CITY AND SUBURBAN
The dogs bark and the caravans move in it's humbug time in Rome
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Bah! Humbug! A fine display of sea- sonal sanctimony and hypocrisy is on view this week at Rome, where the European Community's leaders confer on the future of their money. They will all be urged to show vision, to do the truly European thing, and of course to submerge narrow national interests. Sir Geoffrey Howe has been urging them in this direction already. What we need now is a Euro-Advent calendar, with Sir Geoffrey, Sir Leon Brittan and Lord Cockfield popping up predictably in their traditional squares with their familiar messages. We did not hear much from them last week, when the Community spirit was on display in Brus- sels. I suppose there must be such a thing as a Belgian humourist, because somebody booked the negotiations on Gatt, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, into the Heysel Stadium. This humourist went on to ensure that the talks would break up last Friday, when the negotiators had to move out and make way for a caravan show. Montagu Norman foresaw it: 'The dogs bark' he said, 'and the caravan moves on.' The European spirit, as conjured up in Brussels, had narrow interests well to the fore. Rather than speed up the imperceptible pace of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, the Community was content to risk trade wars and to penalise poor countries. It also penalises this country, as the leading ex- porter of services — for free trade in services as well as goods had for the first time been included in Gatt's remit, and if the negotiations fail, this will fail too. The president of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, who farms sheep on a couple of thousand acres in Kent said of the CAP: 'There can hardly be any other system which so comprehensively undermines the Community's credentials as a free and open market.' I wish he would say as much in Rome (for, besides keeping his sheep and his bees, he is Montagu Norman's successor as Governor of the Bank of England) but that would be out of keeping with the seasonal spirit. Bah!
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