Notes
Mrs Thatcher claims a success at the EEC summit at Fontainebleau. Yet the main result of the summit is that the spending of the EEC — and Britain's con- tribution to that spending — is to be in- creased. This is bad for Britain, not only because every increase in public spending is dangerous, but because Mrs Thatcher has won no guarantee at all that the money will be used more sensibly than in the past. The higher Percentage of national contributions will mainly be devoted to propping up the Common Agricultural Policy. Economic freedom in the whole of Europe suffers from the CAP, as does the environment; andBritain suffers financially as well. All this will now get worse. Nor is it true that agreement at Fontainebleau will give the E. 1EC a renewed confidence to transform itself. Recent history has shown that vested Political interests on the Continent are so strong that they always manage to block EEC reform unless the whole system can be brought to the brink of collapse by a coun- try's refusal to agree. Mrs Thatcher therefore has passed up the only chance of real change by agreeing, before she had to, to more than she had to. We shall now return to the era of complacent Euro-pieties (including, apparently, a European flag and anthem), and the relentless rise of costs. Britain will get her 1983 refund of £450 million, but that had already been agreed and was a precondition of any settlement,
and she will in future get a better percentage deal, but of a higher sum. That is all; but Mrs Thatcher believes that it is enough to come back to the House of Commons and ask that the amount of `own resources' (the money paid by member states to the EEC) be increased from the present notional one per cent of VAT to 1.4 per cent. The House will be entitled to ask how she has managed to get so little from the extraordinarily long and acrimonious negotiations of the past Year. And there are signs that a large number of Conservative MPs is in the mood to resist. This includes not only anti- Marketeers, but respectable figures like Sir Terence Higgins, the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, who insists, with an accountant's care, that Britain is still getting nothing for something. The Government will try to make much of EEC Promises to control the budget in the future, but the essential point is that tax- payers here will pay more. On that point, the Government deserves to lose.
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