial/colonial model within British migration studies has tended to reinforce the myth of pre-1945 British cultural homogeneity, scholarship on the Irish in post-war Britain alludes to the continuities of a much longer history of ‘multicultural racism
devising and marketing new ways of thinking about Britain’s role in the world. Their repackaging of British national identity involved challenging what they saw as widespread ‘anti-European’ modes of thinking and talking about the British in Europe (for a restatement see Blair 2010: 533–4). The paradox as they saw it was that anti-Europeanism denied the British a role in Europe at all. Combining insights from the literatures on discourse theory and norms, this section helps us appreciate what Blair and Brown were trying to achieve from a theoretical vantage point. The
children’s national self-understanding. 31 Jonathan Clark, lecturer in history at Oxford at the time, lent his support. In 1990, in a debate on ‘History, the Nation and the Schools’ held at Ruskin College, 32 he argued that this desire to return to a halcyon age of history teaching was owed to a modern crisis of British national identity demonstrating nostalgia for a time ‘when “we” were
to the radio. In addition to unashamedly representing Britain’s imperial past, the BBC became a consistent supporter of the empire during the interwar years. It presented the empire as an environment in which the best aspects of the British character and British institutions were at work; the empire, as reflected by the BBC, both constructed and reinforced British national identity. The BBC actively sought to explain and justify the empire to British listeners. And although the BBC did not suppress criticism of the empire, the dominant message was uncritical
mechanism of the Europeanist message than apparently it was able to. Studying the empirical position of the ‘pro’ groups would have the practical advantage of identifying the potential levers available to policy-makers in their quest to upgrade the ‘European’ element of British national identity. The second strand would be part empirical and part theoretical and would involve finding more out about the life-world inhabited by New Labour decision-makers. It may seem paradoxical to suggest this as a topic when the post-1997 Labour governments are surely the most
embodying many of the ideals about how and why Britain was fighting. The cornerstones of British national identity in wartime were a collective belief in national unity and the levelling of the class system, duty and service, equality of sacrifice, and good cheer and grace under fire. It has long been established by historians that this vision of the British nation at war was deliberately crafted by popular culture, the media, the government and the people themselves, and often falters under critical examination.4 However, a consideration of popular dance during the war