The UK applied to join the EEC simply to please the US - we have been US vassals since 1956

From How Europe failed us by CD Montgomery in the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic here.

'Despite Macmillan making clear to JFK the demerits of the EEC as it actually existed, the official US minutes of the PM’s chat with the President in 1962, a year after Britain had finally applied to join (and De Gaulle had vetoed for the first time), are stark: US support depended upon the UK “fully [accepting] the political and institutional obligations of the Rome Treaties”.

'And thus we have our first Powellite lesson: the EEC was, for Britain, an American project. We tried to join it because we thought doing so curried favour with Washington; our entry was as they wished it. They did not make it happen: we did that. We responded to our post-imperial situation with decisions we thought were in our interests, but our Cold war (and quintessentially post-Suez) calculus was, “How does this play in DC?” That was our European strategy. It was not that of France whose strategy (so admired by the young Henry Kissinger) was precisely the opposite — to make America sweat for her relationship with it.'

Sir Anthony Eden was the last British Prime Minister to follow a foreign policy independently of the USA and was destroyed by Eisenhower as a result. The supine obedience to Washington that Sir Keir Starmer displays today over Venezuela is the same vassalage that Macmillan, Mrs Thatcher and all the others displayed. 

Jeremy Corbyn has many appalling (and some good) opinions. Regardless of his views he would have been incapable of being a competent Prime Minister but it was his antipathy to the USA that ensured he would be destroyed by a well organised campaign in which no doubt security services and foreign governments were involved.

I posted before something that Eden said after the Suez crisis, quoting Enoch Powell.

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

It might be argued that the Americans have been Britain's enemies not just in the Middle East but much more generally at least since the cold war ended, perhaps long before. 

Jeremy Corbyn of course might argue that and so might have Enoch Powell.

At least Harold Wilson kept us out of the Vietnam war.