Marriage of convenience that ties Britain to the EU

Accession anniversary: Despite 30 years in Europe and ever-more continental habits, the UK is still ambivalent towards integration

Except for parts of Snowdonia, where youngsters released thousands of balloons, the start of Britain's fateful journey into Europe on New Year's Day 1973 seems to have passed largely unnoticed.

That week, the nation settled down to watch a contest called "Miss TV Europe" and the Post Office launched a set of stamps to mark the event. But even the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, a Europhile Conservative, seemed more nervous than euphoric. He said: "Of course, whenever there is change, people have fears, and it may be particularly characteristic of the British that they are conservative by nature, which has stood us very well in many difficult times, and so they fear change particularly."

Thirty years later, Britain is economically entwined with the European Union and linked physically to France via the Channel Tunnel. In all sorts of ways the UK is more open to continental influence – from our drinking habits to our working practices, which have been moulded by Europe's social and environmental standards.

But events to mark the 30th anniversary may make those of 1973 look like a day of unalloyed national celebration. So has our membership failed to deliver even the relatively little that was expected? And why have its acknowledged benefits not led to popularity?

By 1973, when Britain finally managed to join the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, it had been trying to do so for more than a decade. When continental states had made the first moves towards integration in the 1950s the UK had stayed aloof, allowing the original six – France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – to go ahead without Britain.

But, by the 1960s, this was seen as an economic and political mistake, prompting a protracted effort to overcome French opposition. In 1963 the French President, General Charles de Gaulle, famously vetoed Britain's bid, and only when the wartime leader of the Free French bowed out was Britain's path to membership clear. Even then things were hardly certain, and it was Mr Heath's unexpected 1970 election victory that proved decisive: the Tory leader hit it off with the centre-right French President, Georges Pompidou, and at last an entente cordiale broke out.

Talks started in July 1970, and by May 1971 it was clear they were going to succeed. In the glittering splendour of the Salon des Fêtes at the Elysée Palace in Paris M. Pompidou declared it would be "unreasonable now to believe that an agreement is not possible".

The priority of the day was to resolve political obstacles, rather than to look into the future. According to Sir Roy Denman, a member of the British negotiating team who later became a senior European Commission official, the strategic objectives of membership were rarely discussed, even at the highest level. "You don't talk, when you are in a negotiating team, about what will happen in the future," said Sir Roy. "It is like being in a war when you concentrate on the battle at hand."

Because Britain had been out at the beginning the Government had to implement the European laws which had been enacted and which even then ran to some 13,000 pages (they now make up around 80,000).

For 18 months the talks ground on, and some of the biggest problems seem spectacularly irrelevant now. Top of the list was access to the British market for New Zealand butter and lamb. With thousands of Britons having "kith and kin" in Australasia, New Zealand in effect had a veto over British membership.

But other issues have echoed down the past three decades. The size of Britain's budget contribution was one. Partly because the UK fought so hard for New Zealand it got a bad deal on financing, and by 1977 was paying 18.92 per cent of the EEC budget. That, coupled with the relatively small return Britain receives in farming subsidies, rankled. Eventually Margaret Thatcher negotiated an annual rebate – now worth about £2bn – in 1984, although that is now a source of contention.

A second problem area was fishing, where the 1973 deal permitted foreign vessels to enter waters which, until then, had been restricted to national fishermen. Such compromises were made to achieve the wider economic and political aims behind membership talks. By the late 1960s Britain was falling economically behind the continental countries it had helped to liberate only two decades earlier.

Thirty years later, the economic advantages of membership are rarely disputed. According to government figures, British exports to current EU countries have risen from 35 per cent in 1973 to 58 per cent today. The UK exports four times as much to the EU as to the United States, and more to France than to the Commonwealth, with the result that more than three million jobs in 800,000 UK companies depend on the EU. No mainstream political party advocates withdrawal, and even Eurosceptics acknowledge the benefits of the single market.

But the political objective of membership was never really debated. For the founding six countries, which were occupied in the Second World War, European integration was forged to ensure that armed conflict could never happen again.

Britain, preoccupied by its colonial reach and links with Washington, saw things differently. As Con O'Neil, the chief official negotiator at the time, put it: "What mattered was to get into the community, and thereby restore our position at the centre of European affairs which, since 1958, we had lost."

Sir Roy puts it more bluntly: "We are happy with a trading arrangement, a common market. But we will not count until we make a political commitment. We have never faced up to the fact that we would have to trade power for power." A powerful case for membership of anything more than an economic club has seldom been heard from British politicians over the past 30 years.

On the eve of Britain's accession in 1973, a BBC poll showed 23 per cent expressing no opinion at all on the merits of joining. A recent poll showed that 22 per cent said they had "no knowledge" about the EU.

All of which has left Britain in 2003 in a rather similar state of mind to the country that joined 30 years earlier: not hostile but wary, uninterested and poorly informed.

Pros and Cons of membership

The Pros

1 Through the EU, British business has tariff-free access to 380 million consumers – the largest and richest market in the world.

2 British citizens can live and work anywhere in the EU – 100,000 Britons work in other EU countries and 450,000 live in them.

3 Under EU law, it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race, religion, disability, age, sex, or sexual orientation. The EU sets minimum standards for working hours and holidays.

4 EU law guards holiday beaches from pollution. A decade ago half of British beaches did not meet EU standards; now 98.5 per cent do.

5 Britain has recourse to the European Court of Justice which (eventually) forced France to accept British beef imports, which remain banned from the US and many non-EU states.

The Cons

1 The Common Agricultural Policy, which will cost £28.5bn a year by 2006, swallows nearly half the EU's annual budget in subsidies – including those for growing tobacco.

2 We are a big net contributor to the EU budget. In 1995-2001 we were the second-largest net contributor and fifth-largest per head.

3 The UK can be out-voted on law-making in many areas, and if it does not apply European legislation it can be taken to court.

4 British fishermen are subject to the Common Fisheries Policy, which has failed to prevent the collapse of fish stocks. It has only just agreed to end funding the modernisation of trawlers.

5 The EU spends £104m each year making the European Parliament commute between Brussels and Strasbourg.