Bucking the Bow Leonard Beaton, the Canadian-born Director of Studies
at the Institute of Strategic Research, who convened the group, and his five co-authors seem to have taken full advantage of this some- what naïve procedure and got through to the final meeting in spite of fierce opposition from the senior officials of the Bow Group. Here they might have foundered if the chief opponents of the pamphlet had not overplayed their hand and tried to bulldoze the meeting into refusing publication. The final voting, I understand, was twenty-one to seventeen in favour of publication. Even so Beaton and Co. had to accept the addition of an extra strong disclaimer, at the front of the pamphlet, of the Bow Group's responsibility for its views and an alteration of its original title which was 'Market Misadventure.' The upshot is that no one knows what the views of the whole Bow Group on Europe are since only thirty-eight (and the authors of the pamphlet) have had the chance of demonstrating what they believe. The Lord Privy Seal was there- fore quite wrong to claim as he did on television the other night that a majority of the Group was in favour of joining Europe, and the Group's establishment who took the rather unsportsman- like course of writing to The Times on Wednes- day were being pretty disengenuous in claiming that the current leading members of the Group believe as they do.
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