Last week M. Giscard d'Estaing and Herr Schmidt completed their
first summit meeting as heads of their respective governments; this week Mr Callaghan has presented, for the first time in some detail, the British case for renegotiation of this country's membership of the Common Market. The French President and the German Chancellor had little to say in their post-conference communiqué about their reaction to Britain's current initiative: they merely expressed the hope that neither this country nor Italy — whose government has, in defiance of EEC regulations, imposed import duties — would stray any further than they have already done outside the framework of EEC rules. At the same time Mr Callaghan has benignly expressed the hope that Britain will find it possible to stay within the community; and inspired pro-Market and Foreign Office briefings have indicated a belief that those members of the Cabinet hostile to our present European entanglement have lost ground. A great deal of all this toing and froing is kerfuffle, and ought to be recognised as such.
Mr Callaghan is accused of wounding the delicate susceptibilities of our European partners by a blunt speech at Luxembourg immediately after he became Foreign Secretary: hands were held up in horror at his effrontery. Yet he never used foul language, nor offered physical violence to a fellow minister, and both of these things happened more than once in ministerial councils in the days of the Six. The impudent M. Giscard urges Britain and Italy to obey not merely the principles of the two treaties (that of Rome and that of Accession) but Market regulations as well, not many months after he shattered those regulations by — as M. Pompidou's Finance Minister — floating the franc. It may be possible so to change the nature of the EEC as to make it possible for Britain to remain within the organisation; or it may be that we will have to withdraw. The road to making either decision will depend less on the niceties of European diplomatic finagling than on the answers to certain questions of principle, and an assessment of Mr Callaghan's real character and purpose.
For Britain to remain within the Community these changes will be required: our contribution to the Community budget must be massively reduced, on a continuing and not merely a temporary basis; the Common Agricultural Policy must be thoroughly re-shaped, and the re-shaping must allow a British government the option of a return to the agricultural financing system of guaranteed prices; our domestic market must be open again to the products of the world and the Commonwealth in particular; and Britain must have unfettered control over her own economy. There is no reason at all why the acceptance of such conditions should altogether destroy the economic alliance of the European states, though it will also be absolutely essential (in snme ways this is the most important condition of all) that the House of Commons has the Power to scrutinise and reject all regulations enterging from the Brussels Commission before these are implemented, and this would, of Course, reduce the Commission to what it Ought to be — an assembly of clerks, rather than a policy-making body. Certainly, the sPectre which the pro-Europeans raise, of a Britain isolated by intransigence from the European mainland, has no foundation in reality: our trade with Europe was already increasing rapidly before we joined the EEC, and our largest new export markets lie not in Europe but in Latin America, as Mr Peter Walker has told us. Further, there is no reason Why the European powers should not Vhchronise their economic policies as and When it seems in their interests to do so, and a reduced Commission — called perhaps a secretariat — could be fairly useful in helping them to do so. The important point is that the Political and economic harmonisation of European countries should be prevented from becoming organic or continuing, and any re negotiation worthy of the name will ensure the riequired emasculation of the aspirations of M. 'ean Monnet.
Ihe curious and whimsical thing is that all this can be done without actually changing the Wording of the Treaty of Rome: as Mr Callaghan pointed out during the election ctnrhpaign, that Treaty enjoins each country to ake whatever measures are necessary to Procure domestic economic stability: if such ii.heasures destroy the fabric of the Treaty, so it. Of course, argument like this is mere pnrnes playing, and it just happens that the ,reign Secretary is adept at such games. In 'act Mr Callaghan, far from being the boor taho haunts the nightmares of the European naties, is a British Foreign Secretary most reminiscent of the great Palmerston, in his nibination of bluffness and ambiguity. There was a particularly entertaining moment ,Larling his last and private get-together with t`Lue other European Foreign Ministers when j!eY severally pressed him not to abandon the 'ogh ideal of European unity: he asked each °he in turn what they meant by the phrase, and got eight different answers.) Ithe truth of the matter is that the whole ur 0 Pea n idea, which has sustained so many aYdreams in the past, is now exposed for the tintellectual farrago that it has always been: ,!'ere is, indeed, no intellectually respectable Se for being a Marketeer any longer. Mr 'allaghan understands all this, and undersota, rlds too, that the pro-Market case is the case tt. children frightened to go out alone in the ark. (It is remarkable how often nowadays rio:Marketeers who are opposed to re-negotation express their case in terms of fear — bear of what would happen if we lost our aropean leading strings, fear of being alone, t,a,r of anything which might require us to t,"Ink and act for ourselves.) To all this the reign Secretary is a robust antidote, but trre remains the element of his ambiguity. In "e coming months such sterling patriots as Mr Shore and Mr Foot and Mr Peart — not to mention the gifted band of Tory anti-Marketeers — will have to follow every move made in the re-negotiation game with close attention, and sustain Mr Callaghan should he be tempted to falter. It is a good task and a worthy task, and it can be taken in all the better heart because the end of the European tunnel is in sight. It is this prospect which will console those of us who have stood against the EEC from the beginning, against all the pressures and the vilification, against the censorship of radio, television and the press — more often than not, alas, acting under the conscious influence of government and party whips — and against the maddened hysteria of the European ideologues. We stood by our guns when we were told — by the then Prime Minister and the then Minister for Europe, no less — that re-negotiation was impossible, and have lived to see them eat their words and say that it is the kind of re-negotiation that takes place that matters. We will yet live to see them accept the consequences of re-negotiation, for victory is now within our grasp.
Let Laker have it
The Spectator has consistently argued that the Concorde project was a mistaken one, and that the endless outpourings of public money on an airframe project that could not command the purchasing loyalty of international customers — albeit that it sustained the advanced level of British higher aircraft technology and gave employment in the Bristol area — could not be justified. We have commended the physical beauty of the final product and acknowledged the quality of the work that has gone into it; but we have concluded — as most of our contemporaries have concluded — that nobody would buy the thing, and that all the money spent on it would in retrospect appear another wasted faggot thrown on the top of a burning heap of inflationary public expenditure.
But an entirely new factor enters the equation with the announcement that Mr Freddie Laker of Laker Airways is willing to take the entire Concorde consignment planned to go to British Airways — and make a profit on its use. Mr Laker has kept his company commercially afloat and profitable through thick and thin — against the determination of Labour governments to close their minds to anything but a public sector in air transport as much as against the cowardly unwillingness of Conservative governments to do anything which might damage the self-satisfied, unsatisfactory and unprofitable monopoly of BOAC, BEA and BA. A Laker Airways take-over of Concorde might well undercut the entire first-class travel market of British Airways, and thus demonstrate the superiority of private to public enterprise: it would be a litmus paper test in the contest between capitalism and state socialism. We can well understand that the bureaucrats of the state airlines would be unwilling to undertake such a contest. For such diehard socialists as Mr Benn — the minister in charge — the problem is, of course, more difficult, in that Mr Laker may well be the last hope of aero-technical employment for his constituents. It will be clear to the rest of us that, if the present government does not pass to Mr Laker the ball he is only too willing to receive, socialism will again have skulked away from competition; and the unemployed electorate can draw their own conclusions as to its consequences.
