Common Market (1)
Brussels wants our oil
Douglas Jay, MP
How many people in this country realise that the Common Market Commission, having successfully riveted on the UK a highly damaging food and agricultural policy, is now attempting to force on us even more dangerous oil proposals? So secretive and involved are the Brussels methods of 'legislation' that the British Parliament (which debated these far-reaching proposals all too briefly earlier this month) cannot at all easily even keep track of what is going forward.
Britain's economic, and therefore political and military future now largely depend on North Sea and Celtic Sea oil; and on the earliest, most economic and most skilful use of it. Every fresh piece of evidence suggests that the reserves in the British zone are even larger than was previously thought. Norway, who has unfettered control of her own large reserves because she declined to join the EEC, is already transforming her economic fortunes as a result. Her balance of payments is strong; her currency has been twice valued upward in twelve months; and she is one of the few western countries now free of the fear of unemployment.
Yet at this moment the Brussels Commission comes forward with not very cleverly designed proposals for getting its hands on Britain's North Sea oil. It proposes (in a document called Towards a New Energy Policy Strategy for the European Community' to be considered by the Council of Ministers before Christmas) what it calls "a Community agency .having a legal personality and financial autonomy," which "would be under the control of the Commission" — not even, be it noted, the Council of Ministers. On this Eric Varley, our own Energy Secretary, comments in the bureaucratic language of an 'explanatory memorandum' that the Commission's proposals have "policy implications regarding UK sovereignty over its indigenous energy resources." Coal of course would come within the jurisdiction of the 'agency' as well as oil.
The House of Lords Scrutiny Committee which, like its Commons counterpart, wrestles with the impossible task of vetting Common Market 'legislation,' is more candid. It says: 'The question of UK sovereignty over its indigenous resources" is "one of paramount importance, not least when the immediate and potential resources of coal, oil and natural gas in and around the UK exceed most, if not all, of those of the other member states. Although Community membership must involve some sharing of burdens and advantages, the House will need to consider whether the UK should, without the fullest, most explicit and acceptable guarantees, concede any of its indigenous energy resources to any sort of Community agency." .Those are the words of their Lordships, not of any partisan anti-Marketeer; and they are of course wholly justified.
But the Commission has gone further than this — working as usual in the murky Brussels twilight. It has launched three draft pieces of legislation which, if not resisted by a British Minister at this week's Brussels Council meeting, would soon be treated by our courts as binding law and would seriously damage future British energy policy and supplies. The first of these would transfer from the British government to the proposed 'agency' the power to control the supply of natural gas to power stations. Blandly the Energy Secretary comments on this: "It is not possible to say whether it will affect the policy which would be considered appropriate to UK circumstances." So the Brussels officials are trying to get approval by the Council of Ministers for this 'legislation' before the British government is able to say whether its effect 'would be damaging to Britain or not. The next directive would transfer out of British control the decision on what sort of new power stations or reconstructed stations could be built if they used petroleum products. On this the Minister again comments that, "it is not possible to say whether [this proposal] will affect the policy which would be considered appropriate to UK circumstances."
The final proposals would bring imports and exports of oil and the regulation of fuel stocks at power stations under Brussels control. "The implications of these proposals for our own control of supplies of hydrocarbons" (says the Minister in inimitable prose) "would appear to be far-reaching and certainly require considerable further examination." (One day, I suppose an unobtrusive memorandum will emerge from the Cabinet Office saying: "The proposal to discontinue the monarchy and the British Parliament would appear to be far-reaching and certainly require considerable further examination.") How grotesquely different is all this from the promises of Mr Heath's notorious 1971 EEC White Paper that "there is no question of erosion of essential national sovereignty." Yet, in the case of oil and coal, while Norway is free to prosper and is prospering, we have already reached the situation where authority over our future oil and coal resources hangs on an uncertain compromise decision, taken in obscurity in Brussels probably before Christmas, and only debated previously for one and a half hours at a late hour by the British Parliament on the basis of documents in some cases not available until a few hours beforehand.
Britain is now running a total current balance of payments deficit of something like £4,000 million a year and piling up new overseas debt at an even greater rate. With interest rates at 10 per cent or more, we are mortgaging our future balance of payments at what seems to. me an extravagant rate, even if we had the unfettered right to use our oil reserves from 1980 onwards wholly for the benefit of the UK economy.
Yet at the same time we are in danger of letting our control over the future use of these reserves slip out of our hands into an overseas official 'agency,' about which the British public. knows virtually nothing, except that it will be outside even the ultimate control of the British Government and Parliament.
There is, of course, no dispute that a concerted international oil policy agreed by the oil-consuming countries, such as the United States has proposed and the French characteristically obstructed, is highly desirable. It could perfectly well be supervised, probably through the OECD which, unlike the EEC, has the appropriate membership, as an international project from which any country could in the last resort withdraw.
But what the EEC Commission proposes is sharply different. It proposes the progressive, and designedly irrevocable, transfer of indigenous natural energy resources out of the • hands of the people of the countries concerned. Like the Common Agricultural Policy, this would be uniquely damaging to Britain, because our coal and oil reserves in the 1980s will be proportionately far greater than those of any other Common Market country. We are already being repeatedly told by Fred Peart that though the CAP is clearly harmful to this country, he cannot help it because he is bound by treaty. It is remarkable how one major proposal of the Brussels Commission after another turns out to be uniquely damaging to this country.
If the present Government assents to anything like the EEC's present energY proposals, we shall as a nation prejudice in advance our most solid hope of sustained economic recovery after 1980.
Douglas Jay is Labour MP for Wandsworth, Battersea North
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