1973-78: A Common Market or a Project for Peace?

My childhood and youth were spent in ‘splendid isolation’ from the rest of Europe. My grandfather had almost made it to the Western Front in 1917, having lied about his age in order to join up. He made it as far as Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire for training, when his whole battalion was struck down by the flu epidemic. He only survived because his mother travelled up from Coventry and demanded her son back, producing his birth certificate. He returned home to a reserved occupation as a coal-miner. The only time I set foot outside the UK was on a 1966 trip to Dublin, where my father had qualified as a Baptist minister during the war. It was just after the IRA had blown up Nelson’s Column to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Uprising. My parents went to Switzerland…