Letter to the Daily Telegraph, published on 27th January 2016
The letter from the Conservative MPs for Reform in Europe (23rd January) implies that there is something uniquely special about UK access to a tariff-free “trading bloc of 500 million people”.
But for the UK this so-called Single market is not really tariff-free at all. In 2014 we made a net payment of £11,442 Million to the EU to allow £147,928 Million worth of our goods to be imported by the EU from Britain. This makes an average effective tariff on our goods of 7.7%.
This needs to be compared with the EU’s average tariff applied to goods imported from countries outside the EU, including our fellow Anglophone countries in North America and Australasia, of 5.3%.
There is thus nothing especially “advantageous” for Britain’s access to the EU market as the MPs’ letter puts it. If the nonsensical fears that the EU would impose tariffs on British goods entering their markets were ever realised, then our payments to them would be more than compensated by the tariffs we would impose on their exports to us.
Given the enormous £77 Billion goods trade deficit we currently have with the EU we would be nearly £6 Billion better off from this source alone, plenty of scope to reduce business taxation to compensate for any tariff payments they might have to make. But it won’t happen. The Germans, especially, are not that daft!
A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th October 1997.
Even if Vauxhall now disowns the remarks of Mustafa Mohatarem, an American citizen and employee of General Motors (report, Oct. 15) that “a lot of manufacturing jobs that are tied to sales in Europe are tied to Britain joining EMU” there is still undoubtedly an orchestrated campaign by sectors of big business to push Britain into abolishing its own currency.
The remarks underline not only the deliberate eliding of the different concepts of common market and common currency, but also bring into sharp relief the practice of foreign businessmen interfering in British politics.
One wonders if Mr Mohatarem will now be sent to Canada to tell the Canadians they must abolish their currency so that General Motors will continue to manufacture cars there for the North American Common Market, or to Mexico where GM are busy building plants.
The fact is that all the major car manufacturers, including Ford and BMW whose UK chairmen have also been giving us the benefit of their “advice”, invest globally for global markets irrespective of currencies: car engines come from Brazil to Europe, and go from Britain to the rest of the world, not just Europe.
The bosses of the car companies know this perfectly well, but neither economics nor consistency have ever been corporate businessmen’s strong suit: a year or so ago their view was that the pound would be weak compared with the euro, now they are all afraid that the pound will be too strong.
In 1990 they were virtually unanimous that Britain should join the ERM: two years later they were delighted at the fall of the pound relative to the mark when Britain left the ERM.
In 1996 Sir Michael Perry, then chairman of Unilever, was asked by the House of Lords European Committee what action Unilever would take if Britain did not join the single currency. He replied, “We operate throughout the world with governments and economic conditions which vary . . . we would not change anything we do”. Car manufacturers will continue to do exactly the same, whether Britain is in or out of EMU.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph from Mrs Gillian Bush, which was published on 18th March 1992.
We have now been presented with a budget from each of the main political parties, and there has been non-stop media comment on them.
The essential point, however has been missed. Not one of these budgets has a chance of being carried out. Whichever party or coalition of parties forms the next government, it will have to ratify, under present pledges, the Maastricht Treaties later on this year.
This will mean that the European Union, as the Common Market now calls itself, and not our Government’s budget, will decide our economic future.
The new, higher rate contributions that M Delors intends us to pay the European Union will distort all the careful calculations.
Some sort of compromise may be workd out. But the Germans, who are the largest contributors, have problems that will make them keen for others to carry the burden of higher rates. It would be close to a miracle if we do not end up doing so.
In addition, the stated intention of normalising VAT across all our presently zero-rated areas of food, gas, electricity, water, sewage treatment, children’s clothes, transport, mail and books will greatly increase indirect taxation and hit the lower paid in particular – as, of course, the artificially high European food prices do already.
This election campaign should be about the future of our country either continuing as an independent sovereign state or becoming just a region of the European Union, not about tiny changes to the tax system.
Over the weekend I heard Mr Major say twice that the Conservative campaign was about giving people choice. We have no choice at all on the one really crucial issue. He should promise us a referendum on the Maastricht Treaties before they are ratified.
An article, full title “What Price Hope and Glory as Europe’s Net Tightens”, published in The Field magazine in April 1990.
Listeners to the radio recently will have heard the vice president of the West German central bank, the Bundesbank, remark in the course of an interview about the unification of East and West Germany that ” . . . of course a country which merges its currency completely cannot remain independent politically”. Thus, in the matter-of-fact tones of someone stating an incontestable fact, did Dr Walther demolish completely the claims of those Europeanists, including some prominent members of the Conservative Party, that European monetary union would not jeopardise our status as an independent country.
Later this year, Britain will be forced to attend an ‘EC Intergovernmental Conference’ at which the principles of a new Treaty will be drawn up to bind EC countries into a monetary union – a common monetary and economic regime controlled in practice by a united Germany. If we were to acquiesce in this process, the disappearance of the Queen’s head from our currency and the substitution of a foreign currency, the Ecu, would remind us daily of the fact of our disappearance as an independent country.
The imminent approach of this Intergovernmental Conference, which the present Government has said repeatedly it does not want, is the crossroads at which we must decide if we wish to continue as an independent country or to be absorbed into a United States of Europe, governed nominally from Brussels, but in practice from Berlin. We must have the simple courage as a people to say that, despite all the chorus about ‘missing buses’ and so forth we will not travel down that road.
The public approach of committed Europeans to this crossroads follows the classic tactic adopted (by much the same people) in another decisive transformation of our national life since 1945: immigration. This tactic is to assert in the early years that the changes are small and beneficial and no threat; that to oppose them is to be a ‘Little Englander’ and xenophobic. Later, as the problems become clear to almost everyone, we are assured that they are ‘transient’. Then a decade later, we are told we must live with the problems, and more changes are proposed (or avoided) which ensure that we never solve the problem.
In 1973-’75 the British people were continually assured that the EC was essentially a free trade area or ‘Common Market’, the term by which it is still freely described in Britain, despite its single most important feature being the most highly-rigged agricultural market in the world (which is saying something).
Thus, seven years after accession to the EC (in1973), once the predictable budgetary problems were obvious, Britain was locked in battle month after month to reduce the absurdly high exaction placed on it, a battle in which the president of France, a country which received rather than paid, could haughtily describe our Prime Minister as une fille d’épicier – a grocer’s daughter.
Today, ten years on, the German government feeds the Europhile press in this country with a steady diet of remarks carefully designed to jangle the British establishment’s nerves – that if we do not enthuse over German unification, we risk staying ‘on the sidelines of history’, we shall be ‘marginalised in Europe’, our role will be ‘merely that of onlooker’ and so on, all of which sentiments are heartily endorsed it seems by Mr Edward Heath.
Europeanists frequently talk about Britain’s role, or lack of it, in Europe, of allegedly ‘missed’ opportunities of ‘leading’ Europe. Their predecessors in the soft-centre of British politics in the ’20s and ’30s would wax lyrical about Britain’s role in the League of Nations, and about the moral leadership that we should give to a waiting world.
In fact, among nations it is influence, not leadership in the personal sense, which governs relationships – and influence follows power. Today it is industrial power which counts. Britain is acceding to a wholly unequal treaty with the EC because it has been, and still is, industrially weak by comparison with its principal European competitor, Germany, and to a lesser extent, France.
The causes of Britain’s decline since its pioneering of the Industrial Revolution have been extensively debated by economists; but perhaps two aspects stand out. One is that the nadir of Britain’s industrial performance, in farming as well as in manufacturing, probably occurred in the years just before the First World War. Over the 80 years since then we have slowly improved, with some slipping back and some spectacular successes. Of course, all but a few saw Britain in 1910 as immensely powerful, but a huge trade deficit was disguised by interest on overseas investments made by earlier generations.
The second obvious fact about our weak industrial performance in the last 100 years is that it has depended entirely on ourselves. We have not been ravaged by foreign conquest; we have not been denied access to vital new materials. However, rather than give our industry, and above all manufacturing industry, the primacy it must have if we are to survive as a modern nation, each generation of political leaders this century, with few exceptions, has sought redress from our loss of influence in the quack remedies of ‘special relationships’, international conference attendance, EC membership and, recently, ‘services’.
Politics and politicians in Japan, Germany and even the USA are essentially in the entertainment category; only in Britain are they taken seriously. With an industry led mainly by accountants and lawyers we have lost industrial battle after industrial battle because we have not really fought. We have been like an army led, not by infantrymen and gunners, but by the Pay Corps and the Legal Branch with off-stage exhortation by Parliament.
Can anyone seriously believe that more of the same, this time from Europe in the shape of Mr Heseltine’s Euro-Senate pantomime, can do anything to help Britain pull itself up into the ranks of a fully-competitive industrial power? Can anyone believe that Germany, dominating the EC, would lift a finger to allow Britain to become a serious competitor? Even today West Germany, with an overwhelming balance of trade surplus (the largest single element of which, nearly £10 billion, comes from Britain), will not allow Britain a devaluation of the green pound to give our farmers the returns from the CAP which other EC farmers enjoy. This is because Germany’s net EC budget contribution would rise in consequence.
The steady fall in the real price of manufactured and agricultural products since the Industrial Revolution has dramatically improved our standard of living. Services show little, if any, productivity rise. During six years of the last war, British agriculture changed from relative backwardness to being one of the most mechanised and productive in the world – yields rose by 50 per cent, output doubled, and labour productivity rose by 90 per cent. This was brought about by a national act of will, the skill of farmers, the products of a new agricultural machinery industry (the number of tractors increased fourfold) and the application of synthetic nitrates made by our chemical industry. This achievement continued up to 1973, with productivity gains averaging 7 per cent per annum in the 12 years before that, which compares with the average for industry as a whole of about 2.5 per cent. Over the last 50 years, agriculture and chemicals, by commitment, skill and technology, have been our most successful major industries.
The same blend is urgently needed in the rest of our industry before it shrinks still further or passes into foreign hands. To revive our manfacturing industry, on which all else depends, we need above all a national commitment to making it happen. If we cease in any meaningful sense to be an independent nation, it cannot happen.
We need specific measures, such as the power to protect ourselves against foreign dumping of products – power which we have lost to the EC. Above all, we need to convince our young people that we are still in business as a nation and that it is their duty, as well as in their interest, to help us survive.
Without this commitment to our independent future our most talented people will drift away to the industrial heartlands of Germany and the USA; already German firms are actively recruiting our engineering and science graduates, while the flow to the USA continues, as any visitors to the hi-tech industries of California will find. Of course, free people have a right to move to other countries. but it is folly then to give these countries the right to fashion your economic policy and determine your currency.
A suggestion three months ago by Mr Andriessen, the Dutch EC commissioner, that we and the Danes should resume membership of an enlarged European Free Trade Association (EFTA) linked to the EC in a wider European Economic System (EES), offers us everything we could possibly want, though derided by the Foreign Office. This is clearly the way to accommodate our own deep desire to remain independent, the aspirations of the newly-independent nations of Eastern Europe, Denmark’s wish to rejoin Scandinavia, and the desire of the other ten EC countries to unite.
From this position we could trade freely with the rest of Europe and engage in sensible, non-bureaucratic, technical co-operation through the Eureka programme. We could arrange our own trade agreements with the rest of the world, reduce food bills and balance of payments deficit and exploit our unique links of language and history with the Pacific basin – centre of more than half the world’s manufacture.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 23rd March 1982.
Your leader on the Thatcher-Schmidt meeting (March 20th) is a disappointment to those who feel The Daily Telegraph generally sees the world as it really is. The majority of people in this country have always seen the EEC as basically an arrangement whereby West Germany paid her way back to respectability and France received reparations which she felt she was entitled to.
That period is now past, but Britain has been foolishly entangled by soft-centre politicians into an arrangement whereby she pays ad infinitum for the Supreme Quango in Brussels which, as is the way with quangos, has grown mightily in ambition since its setting up. Insofar as Britain and West Germany succeed in reducing their role of EEC paymasters, so the other countries, especially France, will lose interest in the enterprise.
Twenty-two years ago Britain and six other European countries which have prospered quite as much as the EEC countries since, formed a Free Trade Area (EFTA) in industrial goods. On Britain joining the EEC, EFTA was linked to it, but without, of course, taking on board the huge task of modernising Continental agriculture and the nonsense of a common external tariff.
I believe the EFTA arrangement is still the right one for Britain to pursue and our withdrawal from the EEC would hasten its evolution towards this sensible form. It is a dangerous situation that on present form only the Labour party will derive electoral benefit from such a move, the popularity of which will grow with the introduction of maroon passports and other symbols of an unwanted association.
