Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), pp. 86–108

After winning the 1974 general election, the new Labour government under Harold Wilson embarked on the renegotiation of the United Kingdom’s terms of membership in the European Community. Renegotiation partly centred on the Party’s pre-election vow re-make the Common Agricultural Policy as a less budgetarily burdensome programme that would maintain low food prices for British consumers through greater openness with third countries. However, by the time the renegotiation concluded, little was accomplished. This essay will argue that the UK government failed to achieve any of its initial goals on reforming the CAP, because at the exact moment that the negotiators looked to remake the programme, global food prices temporarily spiked well above European prices. Believing higher world prices were only the ‘foothills in the mountains ahead’, the Labour government thereby concluded it would be more cost-effective – both for the Exchequer and the British consumer – to maintain the status quo rather than structurally reform the programme even as the opposite proved to be true. 

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