A letter to the Times which was published on Friday, June 8th 2012.
Lord Owen’s assertion that the British people should be given a direct say in our future relationship with the European Union by way of a referendum is dead right, but the choices posed by the question must be options which are in the British Government’s power to enact (report, June 7). His question 1 – “Do you want the UK to be part of the single market in a wider European community?” – is both too vague and not something that this country can give effect to, involving as it does an unknown number of other countries which may or may not wish to be in Lord Owen’s outer circle.
The countries with which the UK would be associated under the Owen plan are all, with the exception of the Czech Republic, present and former members of the European Free Trade Area (Efta). Why invent another grouping? Britain cannot force the present four members of Efta to accept us back but informal soundings suggest that we would be welcome to rejoin. If the other former members also chose to rejoin Efta that would be fine by us but it would be their decision not ours.
The only choice, therefore, that can intelligibly be put before the British people is: “In or out of the EU?” There is no middle way, disagreable as this may be to the British political class with its addiction to fudge.
A letter to the Spectator magazine which was published on 23rd September 2006.
Your contributor David Rennie (‘It’s funny what you can pick up in Iceland’, 16th September) greatly overcomplicates the basic issues surrounding Britain’s possible withdrawal from the EU with his talk of rejoining the European Free Trade Area (Efta). What most long-term opponents of Britain’s membership of the EU actually wish is for the UK to be in the same relationship with the EU for economic purposes as are the USA, Canada and Australia, whose aggregate trade with the EU is about the same as Britain’s, and for which they pay the EU absolutely nothing. The constant reiteration of the phrase ‘access to the Single Market’ as the benefit for which Britain pays about £10 billion gross is thus totally misleading. The EU’s external trade is regulated by its membership of the World Trade Organisation in which, after withdrawal from the EU, the UK would resume its place as a fully independent member. World trade in goods is in any case practically tariff-free, while since 1995 the WTO has systematically extended transparency to the trade in services.
From a global trade policy and regulation point of view the EU, like EFTA, is now to all intents and purposes irrelevant.
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 Sunday Telegraph which was published on 3rd December 1989.
I am not sure where Robert Jackson (Letters, Nov. 26th) gets his information about Germany, but as a recent visitor to West Germany I can say the Press and magazines are full of the prospect of reunification.
He seems shaky on the “philosophical basis” of the EEC, which was designed and still operates fundamentally as a system of war reparations by Germany to France. Its basis is about as incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon way of government as anything could be.
The basis of the majority of the EEC’s pronouncements is the Single European Act (SEA), which is an enabling Act, a form of legislation abhorrent to our tradition, but completely in line with Continental practice. It was after all the enabling law – Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Reich und Volk – democratically passed by the German Parliament which was the legal foundation of the Hitler regime.
It is the claim that the SEA covers transport, health, education, etc which enables the EEC Commission, in its view, to issue to our government detailed instructions on matters which in our parliamentary tradition would have to be agreed individually and separately. The problem posed by German reunification is not our crisis but France’s, whose policy of using German economic power as a prop to its own pretensions is now in ruins. For us, the suggestion by Mr Andriessen, the Dutch EEC commissioner, that we should resume membership of an EFTA linked to the EEC in a wider European Economic System (EES) with all the Single Market freedoms, though derided by the Foreign Office, renders us everything we could possibly want.
While Germany unifies and draws closer to Russia, and France, Italy and Spain enter some form of Latin federation, we will be free to resume our position as a founder member of the Society of English speaking nations and that expanding society of nations outside Europe who have English as their language of business, industry and technology.
We would be excluded from EEC inner councils – but so what? We shall also be excluded from the Common Agricultural Policy, from an annual levy likely to reach £3 billion in a year or so (removing which reduces our balance of payments deficit at a stroke), from artificially high food prices, affecting particularly the poorest, from the absurd hyprocrisy of Italian commissioners complaining about our water quality, from an Irish commissioner telling us, a great nation, what we can and cannot do with our industry, and so on.
In short we shall be excluded from a nightmare and wonder why we ever endured it for so long.
A letter to the Editor of The Field magazine which was published in November 1989.
It was written in answer to a letter from Martyn Bond, Head of Information Office, European Parliament, London, SW1. This followed an article by Professor Bush published in The Field in their August 1989 issue which you can find in the Papers and Articles Section.
Mr Bond wrote in his letter: “The Single European Act was not ‘smuggled through the British Parliament despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister’. It was approved by 319 votes to 160. The Prime Minister herself voted in favour.”
Mr Bond also wrote: “Professor Bush asserts that ‘many decisions in the Council of Ministers are taken now on the basis of one country, one vote’. In fact, fewer are now taken on this basis than in the past, and more are taken on a weighted basis, according to a key unanimously agreed by all member states and ratified.”
Mr Bond also wrote: “Professor Bush asserts that ‘Britain’s trade with Sweden, a non-EEC member, and theirs with Germany is as free as Britain’s with Germany’. This is nonsense, as repeated attempts by other members of EFTA to become full members of the EEC have shown including Austria’s current application.”
Mr Bond also wrote: “He [Prof Bush] continues, ‘None of the improvements in our manufacturing industry in the last few years owes anything to the EEC entanglement, any more than Germany’s industrial renaissance did.’ Both assertions are false, ignoring the importance of markets (potential demand) in investment decisions. More representative and well-informed sources (CBI and Bank of England) argue a case opposed to Professor Bush’s in their surveys and reports.”
Stephen Bush replied:
If Mr Bond had cared to consult some of his fellow countrymen up and down the country in April to July 1986, he would have found that few would have ever heard of the Single European Act which was passed through Parliament in that short time. Contrast this with the exposure given to the current Health White Paper.
Readers will have appreciated that the weighting in the European Parliament I referred to was by countries, and to repeat – seven countries with a combined population of 51 million have around 134 seats to Britain’s 81 for a population of 57 million.
Virtually all of the tariffs on industrial goods in trade between European Free Trade Association (EFTA) members and the EEC were abolished on 1 July, 1977. In 1988, per head of population, Sweden exported £440 worth of goods to Germany, while the UK exported £170. Sweden has a policy of not joining the EEC.
Markets are an essential feature of investment decisions, but I deny that the power-hungry European Commission and Parliament are needed to supply this ingredient. Product quality and market knowledge are the overriding factors as the success of Japanese goods testifies – despite the barriers that were erected against them by the EEC.
Rather than rely on blind faith about the EEC I prefer to use my eyes. While 85 per cent of our colossal manufacturing trade deficit (about £14 billion in 1988) is with the EEC, our trade with our single biggest customer, the USA, is fundamentally in balance, in fact £2 billion in surplus in 1987. Whatever ‘informed opinion’ in the CBI may tell Mr Bond, its own members invest most of their overseas capital in North America, not in the EEC.
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.
