Excuses, evasions and explanations
Many people in prominent positions in Britain have worked hard to get us into the European Community and keep us there, and it would be both naive and unfair to imagine that they are all either ill-informed or ill-intentioned. Some (on both sides of the argument) are merely selfish, in that they have considered only their personal interests or those of some group to which they belong. Some others have been trying to deceive, not the British people, but their new partners. They believe that Britain' can build a new Empire, or something like it, in Europe, and run it to her own advantage. That group at least is less defeatist than some, but it ignores the entrenched positions of France and Germany as well as our own present economic weaknesses, and reveals an ignorance that is matched only by its arrogance.
Most of the remaining apologists are convinced that membership is in the interests of all of us in the longer or shorter term. They .fall into three distinct sub-groups. The most surprising, and perhaps the biggest group, believes in some vague notion of internationalism, forgets the Community's protectionist wall and has never troubled to look at the mountain of detailed decisions that tell us what membership really involves. Nobody expects any human, being to go through all the volumes of decisions and remain sane, but the more prudent among us have looked carefully at some of them and at the opinion of those, many of them specialists, who have examined parts of that immense mass of binding obligations.
The members of this "internationalist" group do not appear to have done even that. A typical case is that of Lady Jackson, formerly Miss Barbara Ward. Lady Jackson is one of the most sensitive, informed, balanced and intelligent people one could wish to meet and is certainly a democrat. Yet she wrote to the Times (January 4, 1975) to express dismay and bewilderment that Mr Tony Benn should weigh the rights of the British people against "an entirely new attempt to reconcile the once deadly rivalries of the French and Germans and to bring Europe's often fractious nationalities into a deepening neighbourliness and tolerance."
Lady Jackson and the many who share her attitude overlook a whole range of questions. Some of us do not believe that it is the ECSC and EEC experiments that have put an end to the possibility of war between France and Germany. It seems to us that it was, on the contrary, the accepted impossibility by both countries of another such war that made the European ventures possible. Indeed, we see the outlines of a worse risk — that the tight economic bloc being formed by the Community countries and their associates in the Mediterranean, Africa and the West Indies may force the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand into a counter bloc, as well as alienating India and Pakistan. Nor do we see any proof in history that the surrender or merging of local sovereignties prevents war. The United States, Nigeria and Pakistan have all been the scenes of bloody wars as a consequence of federation. The whole assumption that assertions of sovereignty are a principal cause of war is open to challenge. If they are, then the twentieth century, which has seen the creation (net of losses) of more than seventy new and sovereign states has made and is still making some startling mistakes. Even without those views, we should still think it wise to ask how much sacrifice of our right to control our own affairs others were entitled to ask of us, in return for the hope of peace in Europe. Not even to ask that question is like buying a house because one likes the view, without enquiring whether it would withstand wind and weather, and whether the view was likely to remain. The only weakness of that analogy is that it likens a decision about the future of a whole nation to the petty foolishness of a single individual. There are two other groups of apologists, of which one is dishonest (with good intentions) and the other blindly utopian. The well-intentioned but dishonest ones genuinely believe two things: first, that membership must in the long run bring great advantages, and second, that most of us are too stupid or too shortsighted to recognize those distant advantages.
Whether or not there are advantages is discussed below. The error of this group is that of tyrants through the ages, who believed that they alone could see far enough into the future, and so could best serve the ignorant and unimaginative by telling them lies. The most outspoken member of this group has been Peter Jenkins of the Guardian, who openly advised Ministers to play as dirtily as they could over the referendum, provided the dirt didn't show. Mr David Wood, of the Times, came several degrees nearer to respect for truth. He merely regretted that a Dutch member of the Strasbourg 'Parliament' had made proposals calling attention to ideas which Mr Wood would have liked to see concealed during the referendum period. • The third group is more honest and less arrogant. Its members too believe that the advantages of membership will be shown only in the long run. In the short — and in some cases medium — term they expect economic and political losses. Some foresee short-term economic losses, followed by great economic gains while others see only long-term political gains accompanied by permanent economic loss. This third group is the most important, and it is worth a section to itself (see below).
Meanwhile, some other defences and excuses are so commonly used that they need a word of answer. Roy Jenkins, who is wise and always moderate in statement, defended British membership a year or two ago, on the ground that "the economic climate might become less bland." If by that he meant that some tariffs might be raised against Britain, then the Community was already a guilty party when he spoke, for it had made the climate less bland by raising new tariff barriers against most of the world, and has added a great many 'non-tariff' barriers which are one of its principal worries. In another sense, of course, the climate is already very much less bland, in the aftermath of widespread inflation and the new cost of oil. But all past experience, and in particular that of the Coal-Steel Pool, which is part of the Community, suggests that experiments in international economic co-operation which show signs of success on a rising market turn sour when the market begins to contract. Nations, like individuals, become less, not more charitable when their standard of living is threatened. That is one of the reasons why the Community's only prosperous member, Germany, is now becoming its toughest member, lending money to Italy only on strict terms, and thinking twice about every effort by her partners to persuade her to shell out more. Mr Jenkins' argument is closely related to another, which asserts that we are "too weak to stay outside" and that the only safety is in numbers. It is true that Britain's present economic position is weak. But so is that of every other Community member except Germany. The Community's own latest issue of its Basic Statistics, covering a period long before the ganging-up of the oil producers hit us, shows every Community country except Germany with a balance-of-payments deficit, and all the other members are harder hit than us, because they have no present prospect of an oil surplus of their own. In any case, weakness is weakness whether we are inside the Community or outside it. Life inside it is a perpetual battle by nine self-interested States, in which the scales are perpetually weighted in favour of Germany and France. and in which the weak either do as they are told or go to the wall. So long as we are weak, we shall need help of some kind from somewhere, but outside the Community the choice is wider and the climate often warmer.
An even stranger argument, which turns up more and more frequently, says that there is really no harm in our giving up large chunks of our right to make our own decisions, because circumstances have already deprived us of much of our ability to do that. It is of course, true that Britain can no longer dictate to others, and cannot always do exactly what she wants for herself. At the time of writing, the most recent exponent of that argument was the ineffable Mr Hattersley, who explained (and to an academic audience!) that Britain was no longer a super-power, and therefore no longer capable of enforcing her will in the world. He added, quite rightly, that not even the two giant powers were "insulated from the international economy" and that, whether we like it or not, "our country will be influenced by judgements made beyond these shores." All that is patently true, and one possible conclusion to be drawn is that there is no advantage to be got from sacrificing historic rights in the hope of becoming a small portion of yet another impotent great power. But Mr Hattersley's conclusion — widely echoed among his fellows — is that, having lost some of our power through force of circumstances, we might as well give away the rest. Which is exactly like saying that a man who has lost one leg in an accident would be wise to have the other amputated too, provided he could get a few vague and ambiguous promises in return. The favourite justification, however, and the one most commonly used by Ministers and some Labour MPs, is that those of us who oppose British membership are making the mistake of looking at the rules of the club we have joined. These, we are told, no longer matter. They can always be bent or broken, and that, indeed, constantly happens. Moreover, they say, with the coming into power of new heads of government in France and Germany, the Community has changed its nature. There is no longer (in this theory) any emphasis on economic, monetary and political union, but instead, everybody is interested only in economic co-operation to avoid inflation and unemployment. And anyhow, British Ministers have only to say 'No' to anything they dislike and nothing will then happen. From the point of view of the Marketeers, the beauty of that claim is that it has a basis of truth. Community rules have indeed been bent, broken or simply ignored. The bending and breaking of rules is a normal and necessary feature of political life in countries with over-rigid rules and constitutions, because nobody can govern except pragmatically, responding to needs as they arise. But to the simple minds of the British Islanders, accepting rules because they can be broken is a poor idea and scarcely honest. More important, it is almost impossible for British observers to foresee just when French politicians, for instance, are going to agree without argument that it is right to bend or break and when they are going to dig in their heels and say, "No, it can't be done; the rules forbid it." It is said that Mr Heath was driven mad by the alternance of these two circumstances during the first negotiations, and many others have had the same experience. There is, somewhere, an underlying, unwritten rule which tells Frenchmen when it is obvious that the written rules must be broken, but only they know that unwritten rule.
It is also true that M. Giscard d'Estaing and Herr Helmut Schmidt have shown less interest than some of their predecessors in the road to political union (though the former would deny that), and more in the roads that lead away from inflation and unemployment. But none of that means that the rules no longer matter, and that our Ministers can feel confident at any time of being allowed to protect our own interests when necessary. If that had been true, there would have been no hullabaloo when Mr Callaghan made his opening statement to the Council of Minister and no insistence all through the negotiations, as there has been, that nothing must be done to change the rules laid down in the treaties and other documents. Nor would there have been any need for the surrender by Mr Wilson which is discussed later in this pamphlet. The basic argument is simple: if the rules don't matter, why not change them? If they do matter, as we are insistently told, it is dishonest to pretend that they do not.
There are two simple ways by which Mr Callaghan can test that point. He can demand that all the rights the apologists tell us we are going to possess be written into the rules in one or other — or both — of two ways. They can be written into the Treaty of Accession (which took us into the Community), along with the minor and mostly temporary concessions secured by Mr Geoffrey Rippon in 1970-71, or we can get an assurance from the Council and Court of the Community that the Court will enforce obedience to what has been agreed in the course of re-negotiation, in the same way as it enforces obedience to the treaties themselves. Nothing else will be worth the paper it is written on, if indeed our negotiators succeed in getting anything on to paper. If and when Mr Callaghan tries that simple and reasonable test — the kind that the original six insisted on amongst themselves — he will discover that the right to bend and break belongs only to the strongest, except on accidental occasions, like the end stages of a major package deal. The original members still intend to play football, and who can blame them?
Mr Callaghan has borrowed from Mr R ippon what is certainly the lamest excuse of all. He told the House of Commons on December 19, 1974, that "the numbers of regulations and directives that issue from the Commission is in some ways greater than would be the administrative decisions that would have been taken by Ministers in this country and could not have been challenged except by way of questions in the House or by correspondence." It follows therefore, in Mr Callaghan's view, that the methods of scrutiny now being tried (see below) increase rather than reduce the powers of Parliament.
Mr Callaghan's statement contains the notable admission that we get more orders from Brussels than governments used to give us, with the explicit or tacit consent of Parliament, on similar subjects. It also contains a lamentable error of reasoning. It is true that our overworked Parliament accepts many restrictions on its rights of debate and decision. But it can change those rules and get rid of the restrictions if it wishes. It can indeed do more. It can change the Constitution and throw large chunks of it into the Thames, as it did when it voted the European Communities Act. But, as we shall see later, it cannot give itself any effective control over Community decisions. There is simply no comparison between the two situations: Mr Callaghan should beware of picking up ideas from the Opposition.'
It was Mr Callaghan too — again following others — who claimed that sacrificing the rights of Parliament and people was a quite normal thing, which had been done when Britain joined NATO and other bodies, in some of which (he said, quite accurately) we had accepted qualified-majority voting. That is plain nonsense. Joining the Community has tied our hand in ways which in international law we cannot untie, and which economic. changes will make harder to untie in practice as time goes on. It has been quite accurately described by one of its British supporters, Mr Andrew Shonfield, as a "journey to an unknown destination." The journeys we make in other bodies are to known and precise destinations, are to last for limited periods, and can be abandoned if the price seems too high for what we get in return.
Previous page
