By Bagehot
A FEW years ago, a fascinating exhibition was mounted of old British newspaper cartoons relating to the country’s ties with Europe. The show was known as Eurobollocks and had lots of cartoons from the era of Margaret Thatcher’s titanic budget struggles, or John Major’s fights over bans on British beef. But as someone born in 1971, I was most interested in the cartoons from the 1950s and 1960s, and the time of Britain’s first, unsuccessful bids to join what was then the European Economic Community. A key question at the time was Britain’s privileged trading relations with members of the Commonwealth, and the fact that Britain would have to choose between the EEC and what remained of the old imperial preference system.