The Commonwealth: the Black and White of It
By Sir Ronald Sanders
Thursday, August 29, 2013 – Huntington News Net
Sir Ronald Sanders
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of the British Capital City, London, has joined in a chorus of voices in the Conservative Party that has been calling for Britain to abandon its membership of the European Union (EU) and to look instead to the Commonwealth of Nations as “countries that offer immense opportunities for British goods, people, services and capital”.
This is a huge reversal from 1971 when the then leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Britain, Edward Heath, told the House of Commons that the idea that the Commonwealth might become “an effective economic and political let alone military bloc had never been realised”. On the contrary, he argued, it was generally accepted that that trade with the Commonwealth overseas, unlike that with the European Common Market, held no prospect of dynamic growth. Britain’s subsequent entry to what is now the European Union (EU) in 1973 put an end to any further development of the Commonwealth as preferential trading group. Continue reading
