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One argument that has rattled on in Britain since Henry VIII is that Britain should not associate with predominantly Roman Catholic Western Europe; the Free Church of Scotland has specifically warned members against the sinister "web of Rome." Another criticism of British membership is that under Common Market guarantees of free movement, the Anglo-Saxon shores will be invaded by hordes of immigrants from the Continent, competing for jobs and living space.
The Case For. Most businessmen, particularly the big industrialists, favor Britain's entry, thereby arousing labor union suspicions that they plan to trim British wages to Continental levels. Actually, those levels are rising.* More significantly. Common Market membership would shake up labor's soft and featherbedded ways. At present, British workers are immobile, hence many areas suffer from a severe labor shortage; plants will do anything—including slowing down production—to keep workers. British industry would have to take drastic steps to reorganize and re-equip. Many British businessmen agree that the "bracing cold shower." as Macmillan describes European competition, may flush inefficient firms right out of business. But, Macmillan argues, Britain is facing that competition anyway, and will be able to meet it under better conditions if she joins. In the Market, "the test will be in the straight competition of brains, productive capacity and energy per man."
In the heat of the Commonwealth controversy, few Britons recall that its sacrosanct trade ties started as a marriage of convenience—and have lately proved increasingly inconvenient. Since the 1880s, British politicians have dreamed of the Empire as a competition-proof common market that would forever absorb British manufactured goods and supply cheap raw materials in exchange. But it never worked that way. In 1962, as Richard Cobden protested in the early 19th century, the Commonwealth is, in purely economic terms, "but a gorgeous and ponderous appendage to swell our ostensible grandeur without improving our balance of trade."
While clinging possessively to the right of free entry into British markets, the Commonwealth nations have tended increasingly to discriminate against British goods that threatened their own budding industries. In recent years, Britain's Commonwealth trade has consistently ended in the red. Britain's exports to the Commonwealth since 1954 have dwindled from 49% to 36% of her total foreign trade; they were actually exceeded this year, for the first time, by her exports to Western Europe. Trade with the six Common Market countries alone has soared 30% since 1960 and now accounts for more than one-third of Britain's overseas sales.
Moreover, throughout the booming '50s, Britain's economy limped ahead at less than half the Common Market's rate of growth (annual average: 8%). Although at home Britons lived amid unprecedented—and inflationary—prosperity, a long series of financial crises culminated last summer in a massive, sustained flight from the pound that at its peak pumped up to $1.4 billion a month out of Britain. The government stanched the flow with heavy loans and anti-inflationary wage curbs (the "pay pause"), but the only permanent cure, economists decided, was to boost