The Spectator’s Notes | 17 January 2013

David Cameron’s long-awaited speech on Europe this week falls 50 years to the day after the death of Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell, who died in harness, was the last leader of either main party to oppose entry to what people then called the Common Market. In his last party conference speech as Labour leader, in October 1962, he set five conditions for British entry to the EEC (for which the Tory government was then negotiating). These included retaining national economic freedom and an independent foreign policy. Joining would mean ‘the end of Britain as an independent nation state, the end of 1,000 years of history’, he declared. Unusually for that era, he focused even more on the constitutional than the economic point — the British people had a right, he argued, ‘to ask what exactly was involved in the concept of political union’. With Gaitskell’s death, the opportunity to invoke that right passed.