POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Mr Brown's European Adventure

By ALAN WATKINS E next Labour government,' wrote Mr Desmond Donnelly in the Daily Express of July 4, 1963, 'could lead Britain into the Euro-

pean Common Market.' He concluded that Mr Harold Wilson 'is preparing for the high dive into Europe.' The result of this piece of Mr Donnelly's was, one remembers, a more than usually angry meeting of the parliamentary Labour party. Mr Emanuel Shinwell, who was not then chairman of the meeting, was much exercised over the whole affair. Mr George Wigg made an irate speech chiefly about aeroplanes, of which no one present could follow a word. And those who remained silent retained their clammy suspicions.

These suspicions, we should understand, were not concerned with Mr Donnelly. He, then as

now, was regarded as being outside the pale of decent left-wing society. Rather, the suspicions were concerned with the leader himself, Mr Wilson. 'We thought he'd double-crossed us,' said a left-winger who six months previously had voted for him in the leadership contest. Needless to say, Mr Wilson had not in fact inspired Mr Donnelly's article (though there are grounds for believing that another highly placed Labour politician was not unaware of its contents). Nevertheless, Mr Wilson evidently considered the. incident serious enough to make a placatory speech explaining his position on the Market. He said something, so one recalls, about not taking a high dive until he was sure there was enough water in the pool.

From which one might infer that today, three years later, the European pool was filling up rapidly; full enough certainly for a preliminary dip, if not perhaps for a high dive. And one would base this inference not only on the speeches of Mr George Brown, Mr Michael Stewart and Mr George Thomson earlier this week, but also on the recent activities of Mr Brown's own Department of Economic Affairs. For even in the months before the election, even before Mr Wilson had given his promise to appoint a Minister for Europe, the DEA had been busily looking into the Common Market question.

This was not entirely surprising. For one thing, the Department had for some time been worried about the decline in our trade with Europe. As the DEA progress report for April IN°. 15) puts it : 'In 1963 our exports to the EEC rose by 14 per cent. In 1964 the rise wads only 3 per cent, and it came down to under 1 per cent last year.' And, for another thing, the structure of the Department was convenient. It possessed a division concerned with economic co- ordination oyerseas under the direction of Mr W. A. Nield. (Mr' Nield has now left the DEA for the Cabinet Office, where he will be dealing with Rhodesia. He will be succeeded by Mr Derek Mitchell, who has not yet taken up his post. Meanwhile, the overseas divisions is being looked after by Mr Douglas Allen.) More im- portant than the formal structure and responsi- bilities of the Department, however, are the per- sonalities of its two leading members, Sir Eric Roll, the Permanent Secretary, and Mr Brown.

Sir Eric, it may be remembered, was the civil servant who, metaphorically at any rate, sat at Mr Edward Heath's right hand during those endless Brussels negotiations four years ago. Though the official leader of the British dele- gation was Sir Pierson Dixon, it was Sir Eric who understood about tariffs and kangaroo meat and similar arcane matters. And Sir Eric, it seems, has never ceased to look back wistfully to those adventurous days. He would like nothing better, so one is told, than to recapture them, this time, possibly, in an even more exalted post —not as a mere civil servant, but as a full- scale Minister for Europe. (But perhaps this latter suggestion is one of those civil service jokes which should not be taken too seriously.) At all events, Sir Eric remains a dedicated European who has for some time been pushing his depart- ment in that direction.

Not that Mr Brown needed pushing very forcibly. True, he is a man of sudden and intense enthusiasms, rather like Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows. It might be said that, just as Mr Toad changed his passion for caravanning to one for motoring, so Mr Brown has changed his passion for the prices and incomes policy to one for the Common Market. To say this, however, would be unfair to Mr Brown, even though it contains an element of truth. There is no one in the Government with a braver and more con- sistent record on the Market. He has always maintained that some day we would have to go in. The result is that the lights now burn late at the DEA. One hears harrowing stories of civil servants who are engaged on Europe working until eleven at night. And matters have now reached the stage when, following a good deal of preparatory work. talks are being conducted with foreign officials.

But move across to the Foreign Office and you are presented with a slightly different picture. Nothing, you are told, has been settled yet. It depends on the General. It is 'all in the air.' It is 'a long way off.' Foreign Office officials are even prepared to concede that Mr Stewart made an error of judgment—strong words, indeed, in civil service patois—in reading too great a degree of friendliness into M Couve de Murville's recent speech at the Western European Union meeting. This is not to say, of course, that there is any disagreement between Mr Brown and Mr Thom- son, who is in charge of the Foreign Office side of the European talks. As far as one knows, the two men get on perfectly amicably. Still, one is conscious of the repetition of a familiar pattern. The Department of Economic Affairs is full of ideas, not all of them good, and energy, not all d it well directed; while the older-established department looks on sceptically. In the past it has been the Treasury which has been sceptical of the DEA. Now it looks as if the Foreign Office is joining in.

However, I am not anxious to describe the Common Market situation exclusively in depart-

mental terms. There is a regrettable current ten- dency to attribute to civil servants power which they do not possess, thereby making them appear more glamorous and at the same time more sinister than they really are. The attitude of Mr Wilson, for instance, is of rather more impor- tance than that of the Foreign Office. The general impression is that in his heart he is no more enthusiastic about the Market than he ever was.

On the other hand, he believes there is no harm in seeing which way the wind is blowing. For this purpose he has cast into the atmosphere two trial balloons in the shape of Mr Thomson and Mr Brown. If they are somehow blown into Europe, taking the rest of us with them, well and good. If not, no great harm will have been done. Mr Wilson, in other words, is waiting for events to make his decision for him. In the meantime he has other matters to engage his attention. His approach—for which, oddly perhaps, there may be something to be said—could hardly be more different from Mr Brown's.

Mr Wilson's approach is also very different from that of the Labour MPs who oppose entry to the market except on the most extravagant terms or indeed on any terms whatever. Little has been heard of these Members lately, just as little has been heard of the Market enthusiasts. The silence of the pro-Market group is understandable enough, as they are now receiving from the Government all they could reasonably have hoped for, and perhaps a little more. The silence of the anti-Marketeers is not quite so easily ex- plained. Partly they have been quiet because of their preoccupations with Vietnam and the early- warning legislation; partly because Europe re- emerged as a topic only during the election campaign.

It would be a great mistake, however, to assume—as some ministers and some newspapers have assumed—that the Common Market is dead as a subject for controversy inside the Labour party. Maybe the Conservatives are united on the Market (they are certainly more united than they were in 1961-63), but the Labour party is rather different. One young Labour MP of the 1964 intake recently told me that entry to the Common Market would be the sole question on which he would be prepared to vote against his party. Nor should it be thought that the intake of 1966 will necessarily be any more accommo- dating. As a broad proposition it is no doubt true that younger politicians tend to be more in favour of entry to Europe than their elders: but in the Labour party at least there are exceptions to this in sufficient number to make life uncom- fortable for Mr Wilson.

At the moment, admittedly, the impression Mr Wilson gives is that he is perfectly ready to take on the entire Parliamentary Labour party single- handed, whether over the Market or over any- thing else. And no doubt he could carry the Cabinet with him, despite its current quota of anti-Marketeers such as Mr Richard Crossman, Mrs Barbara Castle, Mr Douglas Jay and Mr Fred Peart. At the same time he has in his usual fashion kept himself in what Lord Montgomery would call a position of balance. He can move forwards or backwards or sideways, as the occa- sion may demand; and Mr Brown may yet find hinitelf bravely sounding the advance into Europe when everyone else has long ago retreated.