POLITICS
It has taken £600 million of Mr Lee Kun-hee's money to answer Norman Lamont's question
BORIS JOHNSON
Mark those words. Roll them about in your mind. Granted, we all know about Norman (the official ministerial 'line to take' at Bournemouth was 'poor Norman'), denigrated by ex-colleagues as a louche, ris- ible, embittered human badger. And yet I recommend that you read his thoughtful speech, not just reports of it. As one instinctively in favour of causing mayhem within the EC, not pulling out, I found the logic at least challenging: the continental agenda is federalist; the net benefits are minimal; we should contemplate the wide blue yonder. Several MPs I met pooh- poohed Lamountebank, but admitted the force of his case.
What a relief, then, it was for them when, from the other side of the globe, Michael Heseltine played what has become a trump. With the announcement of Samsung's investment in Teesside, the pro-Euros had the makings of a rebuttal. The South Kore- ans, about whom the British know nothing except that they eat dogs and a kind of sour cabbage called kimchi, are to spend £600 mil- lion on new factories at Wynyard Park, mak- ing personal computers, fax machines, microchips and sundry gismos. And that is to say nothing of the service industries that will sprout in the beer-sodden, derelict north- east to support the Koreans managers, the restaurants — Kentucky Fried Whippet, per- haps — and the comfort parlours. 'What it proves above all,' a jubilant Hezza was able to tell the Today programme, 'is the impor- tance of our European policy because they are coming to the UK as part of Europe, and if we were not believed to be wholeheartedly committed to the European Union, none of this investment would come to Britain.' Ah so. Or rather, Oh really? This question of inward investment is the most difficult terrain of all for the let's-get- outers. Even Lamont, in his Bournemouth speech, admitted it was one of the few strong points in the pro-Euro repertoire. Is it true, though? Is it true that if Britain is to attract these Asian screwdriver plants, it absolutely must remain a member of the EC? This column decided to investigate. Some of us may suspect that what spoke more deeply to the Korean soul was Presi- dent Heseltine's bribes of £80 million in `regional assistance' to Samsung, including, good grief, £13 million in interest-free loans. If you were offered a government subsidy worth about £26,000 for every new job you proposed to create, you might be tempted to say snap.
Still, one has to accept the possibility that those sweeteners might have been just one of the necessary conditions. No amount of subsidy would have sufficed, had Britain not been a member of the EC, if the department of trade is to be believed. It is, naturally, not to be believed. It was neces- sary to talk to the Koreans.
I tried to raise Seoul, but, under the visionary management of 42-year-old chair- man Lee Kun-hee, everybody at Samsung HQ had knocked off by 4 p.m. Seoul time, presumably to go and practise their putting. I did, however, manage to catch Mr Chan Bae, managing director of Samsung UK, and I asked how they would feel about Teesside if Britain were not a member of the Community. It may be, gentle reader, that he had already received a full briefing on this point from Board of Trade officials, complete with 'line to take'. But it would be deceiving you to pretend he was helpful to the get-outers' cause.
`Frankly speaking, it does matter,' said Mr Bae. 'It would have a very negative impact for us . . . UK is a kind of instru- `I'll do anything except the Ring Cycle.' ment for us to become a member of the European Union,' he said, advancing the familiar 'springboard', 'beachhead', or, as the French would have it, 'Trojan Horse' justification for Asian-Pacific investment in Britain. He points out that 80 per cent of the Teesside Teasmades, etc. are bound for continental Europe.
But the arguments of Stormin" Nor- man, as we must now call him in deference to the Sun, had encompassed that objec- tion. Lamont proposed that Britain might remain a member of the European Com- munity in its free-trading aspects, simply shearing off the unattractive elements of political and monetary integration. In other words, we might opt to be a kind of nuclear Liechtenstein, in the European Economic Area, having the benefits and obligations of the Single Market (and the considerable loss of sovereignty that already implies), but without the wilder federalist excres- cences: sending MEPs to a much more powerful Euro-parliament, the single cur- rency and so on. That, surely, is a fudge around which the bulk of the Tory party, and indeed the country, might unite.
So I tried it out on Mr Bae.
What if Britain hung back a little, I asked. All the existing advantages of the location would persist, the language, the golf courses, the trained workforce, the Social Chapter opt-out, up to and including free trade with Europe. Mr Bae fully understood the question. But he didn't like the proposition one bit. 'If the UK is not part, then France and Germany will make solidarity . . . We like the UK to have polit- ical power. Without political power it is just like the paper tiger.' So there we are, then. Mr Bae was exceedingly affable and polite; but the message was clear. Britain either goes in, totus porcus, or . . . put it this way, Samsung would be more likely to have its gadgets made in Barcelona. It is hard, alas, to imagine any British company filling the gap with a comparable new investment. In the old days, Enoch Powell used to have a conspiracy theory that Britain went into the Community because the Ameri- cans wanted it, and because Britain craved American approval. Now we have to go 00 with it all because the Koreans want it, and we crave Korean investment. How fallen this country is, how changed.
Boris Johnson writes for the Daily Telegraph
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