Instead of feuding over farm spending and Iraq, the French and British might now be celebrating four decades of union under Queen Elizabeth II if London had accepted a French plan drafted at the height of the Suez crisis in 1956.
Guy Mollet, then the French Prime Minister, proposed a merger as a way of sealing their alliance against threats in the Middle East.
Sir Anthony Eden, the British Prime Minister, rejected the first idea but was keen to bring France into the Commonwealth, according to National Archive documents cited by a BBC Radio 4 documentary.
...
According to the 1956 Cabinet memorandum: "M Mollet . . . raised with the Prime Minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France."
A Cabinet official recorded the enthusiastic way that Eden responded when he discussed it with Sir Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary: "Sir Norman Brook . . . informed me the PM told him he thought in the light of his talks with the French: that we should give consideration to France joining the Commonwealth; that M Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty; that the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."
The idea was dropped quietly after opposition from Whitehall. James Ellison, a London University historian, said that France was not the only candidate. "Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway were also discussed. The Treasury advised that the instability of European economies would not do the Commonwealth a lot of good."
It is very hard to get my head around something like this. I am intrigued by "counterfactual" historical premises, but I don't have any idea how the world would look if this was attempted. The Times suggestions seem a little frivolous to me:
- If only we'd got it together...
Britain would still have a thriving car industry
The trains might just run on time
The Channel Tunnel, an idea first mooted in the 1750s and developed by the Victorians, would have been opened at least 20 years earlier
The end of disputes about "champagne" made in Sussex and Somerset brie
Arsenal would stop fielding a team full of "foreigners" and England would have won the World Cup more than once
The empire would grow from a handful of small islands to a slightly larger handful of small islands
Tales of SAS derring do would include attacks on Greenpeace ships
On second thought, maybe they are all frivolous except the bit about the World Cup.
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