In his 1992 autobiographical work "A Historian in the Twentieth Century" Beloff discusses his political journey. He had been at school a conservative, was then attracted to socialism once at university and became a liberal after the Second World War. In 1962, during public debate of the case for a referendum on whether to join the European Economic Community, he argued that a referendum is not meaningful unless clear alternatives are set before the electorate; in the absence of such clarity, "the electorate would... be doing no more than indicating a very general bias one way or another" ('"The Case against a Referendumˮ", "The Observer", 21 October 1962, p. 11).