LETTERS Ken on euroautocue
From Mr Conrad Black Sir: Kenneth Clarke (Letters, 29 July) invokes the usual farrago of eurononsense in opposition to my advocacy of Britain remain- ing in the European Common Market while joining Nafta. As if on euroautocue, he recites the familiar mantra that any change to the terms of our adherence to Europe would be both disadvantageous and impossi- ble to negotiate. (How we couldn't negotiate a disadvantage for ourselves escapes my imagination, but the point is academic.) Mr Clarke imputes to me europhobic views that I do not hold, and no evidence is, or could be, cited that I do hold them. The USA would certainly cause Nafta to invite us to join if the British government asked it to, as Senator Gramm told us when he was here three weeks ago. But Mr Clarke, in his capacity as a 'frequent visitor' to the United States, advised us to ignore the chairman of the US Senate banking committee.
Surely, even the Foreign Office could manage to accept such an invitation and still negotiate retention of free movement of goods and services with Europe. Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Israel and now Mexico enjoy this status. Mexico, of course, is a Nafta member; Israel has free access to Nafta, and the others are negotiating it. The UK should be the first G7 economy to have free access to both Europe and North America, for reasons almost too obvious to anyone except the likes of Kenneth Clarke to mention.
Mr Clarke's pride in the EU–Mexican arrangement, which Europe is officially withholding from the United States and Canada, is bizarre. I share Mr Clarke's enthusiasm for transatlantic free trade, but the stumbling block is not the US Congress, as he claims, but European inability to compete with the Americans coupled with a mad eurovision of becoming a geopoliti- cal rival to the USA. Very few British eurosceptics are the eurohaters that Mr Clarke and others tediously claim them to be. Much more commonplace, and much more dangerous to Britain, are the euroin- tegrationists who are americophobes.
John Sabin (also 29 July) is right, as I have always acknowledged, that Europe is a grand vision and achievement, but most of it is eco- nomically stagnant compared to the USA, mainly because of the eurosocialism, which he dismisses as a 'myth'. The collapse of com- munism did not make Lionel Jospin an iden- tical ideological twin of George W. Bush.
I thank Neil Balfour and Aaron Schnei- der for their insightful and supportive com- ments. However, I don't agree with Mr Bal- four that it will necessarily be desirable to leave Europe altogether; a Europe which, contrary to John Croolcshank's comments in his letter of 5 August, does possess some of the 'splendour' that Mr Churchill pre- sciently foresaw for it in 1943.
Conrad Black
Chairman, Telegraph Group Ltd, Canary Wharf, London E14
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