No way out?
Sir: Your lengthy editorial attack (January 26), against the Common Market is surely pointless. No British Government, however much show it might make of renegotiating the terms of our entry, could actually take Britain out of the Market without the most ruinous effect on our credibility. Our entry, surely, was a beginning in the essential process of building a united Europe which is so vital for our future.
Harold Wilson's about-turn on the terms of entry was one of the most discreditable of his actions and was widely treated with the contempt it deserved, particularly by the moderates within his own party. Since the pledge to re-negotiate the terms was made, Mr Wilson has been more and more a prisoner of his left wing and his recent actions have borne this out to the cost of national unity in the present crisis.
The Common Market presents an ideal of unity for future generations and for our own. No one can expect this to happen at once. Nor can the critics of the Market explain where, if not as part of Europe, Britain's role in today's world lies.
Richard B. L. Fitzwilliams 5 Lymington Mansions, Lymington Road, West End Lane, London NW6.
Sir: In taking you to task over your hostility to the Common Market, Mr Philip Zec (Letters, February 2) quotes an Economist report stating that 84 per cent of leading British companies claim clear benefits flowing to them from EEC membership and equally claim that outside the Community they would lose out seriously. I suppose their counterparts on the continent would be even less happy. Poor dears.
What Mr Zec and other Eurofanatics just will not realise is that many of us have no objections whatsoever to their European fantasies, provided we are not forced to share them. And forced we were. The day of reckoning will come.
As for the industrialists, let our politicians — Labour preferably — make suitable free-trade arrangements where practicable and desirable, as others have done, and use the devices of national protectionism only when absolutely necessary.
N. E. Henry 29 Inglefield Avenue, Heath, Cardiff
Previous page
