Half-Remembered Quotations from Mostly Forgotten Speeches: The Limits of Labour's European Policy Discourse

Abstract

it identifies the ideational consistencies in the leaders' attitudes to: Empire; federalism in the EEC/EU; and laying down conditions that have to be met before any constructive engagement with 'Europe' can be countenanced. We argue that these consistencies, spanning a 50-year period, exemplify a certain stagnation both within Labour's European discourses and within British foreign policy thinking more widely. We develop the idea that Labour party thinking has been crucially framed by both small 'c' conservative and upper-case Conservative ideology, popularised by Winston Churchill in his 'three circles' model of British foreign policy.

Introduction: InterpretingBritishEuropean Policy

“…This interdisciplinary body of work – European Studies in empirical and methodological orientation, as opposed to contemporary ‘EU Studies’ (McGowan , p. 8; Warleigh‐Lack, ) – looks to the historical, cultural and background ideas informing Britain's policy responses to European integration dilemmas. This work takes various guises: British politics and/or foreign policy that have an explicit (Baker and Seawright, ; Deighton, ; Williams, ; Holden, ; Oppermann, ) or has a composite European focus (Turner, ; Gaskarth, ); the history of British diplomacy toward the EC/EU (George, ; Ludlow, ; Wilkes, ; Parr, ; Gowland et al ., ; Pine, ); political parties, civil society and other sectoral interests and European integration (Turner, ; Coupland, ; Crowson, ; Usherwood, ; Broad and Daddow, ; Lynch, ; Fitzgibbon, ); and accounts of the symbolism and cultural capital attached to Eurosceptical readings of the British (influentially, Colley, ) – but most often English – national ‘character’ (Marcussen et al ., , pp. 111–4; Redwood, , pp.…”

Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and the Eurosceptic Tradition in Britain

“…However, two themes recur throughout the tradition and we will use them to elucidate its main contours, using data from Thatcher and Blair's foreign policy discourses (for more on discourse analysis as data see Milliken ; Titscher et al. ; applied in Broad and Daddow ). The choice of prime ministers was quite straightforward.…”

The Labour Party and Europe from Brown to Miliband: Back to the Future?

“…Public and academic attention has focused recently on the evolution of the debate about Europe within the Conservative Party since 2010 and the rise of hard Euroscepticism both within the party and in the British public at large (Gifford, ; Schnapper, ; Lynch and Whitaker, ; Matthijs, ). Discussion about the Labour Party's attitude towards European integration, which flourished under Blair, is scarcer for the post‐2007 period (Deighton, ; Riddell, ; Smith, ; Schnapper, ; Broad and Daddow, ). Labour's position deserves attention not only because it is hoping to return to power in the 2015 general election, but also because, with David Cameron's promise of a referendum about membership of the EU in 2017, the European issue has again become centre stage in the British political debate, with a real possibility of the country leaving the EU altogether.…”

“…The comparison between the two periods will be based on political discourse analysis in the sense used by Henrik Larsen () to study British discourse about Europe, implying that language is not neutral, that it has its own dynamics and reveals values as well as constraints. I compare comments by the main protagonists of the 1960s with writings and speeches by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, building on work already undergone by Broad and Daddow (). Sources are more abundant for Brown than for Miliband, not only because Brown was in a position to express himself on European issues for a longer period of time as Chancellor then Prime Minister, but also because Miliband talked little about foreign policy in general and Europe (which were his brother's strong suit) in particular since becoming leader, with two exceptions: a speech to the Confederation of British Industry against leaving the EU in November 2012 and in parliamentary debates about the Syrian crisis in the summer of 2013.…”