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Comment by phobosdeimos | Hacker News Reader

The UK was so broke in the 1970s they could barely keep their military budget up, most importantly an independent nuclear deterrent. Superpower status was a thing of the past. With Brexit coming up its insightful to read up on post WW2 British history and how it got itself into the EU.

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Sadly, Brexit will bring some cuts to UK research. And to projects like EUROATOM, where UK is a major contributor and host. It seems we haven't learned much from history.

The UK has a lot of previous form in that department - the TSR-2 (cancelled in favour of the F-111) and the Miles M.52 (blueprints given to the US and formed the basis of the Bell X-1 design) to name but two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52

Britain's first attempt to get into the EU was vetoed by de Gaulle; a strange was of repaying the UK's effort in getting France a permanent seat on the UN security council in 1945.

Twice in fact, in 63 and 67. His motivations, which he explained at length in a press conference that’s easy to find online were that the U.K. was only interested in a strictly limited free trade union, and wanted an extremely bespoke deal, excluding farming etc.

That never really changed, although Britain eventually gave up most of these conditions, when they finally joined.

And also that he viewed the UK as a pawn of the US.

Seems he was correct in this too.

> That never really changed, although Britain eventually gave up most of these conditions, when they finally joined.

And then still left eventually (well, this is in progress) because of exactly these reasons. De Gaulle was absolutely right on this.

In hindsight, it is clear now that he was extremely prescient.

What an accurate analisys of a major geopolitical event!

I'm pretty sure De Gaulle was a time traveller, because a lot of calls he made were that way; "okayish" when they were made but jump 20 years forward and suddenly it's clear as day.

Sadly he was maybe a little too good at it, because now my country is frozen in an incessant quest to find a new De Gaulle; we can't accept the idea that politician - even president - are flawed and make mistakes, so we call all of them "bad", "wrong choice", ... That's why our president always have rock bottom public opinion.

Just shows that the leaders of war-time should retire after the peace treaty. Britain elected Labour right after the war and though rationing kept going for quite a while, the peace-time government created such brilliant things like the NHS.

De Gaulle retired from the governement after the war, he was back in power by election in the 60s

Do you have any good book recommendations on post WW2 British history and how we got into the EU? I'd like to read up on that!

It costs money to intern Irish patriots without trial in your colony's concentration camps

Would you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The problem isn't your views, it's that this sort of thing leads to flamewars that take over discussion completely if we let it.

The idea on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

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