LIES, DAMNED LIES AND FEDERASTS
Euro-sceptics are not the real splitters in the Conservative Party
IN THE fable, the little boy who cried `wolf ended up being eaten by one. Fables are simple things, with simple endings; politics is more complicated. Last week, Mr Douglas Hurd told the Foreign Press Association that he really was getting rather tired of those `few' in the Conserva- tive Party who were crying wolf over Europe: 'There is a limit to the audience for this kind of thing. After a time people turn against daily unconvincing efforts to make their flesh creep. That limit had now been reached. The bubble has burst.'
The Foreign Secretary's words were well received by the media and the Conserva- tive Party; together with Mr Major's speech in Wales on the following day, they seemed to offer a firm assurance that Europe was a wolf-free zone. The Party sighed with relief, and felt glad that it had such wise and far-seeing shepherds to guard it. Then, just three days later, Mr Hurd was sitting minding his own (and our) business in Luxembourg when something large and distinctly vulpine landed on his desk. It was a draft treaty from the presidency of the EEC's Council of Minis- ters, the Luxembourg government, declar- ing that Europe must commit itself to a `federal destiny'. On reading this paper, Mr Hurd's flesh seems to have crept a little after all.
To be fair, the Foreign Secretary has been less inconsistent than this sequence of events might seem to imply. The warnings which he said he was tired of hearing were not claims that a federalist threat existed in Europe; they were warnings that he was going to give in to that threat. He made the same point when cross-examined by the Foreign Affairs Committee in Parliament last week: 'A lot of people', he said, 'have taken a lot of time warning us against committing sins that we have no mind to commit at all'.
So that is clear, then. The Bruges Group and their sympathisers (a `few' or 'a lot of people' — take your pick) have been advising the Government not to do things which it is not going to do anyway. The advice they give is not contrary to govern- ment policy; its only fault is that it is superfluous. Monday's contretemps in Lux- embourg gave proof that this is so. Yet in that case why has the Government devoted so much energy over the last two months to `marginalising' the Bruges Group and silencing those who agree with it? When Sir Geoffrey Howe said that he must be the first minister to have resigned because he supported government policy, he was jok- ing. (`No,' said Mr Ridley later, without joking, 'I was the first minister to do that'). But is the Bruges Group the first outside body to be attacked by the Government for supporting government policy? The Group itself has been leaned on heavily by the Tory party managers, and ministers have been banned from addressing its meetings. Inside Parliament, the 'Friends of Bruges' (a completely separate grouping, consist- ing of anti-federalist Tory MPs) has been subjected to a campaign of attrition by the Whips, and its organiser, Mr William Cash, has been heckled at a meeting of the backbench European affairs committee which he chairs.
The obvious answer is that all this has little to do with policy on Europe, and a lot to do with fears of party divisions as a general election approaches. But in order to talk sensibly about 'Tory splits' one has to be able to indicate who is really doing the splitting. 'Right-wing Tory rebels on Europe' has become a stock phrase in the news reports: but against what, exactly, have they rebelled so far? Mrs Thatcher has publicly thanked Messrs Major and Hurd for resisting federalism. Mr Ridley has made a speech against monetary union, in which the most combative passages were all quotations from Mr Major. And Mr Cash has gathered votes for an early-day motion in the Commons supporting gov- ernment policy on Europe: for this he was subjected to a whispering campaign, which claimed (falsely) that he had lied about having government approval for his mo- tion.
Of course there is a strong element of game-playing about what Messrs Ridley, Cash and others have been doing. But their opponents in this game are not the Gov- ernment as such, but those on the other wing of the party who want government policy to become more pro-federalist. And those opponents have a similar game of their own: while Mr Cash hunts through the Government's record for policy state- ments he can quote for his purposes, Mr Hugh Dykes and his friends are combing the Government's record for things that look like 'commitments' to further trans- fers of power to Brussels. The Euro- enthusiasts are particularly fond of the Single European Act: according to Mr Chris Patten, for example, 'we are already committed to economic and monetary un- ion under the preamble to the Single European Act'.
Now, both sides of this argument are entitled to play these games; but the first rule of all such games is that you have to get your quotations and your facts right. The preamble to the Single European Act does not 'commit' Britain to anything; it merely reports (in one of those sentences beginning 'Whereas . . .') that the EEC heads of government 'approved the objec- tive of the progressive realisation of econo- mic and monetary union' at a conference in 1972. That is not a treaty commitment: it is a historical statement in a preamble. And in general it is hard to find commitments to any big changes in Britain's status in Europe among the legal documents the Government has signed, or even among the policy statements it has issued. The pro-federalist wing of the Tory party is less successful at playing its game, because on many points the policies it favours have actually been rejected by the Government. Who are the Tory rebels? If being a rebel means rebelling against stated positions of government policy, then the leading rebels in the Tory party are Mr Hugh Dykes, Mr Edward Heath and Sir Christopher Prout, the leader of the Tory MEPs. The Govern- ment is against Stage Three of the Delors report: they are for it. The Government is against the 'social charter': they are for it. The Government is against a 'federal' constitution for Europe: but when Sir Christopher applied for Tory MEPs to join the Christian Democrats' group in April, he wrote that his members fully supported `the institutional development of the Com- munity into a European Union of a federal type'. Mr Heath talks about federalism as if it were both inevitable and desirable. Since he assured Parliament in 1970 that `there will not be a blueprint for a federal Europe', and assured the country in 1971 that 'there is no question of eroding any national sovereignty', we can at least say that he is an expert on the subject of telling lies about Europe.
And why are these people never de- scribed as rebelling against the policies of the Government? It may have something to do with the fact that Mr Chris Patten (who forwarded Sir Christopher Prout's letter to the Christian Democrats with an approving covering note) is chairman of the Party. Perhaps Mr Patten, like Milton, is of the Devil's party without knowing it — though one hesitates to accuse Mr Patten, of all people, of sinning through ignorance. The determination of the media to stick to their `right-wing rebels on Europe' line is also breathtaking in its way. Reporting Mr Heath's venomous attack on Mrs Thatcher on Wednesday morning, the To- day programme said: `Mrs Thatcher has done it again . . . but at least Mr Heath has drawn the sting'.
The real problem, however, is a much wider ignorance in this country of the nature of the European debate in the rest of the EEC. For this ignorance, at least, those on the Brugeist wing of the Tory party are partly to blame. There has been a tendency to lump together all new propos- als for ways of achieving closer European `union' as part of the same federalist plot; in this way the very word 'federalist' has become distorted and devalued. Forget about the quaint complaints of the Euro- enthusiasts on this point, who tell us that federalism means decentralisation. (Yes, it would mean that if we were starting from a centralised European state — but we aren't so it doesn't.) Federalism means any en- trenched two-tier system in which the upper tier (the central, federal authority) has the characteristics of a real government — executive and legislative — and has its own sphere of competence, usually cover- ing more important matters than the ones left to the regional governments of the second tier. The present EEC structure is not a proper federal system: M. Delors and his merry men are not a real executive, the Strasbourg assembly is not a real legisla- ture, and the most important decisions are taken by meetings of representatives of national governments. And so the big divide in Europe is between those who want the EEC to change its nature and become a federal state, and those who want to extend the present system without changing its nature.
The extenders — or, to coin another piece of jargon, the -co-operationists may put forward all sorts of ideas for more majority voting, wider spheres of compe- tence, and so on, and they may earn the wrath of the Brugeists in the process; but that is as nothing to the wrath of the federalists which falls in torrents on their heads. Unless you have spent a day or two in the company of federalists (as I was privileged to do, two weeks ago, at a conference organised by Mr Hugh Dykes and the European Movement), you can hardly imagine the depth of feeling on this subject. 'We don't want any co-operation of states', cried Herr Poettering, a German MEP, at the European Movement's con- ference, 'we want the integration of Europe!' Sometimes, this seems as genteel a debate as that between Trotskyists and Comintern loyalists during the Spanish civil war.
Top of the hate-list for the federalist movement is the draft treaty prepared by the Luxembourg Presidency of the EEC. The first version of this paper has been described as 'dangerous and worrying' in the pages of the New Federalist, because although it extends majority voting and increases EEC competence, it keeps the European Council (the meeting of heads of national governments) as the final decision-making body. All that happened this week was that in order to throw a sop to its federalist critics, the Luxembourg government added a few phrases about a federal 'destiny' to the preamble. Although paraded through the pages of the British newspapers as a federalist docu- ment, this draft treaty is nothing of the sort. It is a co-operationist document; and although there are many bits of it that Mr Hurd still disagrees with, he is happy to argue his way up and down it, and if necessary veto parts of it, because it is essentially on his side of the big divide. And so too, for that matter, is the Brugeist position, which is really just a noisily cautious version of co-operationism.
And what is there on the other side of the divide? As it happens, there is a document almost as long and detailed as the Luxembourg draft treaty. It is entitled `Pour une Constitution fdderale de l'Union europeenne': it proposes creating a real European government (with the Commis- sion as a real executive) and a bicameral parliament with real legislative powers, in which the Council of national ministers would be reduced to the status of an upper house. And who produced this document? It was the leaders of the Christian Demo- cratic governments and parties (those friends of Mr Major's friend Chris) at their meeting in Dublin last November. The Euro-fight at the IGCs still has six months to go, and Mr Major has every chance of winning most of the important issues on points. But he will never be able to fight properly until he works out who his real friends are.
'Hugo's always been an assertive parker.'
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