Euromess
Roger Berthoud
The EEC is in a mess. As the current wrangling over farm prices in Brussels emphasises, the common agricultural policy has become more and more of a fiction, with prices for farmproduce-in West Oermany 45 per cent higher than in the UK. The European Monetary System is stalled, and likely to remain so till next month's summit meeting in Paris. There is a constitutional clash between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers over the budgetary allocation for regional spending this year.
Just another crisis? Perhaps, but one which springs from fundamental defects in the system, rather than primarily from a clash of wills. More interesting than the present mess, to which a messy solution will no doubt eventually be found, is the gradual change which has come over British attitudes to the EEC.
The change was to some extent to be seen • in the generally rational debate over the merits of Britain joining the EMS. It will perhaps be in evidence in the campaign for the first directly elected European Parliament. The change is, it seems to me, the growing level of agreement — or doubt — between what in the past have been crudely labelled proand anti-Marketeers.
After five years of membership, the unfairness from Britain's point of view of many of the EEC's policies has come to loom large to the most fervent advocates of membership. Apart from some slight improvement in the ratio of Britain's exports to the EEC, compared with imports, the expeCted economic benefits have been hard to detect. Future developments, like the entry of Greece, Spain and Portugal, are likely to increase the burdens Without ensuring any compensating economic gains. Pro-Marketeers have become harderheaded. But so too have the antis. The world outside, marked by a recession unlikely to lift, and indeed by increasingly tough terms for access to EEC markets for non-members in certain crucial sectors, looks even colder than at the time of the 1975 referendum. As for the 'fortress Britain' scenario of the protectionists: would trade unionists accept the cut in real wages needed for a massive regeneration of investment in British industry? The question itself is risible.
The reality of membership has sunk home. How very British that the proand anti-Marketeers have failed to recognise the growing amount of common ground between them. Perhaps, like unions and management, they have come to cherish the old animosities. Like politicians at Westminster, they remain reluctant to make common cause, even when national interests make this desirable.
Yet there are at least three specific issues where little seems to divide and much to unite the two camps: the common agricultural policy, the common fisheries policy, and the system of contributions to the EEC budget.
True, the pro-Europeans have always recognised that the CAP constituted a burden for Britain, because it obliged the consumer to pay a high price for stable supplies within a virtually self-sufficient community. Since accession, however, the surpluses generated by high producer prices have got out of hand, notably in the dairy sector, and the cost of storing or disposing of them has risen correspondingly.
Providentially, the British consumer has been shielded from the full impact of the CAP by the elaborate mechanism of 'green' currencies and subsidies and levies, on intra-Community trade designed to preserve the semblance of common prices in the face of currency fluctuations. It is these so-called monetary compensatory amounts, which have greatly benefited the West German farmer, which the French now want to be phased out.
In the longer term, Britain, as a low wage economy and major food importer, is bound to suffer acutely from paying the same farm prices as its high wage partners. The best hope for containing prices and reducing the overall cost of the CAP is to separate out its 'social' element, enabling national governments to find ways other than high prices of supporting uneconomic small farmers, whose main value may be environmental or social.
The system of contributions to the EEC budget must also be a common target for reform and proand anti-Marketeers alike, given that Britain's industry is likely to remain incapable of seizing any substantial compensating advantages from membership. Britain is already the second largest net contributor, and could — as the Prime Minister has pointed out — become the largest, even though our GNP per head ranks seventh among the Nine. Logic suggests a three-pronged approach: reducing the cost of the CAP; pressing for an increase in spending on regional, social and industrial policies; and the introduction of a 'progressive' key relating budgetary contributions to capacity to pay.
Finally, there is a large expanse of common ground, or water, over the common fisheries policy. Here is one sector in which Britain would have been indisputably better off outside the EEC. Instead of being able to fix and police its own quotas and conservation measures in a 200 mile exclusive zone, Britain is faced with the legal right of its partners to fish up to the beaches when current exceptional arrangements expire in 1982. No agreement on a new regime can be expected before Britain has a new government better able to face cries of 'sellout'.
Of course there remain areas where advocates of closer cooperation within the EEC will remain in bitter disagreement with, for example, the Labour left: such as participation in the EMS, and greater powers for the directly elected assembly. But five years after we joined it, reasonable men and women can surely agree on much about the European Community. Membership has a number of penalties. which need to be reduced by tough but polite diplomacy, as well as some benefits, mainly political. The burdens are however marginal to Britain's real problems: our poverty is self-inflicted, and must be relieved primarily by our own efforts, helped by the bonus of North Sea oil. Meanwhile there is no credible alternative to trying to make a success, if possible on better terms, of the best available form of cooperation in an unfriendly world.
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