The taming of the Shrew
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Or Much Ado About Nothing? As the Common Market Summit ground to its close on Friday afternoon a group in the press bar discussed which title fitted the two-day drama, having first established that we knew which plays we were talking about in our respective languages. You may conceivably have known that in Italian the Shrew is La bisbetka domata. It is unlikely that you know the Finnish name. Stay around.
The essentially comical nature of the occasion was reflected by the press corps. There we sat all day, poor things, with nothing to do except read the papers, talk, buy rounds, wait for a 'briefing', the term of art which describes an inadequate and tendentious account of the proceedings given by a functionary of the Foreign Office, or the Quai d'Orsay, or whomever. Briefings (le briefing' in French) are not held in a very comm unautaire spirit: English journalists are made unwelcome at the French ones, and at one of the German briefings the door was barred by a large, wellmuscled fellow, straight out of an earlyFifties British war movie, with the words thairmens only!'
The presspersons themselves are more internationally minded, but at the same time determined to parody their national Characteristics. There are sullen, chainsmoking Frenchmen, inscrutable Japanese, fresh-faced, rangy Americans, Italians gesticulating wildly, the British morosely drunk, coming round from time to time to make clumsy advances at the Mademoiselle from Armentieres or at any rate from Paris Match.
The funniest sight of all was the hotel suite of Mr Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher's press secretary, packed with Journalists at 12:30 on Thursday night. A lesser official arrived to explain that the heads of government were still talking at Iveagh House, and wouldn't it be better if the briefing were postponed until the morning rather than sitting up waiting for Mr Illgham? Loud cries of, 'No, not while the drink's still going'; which indeed it was, in large quantities, and free in the sense of Paid for by the British taxpayer. By the following afternoon the tone was one of metaphorical rather than literal ineb riation. Mrs Thatcher's performance at her Press conference was amazing, indeed terrifying. It gave the rest of us some idea of What the unfortunate President Giscard and Herr Schmidt had been going through. The Prime minister, as Mr Callaghan is not the first Person to observe, tends to address any audience as if they were mentally defective. 'We have worked very, very, very hard . . .we are very, very anxious. .we have been selling them oil at 26 dollars a barrel. . .they're getting a thoroughly good deal.'
One doubts, in fact, whether nowadays a schoolmistress would get away with treating her ESN charges in such a relentlessly bullying way. Does she speak to Giscard as she does to reporters? 'You with the red tie and greenish sort of outfit, I'll take a question from you. No, not you again. You've had your question. Oh, all right, you can have another. Any woman can recognise sheer nagging persistence.' It was the performance of a bisbetka, all right. The question remains: has she indeed been domata? And if Mrs 'Thatcher's visit to Dublin was a failure, can it be redeemed? That depends on what expectations were entertained in advance. No-one from Brussels believes that there was ever a serious chance of the British being offered more than they were last week. Nor do Eurowatchers hold out much hope of any significant improvement. Mr Callaghan complains — he would, wouldn't he? — that Mrs Thatcher might have done better had she adopted a more emollient tone in Dublin. The truth is that Mr Callaghan and Mr (as he then was) Wilson would have met with the same failure, but would have cheerfully Pretended that they had re-negotiated the terms (remember the phrase?) And the deeper truth is that the latest developments have only shown up the problems and liabilities which membership of the EEC involved for the United Kingdom from the start. We know that the Community is designed for the convenience of German industry and of French agriculture, though, as Mr Ferdinand Mount has more than once lucidly explained in these pages, the quid pro quo is subtler than that: France has an important industrial sector, and West Germany has plenty of inefficient peasant farmers.
We know that other countries have achieved various forms of gratification from Community membership: straightforward economic gratification, via the CAP, in the case of Denmark and even more spectacularly in the case of Ireland; more obscure gratification in the case of Italy. Italy's enthusiasm for the EEC can best be compared to an uncouth and impoverished cousin of a grand family who manages to get himself elected to a St James's Street club. The thrill of respectability outweighs the fact that he can't really afford it. (And it is disturbing when even Italy finds one other member, the UK, so outlandish that he shuns his company.) The country in Europe which was and is uniquely ill-suited for the present arrange ments of the EEC is Great Britain: Great Britain with her small but efficient agricultural sector, with her historic dependence on cheap imported food, with her obsoles cent industrial sector. The problem of relative impoverishment and large net pay ments was always inherent in British membership. To say this is not to make a partisan point. Still less is it to use the benefit of hindsight. As Mr Stephen Fay has pointed out in the Sunday Times (25 November), the fact that the Common Market was organised so as to penalise the United Kingdom was clearly set out ten years ago — not in anti-European polemics but in every White Paper published on the subject.
What is more, natural developments, as opposed to any dramatic, willed change of course, are likely to exacerbate British alienation from the EEC. The recent proposals of the Commission would only restrain the growth of the CAP budget, not diminish it. The small farmers of Greece, and later of the Iberian peninsula, will no doubt accept their CAP bounty with the rest. At the same time, the two British bonuses — very undeserved bonuses in the view of the French and the Germans —of oil and fish may well sour relations with Europe rather than sweeten them. If no further concessions are made by our partners there will be a very strong temptation to sell North Sea oil to the highest bidder, rather than on favourable terms to the Eight, and to adopt a protectionist fisheries policy. It is a gloomy prospect, at any rate for those who believe that our only salvation lies in Europe. It is difficult to conceal a certain Schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the Eurofanatics. We have at last come face to face with reality, with the fact that a British economy in secular decline is being squeezed to support the trad itional peasant culture of central and southern Europe (which ought to appeal more to Peter Simple that to Mr Peter Jenkins). The only hope is not charity, as they see it, from our partners, but the regeneration of British industry. And if you believe that.. . What we will discover in February is not whether the Eight are prepared to make any further concessions: that question has been answered. It is how far the prime minister is prepared to go by way of reprisal. She can do more damage to the Community by Gaullist noncooperation from inside than by withdrawal. The one safe prediction is that in Rome we shall witness once more 'a Thatcher moved is like a fountain troubled'. From the play, that is, which the Finnish call Miten A kapussi Kesytetaan.
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