POLITICS
Who will catch the ricochets in the Ridley shoot-out?
NOEL MALCOLM
Iforget the name of the war reporter who, sent to cover an outbreak of hostili- ties in a sleepy Central American country, cabled back, 'No war, please instruct,' and received the reply from his editor, 'We supply war, you supply report.' But I think I know how he felt.
The outbreak of hostilities which Mr Ridley sparked off in these pages is not over yet; but (as with some Central Amer- ican wars, perhaps) it is curiously hard to say who is really shooting at whom. The first victory was claimed by the pro- federalist wing of the Tory Party, which saw Mr Ridley's forced resignation from the Government as a public recantation of anti-Europeanism and all its works. Tired of being told over the last year or two that they were a dwindling minority, the feder- alists were agreeably suprised by the speed with which last Thursday's meeting of the 1922 Committee (the gathering of Con- servative backbenchers) disposed of Mr Ridley, with hardly a voice raised in his defence. They were further comforted by the thought that the Cabinet would be- come more 'pro-European' in Mr Ridley's absence. And they rejoiced in the know- ledge that in future any arguments raised in defence of 'sovereignty' could quickly be tarred with the brush of xenophobia, blim- pishness, living in the past, etc, etc.
The trouble with all these lines of argu- ment is that Mr Ridley was not shooting at federalism in the first place. He has always been, and continues to be, in his own jocular phrase, a :federast'; his enthu- siasm, indeed, for the idea of a single market in Europe is said to have been one of the main influences which persuaded Mrs Thatcher to acquiesce in the Single European Act. The other federasts in the Tory Party are talking now as if he had been a sort of Teddy Taylor figure in the Cabinet, an unreconstructed anti- Marketeer clinging to sovereignty at all costs. It is as if they had never set eyes on the key sentence of his interview last week: 'I'm not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot.'
As for that meeting of-the 1922 Commit- tee, it would be misleading to call it a triumph for federalism. The issues raised in Mr Ridley's interview were hardly discus- sed at all; the only real object of concern was the amount of damage which his continued presence in the Government might do to the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in their Euro- pean negotiations. First there was a senten- tious attack on him by Mr Patrick Cor- mack; then a defence by Sir John Stokes; then a briefer and more witty attack by Sir Philip Goodhart; and finally a suggestion, quickly approved, that the views of MPs should be canvassed by their area whips.
And it is not surprising that the whips, who have a natural preference for a quiet life, should have decided not to prolong Mr Ridley's — and their — agony.
Meanwhile, on the opposite wing of the Conservative Party, the anti-Marketeers have also been claiming a victory — though one which may only become apparent in retrospect. 'In years to come, there'll be a Ridley-Lawson statue outside Parliament,' one told me, improbably enough. The feeling here is that the interview with Mr Ridley has started the process, long over- due, of alerting the population of this country to the real nature of the European institutions which are gaining control over their lives. During the last six months the anti-Marketeers have felt more and more distrustful of Mrs Thatcher's charm offen- sive on Europe, suspecting that Messrs Hurd and Major were gradually edging her and the party down the road to European integration. Though supporting Mr Ma- jor's 'hard ecu' in public, some of them have privately regarded it as a half-way house which would not keep us for long from completing the whole journey. And then, just as everyone was settling down to the inevitability of such tendentious com- promise, along came Mr Ridley to remind them that nothing need be inevitable.
So while the federalists believe that this whole episode has weakened the Brugeism of the Party, the anti-Marketeers hope it will have weakened the creeping federal- ism of the Government; and the whips fear that it has weakened both the Government in the short term and the party (by exacer- bating its divisions) in the long term. But none of these analyses entirely captures the truth — which runs, I believe, roughly as follows. The Government has indeed been damaged for the near future, but this wound will heal. The federalists have been given a rhetorical advantage — the ability to dismiss all their opponents now as 'xenophobes' — but this too will prove short-lived, as the real arguments come to the surface again. Most importantly of all, the unexpected calm and consensus achieved in the last few months between party and government on Europe has been shaken, yet not quite in the way that the anti-Marketeers suppose. For the position on which both Government and a majority of Tory MPs had settled is not one of creeping federalism; it is one of a Brugeism strong on principles but weak on strategy. The principles have not been damaged by the 'Ridley affair', but the weakness of the strategy has been more clearly exposed.
The principles were stated clearly enough in an Early Day Motion penned by William Cash (the chairman of the Tory backbench committee on European Affairs) after the Dublin summit in April:
This house congratulates the Prime Minister . . . [for] insisting on a European Commun- ity through willing co-operation between independent sovereign states, with the prim- ary democratic role reserved to national parliaments (including the allocation of taxa- tion and public expenditure) . . . [and] re- jecting federalism.
That motion was signed by no fewer than 143 MPs. Given that ministers and their PPSs do not sign such motions, this indi- cates an overall majority of the party in favour of Brugeist principles.
The Government shares these princi- ples: it is against Stage Three of the Delors Plan, which would take fiscal and budget- ary powers away from national govern- ments. But with the Inter-Governmental Conference on economic and monetary union coming up, principles are not enough. The Government also needs a strategy, and the one it has fastened on so far is not good enough — that of fobbing off Europe with a hard ecu and spinning out the conference next year to postpone the tough decisions until after the next election. Such a plan requires either trust- ful silence or bemused indifference from the Tory Party during the run-up to the IGC; thanks to Mr Ridley, this is now much less likely to happen. The issue will now dominate the constituency garden parties this summer, and overshadow the party Conference in October. A strategy of drift and procrastination will not suffice; the Party will want to see in advance (preferably in the form of a White Paper) a clear statement of what the Government will propose and what it will refuse when it goes to the IGC in December. If Mr Ridley helps to bring that about, then his downfall will not have been in vain.
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