Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
Lucysgirl,
This organisation was sold to the British public as a trading organisation.....not as a political federalist state.
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Apologies for overlooking and not answering this point.
I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the British Press for selling it as "The Common Market", when it wasn't quite the truth.
I don't know about anyone else but from a memoir I read in the 1960s I knew after WWII that the French had peddled the idea of European countries with Iron and Steel industries coming together to form a trading Organisation and I knew we had turned it down. I equated the "Common Market" viz the E.E.C. as just an extension of the Iron and Steel trading bloc whereby countries not having that industry could also trade without borders, e.g. without importation taxes. The phrase "Common Market" does not sound as menacing as the "European Economic Community" which I'm sure would have raised more than a few eyebrows but would have had people questioning the aims and ultimate goal of such a community, especially as it was known at the time that it was fashionable to be a far left Trotskyite in some parts of Europe.
You and Dave in Germany say you don't recognise this country these days - I can say that when Bryan's overseas posting was finished and we came back to England 1970 we couldn't believe the changes made in just a few years away from home. It seemed as if the then government had opened a flood gate & got rid of and replaced all the smiling Gracie Fields/Charlie Chester/George Formby type shop keepers and bus conductors - especially galling was newly installed foreign shop keepers charging an illegal price for a Milk Marketing Board bottle of milk and the foreign conductors not knowing what a bus terminus was.