Skinflint's City Diary
No sensible Conservative would, as a matter of principle or policy, favour Labour's scheme to nationalise North Sea oil: an essential part of Conservatism, after all, is the husbanding of the principle of the worth of private enterprise. But Tories are also nationalists, and therefore concerned at the killing which multi-national oil companies seem set to make in the North Sea at the expense of Britain. There is also, of course, a fear close to the surface of politics that our disastrous membership of the EEC will enable our European so
called partners to snaffle the rich treasure under our seas for their own benefit. Alas, it is now clear that the Europeans are determined to do just that. M. Fernand Spaak, the EEC's director general of energy, has just told an energy conference organised by the Financial Times that part of the ever-growing price of British membership of the Common Market would be our agreement to a Brussels blueprint on energy policy, giving up our oil to the mainly oil-less Common Market countries. This is clearly a move inspired less by the Commission than by France, invariably casting envious and especially nationalorientated eyes on the oil that we have which they have not. It must be resisted, and even nationalisation would not be too high a price to pay to keep continental hands off our oil.
Oil resources
Speaking of oil, and the terrible mess governments of both parties have got into in the handling of our oil resources, how many people realise that Britain is alone among oil producing countries in not insisting on an employment policy by the oil companies which would ensure oil field jobs for the natives of the producing countries in a reasonable proportion? Every oil producing country insists on a certain proportion of native employment in the oil business —
• sometimes, as in the case of Nigeria, a government's insistence on the employment of relatively unqualified native staff retards the efficiency of oil exploitation. In Britain we have recently had the — at least for the moment — leader of the Conservative Party telling us how necessary it is to hire mainly American staff for our oil fields because we did not have enough expert staff of our own. Not true: scattered around the world, and particularly in the employ of American companies in Nigeria and the Far East, are multitudes of skilled British citizens, who cannot get back home to the United Kingdom to work on their own country's oil because of the employment policies of the big oil companies. In the Heriot-Watt University in Scotland there is an amazing supply of capable British oil executives; few can get jobs in the fields themselves. This is something that ought to be, and must be, remedied.
Colonial interest
If, as seems likely to be the case, the new ruler of Portugal, General Spinola, liquidates the Portuguese imperial presence in Africa, leading Portuguese business circles will be in very serious trouble indeed. For, although Portugal has remained poor, in the sense that her workpeople and lower classes have had to forgo all the social benefits of living in a modern country, in order to pay for the massive military effort in Africa, the Lisbon stock exchange and its principal members have done very well out of the war.
These circles, allied with the old military establishment, it was who sustained Dr Salazar — a simple and puritan man who never made money out of anything — in power because he believed so passionately in the civilising mission of his country in Africa. General Spinola has many, manY problems to overcome in outfacing the rich of Portugal; he will need every ounce of the loyalty he has gained from his troops over
all his years in Portuguese GuineaBissoa to carry out the revolution
on which he seems to be bent. And the fact that he will, apparenLIY, fight his own good fight suggests that Portugal will be numbered among the few countries where a military take-over is followed by an anti-capitalist policy. In Chile and Greece the generals are as thick as thieves with big business: in Peru, they are hostile to sirnilar big business interests and in Portugal it seems that they may be
SO.
Third World finance
And while we're on foreign affairs it is useful to note that the seventh annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Kuala Lumpur looks certain to end in 3 failure born of dissension, division and sheer temperament on the part of participating economists, bankers, managers, politicians and others. The reason for this is not: Just the emotional instability .0' delegates, but the sheer stupidity of so many organisational and other ideas which seek to insist on the superiority of internationalisM considered abstractly to national Interests: third world countries Kuala, for example, find that in sEpaistteeronf oil-producing ngourcclisthe Midd.je countries intend to do precisely nothinl about making more expensive01, available to their under-develope° fellow nations at a price cheaper than it can be purchased bY th„e industrial countries of the West._,ri lot of dreams, in the phrase of Ivi• Trudeau, are going to be broken by the progressive collapse of the, idea of a collective Third wall° identity; but some common-sell.: sical attitude may emerge out of IL all.
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