Question from Alfred Farnell

A letter to the Times which was published on 21st June 2009.

If we abandon Trident (leading article, June 20th), we shall leave France as the only strategic nuclear power in Europe, and we shall come under irresistible pressure to give up our permanent seat on the UN Security Council while France will continue to retain hers.  A nuclear submarine armed with ballistic missiles is the only weapons system that allows pressure to be brought on an enemy state anywhere in the world.

Coupled with the two planned carriers, an updated Trident system will give the UK the most potent force projection that can be bought for the money – about £20 billion spent over 10 years, or an average of about £5 billion per annum for the capital cost of the equipment.  This should be compared with the £10 billion net per annum we shall soon be spending in direct contributions to the EU, or £3 billion plus per annum on local authority “cultural services”.

Can anyone seriously suggest that we will derive better value as a nation from these other expenditures?

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 1st November 1993.

It was written by Lord Stoddart of Swindon (Labour Life Peer and Chairman of the Campaign for an Independent Britain), Sir Richard Body (Conservative MP and one of the Maastricht rebels) Austin Mitchell (Labour MP and vice-chairman of the Campaign for an Independent Britain), Professor Stephen Bush (vice-chairman of the Campaign for an Independent Britain), Dr Martin Holmes, Norris McWhirter, Lord Jay, Ron Leighton (Labour MP), Sir Teddy Taylor (Conservative MP and one of the Maastricht rebels), Dr Alan Sked (first leader of UKIP), Peter Dul (Anti-Common Market League) and Charlotte Horsfield (The British Housewives’ League).

Today the Maastricht Treaty comes into force and all British citizens are, without their consent, thereby conscripted as citizens of the European Union with obligations yet to be defined.

Many British politicians, including those on the Conservative and Labour front benches, appear to believe that with Britain’s exit from the ERM last year and the ERM’s virtual collapse in August, the Maastricht Treaty is essentially a dead letter. They could not be more wrong.

Despite the well publicised misgivings in Germany and France, the European Commission is determined to extract the absolute maximum from the authority over member countries which the Maastricht Treaty gives them.

Under Article 103, the Treaty requires member countries to submit national accounts for inspection by the Commission and to co-ordinate their economic policies, striking at the heart of Britain’s freedom to sustain its fragile recovery.

We, who have been consistently opposed to the imposition of the Maastricht Treaty without the explicit approval of the British people, will continue to fight its implementation. Instead, we aim for a self-governing Britain that will regain its freedom to trade unhindered with the whole world, including the Pacific Rim countries, with many of whom we have unique ties of history and language.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 4th February 1992.

Charles Moore is right (article, Jan. 31st).  There is something rotten in the State of the Union, and that is the corrosive defeatism which has gripped most of the British political class since Suez.  To this defeatism must be added the automatic denigration of our country by the majority of journalists and other members of the chattering classes who gullibly reproduce any claim about the superiority of continental countries.

Dirk Bogarde’s review of two books on Germany (Weekend, Feb. 1st) is a case in point.  Beside his fantasies about the three-language abilities of ordinary Germans is the matching remark about our “impoverished, rather smug island”.

According to the OECD, the real disposable incomes per head in Britain, Germany (before unification), France and Japan are only trivially different when calculated in purchasing power parities.  Last year a German study revealed that of the best 50 companies in Europe, 27 were British, while the value of the top 500 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange is greater than those of Frankfurt and Paris combined.  Britain’s net overseas assets (at around £130 billion) are the greatest of any country in the world (including Japan).

Yet these facts about our real strength do not prevent George Jones, for instance, referring to Britain’s “declining economic influence” (Jan. 31st) when discussing pressure brought by the Germans and Japanese on Britain to give up its UN Security Council seat.

The increased pressure for the separation of Scotland from the Union is a predictable consequence of Britain’s insane policy of surrendering her independence to the European Cmmunity – itself a direct consequence of post-Suez defeatism.

To paraphrase Ludendorff’s supposed remark about the British Army, we have become a lion of a country ruled by ninnies, and nobody wants to be part of that when there is an alternative.  Whichever party announced it was reclaiming Britain’s independence and would not ratify the Maastricht surrender would both win the next election and save the Union.

A letter to the Times which was published on 22nd May 1991.

To speak, as Derek Prag does (May 15th) of foreign policy as an example of things which European states can do better jointly is plainly absurd.  Even more than within Europe, Germany, France and Italy are our bitter rivals for trade and influence in that 95 per cent of the world which lies outside the European Community, as anyone who has travelled in the Americas, Asia and Africa can testify.

It is no more sensible to talk (as the media do incessantly) of our European “partners” than to talk of ICI and duPont as “partners” in the Chemical industry, or Everton and Liverpool as “partners” in the FA Cup.  “Competition” is the word, not “partners”.

Britain has a much greater stake in the countries of the non-EC world than any other member of the EC through the spread of the English language and culture and our seminal role in founding about half of those countries.  We have in fact (1988-9) a substantial positive balance of trade with the non-EC countries which goes some way to offsetting the huge £15 billion) negative balance with the EC.

Any joint EC foreign policy, like the joint agricultural policy, like the joint fisheries policy and so on, is therefore bound to be at our expense, as other EC countries manoeuvre to enjoy our advantage.

Mr Prag’s fantastic claim that “on balance, the existence of the EC has probably been the greatest bulwark of free trade” is made at a time when the EC is on the verge of provoking by the greakdown in the Gatt negotiations the most destructive trade war in history, conscripting Britain to fight our natural friends and allies in the English-speaking world, tarring us in fact with the EC protectionist brush.

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 Daily Telegraph which was published on 9th July 1985.

Your leaders on June 27th and July 1st once again implicitly accept the fundamental differences between Britain and the two key EEC countries, France and West Germany, yet refuse to draw the obvious conclusion that we should withdraw from that organisation.

However much you may wish to believe that the Continental countries are not really serious about a European union, the fact is for different reasons they are.  For France, the EEC is seen as a vehicle to promote French concepts and projects – Ariane, Airbus and now Eureka; for Germany, the EEC is a stage on which to regain political pride.

Britain figures absolutely nowhere in their thinking except as a country to be alternately despised, exploited or envied.

France and Germany can, and will, advocate the abrogation of the veto, confident that no proposal will command majority support which will really damage their ambitions.  Britain, however, would look forward to a sequence of decisions which will damage us individually as people and collectively as a nation.  The GAP, the fishing and budget settlements and now the car vehicle emission standards agreement are all immensely damaging to our interests, and this is soon to be followed by pressure to remove immigration controls on arrivals from EEC locations.

The tragedy for Britain is that we endure all this for absolutely nothing.  The ritual incantation by politicians like Mr David Steel (June 27th) who have no practical industrial experience, about the benefits of the EEC’s 320 million common market, doubly miss the point; first all European countries whether in the EEC or not are already linkined within an industrial free trade are; second the benefits of such a market are unquantifiable and, in any case, overshadowed by other factors which lie entirely within the competence of individual natios.

West Germany’s economic success owes absolutely nothing to the EEC’s exisence and everything to having a resolute, technically competent managerial class backed by a trained disciplined work force and a banking system which sees its first duty to support its own manufacturing industry.  The extent to which the British economy has improved of late is the extent to which these three factors have become more widespread.

Again, the technological benefits of large units are vastly overstared by politicians eager for roles to play.  With the possible exception of a moon-shot and certain nuclear missile projects, there are probably no technological goals outside the competence of an industrial nation of 60 million people.

As a recent visitor to centres in the USA engaged in the Eureka technologies, I can say that Americans certainly do not regard their size as conferring any particular advantage.  On the contrary, in the vital computer field for instance, the world’s most powerful commercial computers and the best work stations are both supplied by relatively small firms staffed by gifted individuals.

Sooner or later the political establishment, which long ago lost faith in Britain, will have to allow the British people to confront a stark choice: cease being an independent nation, or let the EEC go its own way to union without Britain.  When the present British passport, which for millions of people is the symbol of our nationhood, is suppressed in about 18 months’ time, just before the next General Election, the present Government will find that in the interests of yet another damaging Euro-compromise it has grievously offended another large section of its natural support.

A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published in February 1983.

Your leading article and the commentary on the City Page (Feb. 21st), like many others, follow the oft-repeated view, also built into most if not all models of the British economy, that there is little if anything to be done to revive the British economy without the long-awaited upturn in the United States economy and revival in world trade generally.

But does this view not lay too great a stress on foreign trade as virtually the only source of inflation-free growth?

With anything from 40 per cent to 90 per cent import penetration in the major categories of the manufacturing sector (valued at about £55 billion annually), it is clear that a determined across-the-board attack by British manufacturers on the British market, aided by a Government employing the same measures to restrict imports as our trading partners do, would be the single biggest contributor to reducing domestic unemployment.

A 10 per cent reduction in manufacturing penetration would correspond to about 300,000 direct jobs alone, even allowing for present under-used capacity.

It is usually objected at this point (as implicitly in your City Comment) that the resultant strong pound would make imports cheaper and exports dearer again, thus largely offsetting the quoted employment gains.

But this objection ignores the fact that the United Kingdom, alone among the major industrialised economies, can, if it wants to, control the trading balance outside the manufacturing sector, without using fiscal means, by varying the extraction rate of oil.

Oil at the present rate of extraction is the great exporter of British manufacturing jobs.  One day’s production of North Sea oil shipped to West Germany keeps 1,000 West Germans in jobs for a year just on converting a fraction of that oil to chemical and plastics products, a large proportion of which are then shipped straight back to Britain to contribute to the import penetration quoted above.

In fact, the oil extraction rate should be seen as a control lever in the economy which we have never had before.

With central government revenues now under control, the opportunity exists to use this control to engineer an import substitution-led revival of the British economy, to a considerable extent independently of the decisions and difficulties in the economies of our principal trading rivals, the United States, Japan, West Germany and France.

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.

A letter to the Financial Times, the first paragraph of which was published in March 1970.

Paul Lewis (F.T. March 20th) has got to be joking when he suggests that Britain proposed that French be the sole official language of an enlarged EEC including this country.  Are there no limits to the national self-abasement which “informed” opinion is prepared to inflict on the rest of us?  English is the main world language not only because of the first and second British Empires, but because as a language it has enormous advantages of adaptability and subtlety of expression.  Cannot Mr Lewis see that the French objective all along has been to use the power of other members of the EEC to promote the national ambitions of France, and that any wider recognition of the French language as a medium of communication does just that?  We are in fact in competition with the French on the language issue, and our national interests will be served by aiming to make English the most widely used language in any European community.  I can envisage no limits to the resistance which would be made to any Government which attempted to bind our country to a form of French empire with a capital at Versailles (another Lewis “idea”).

No, the real way forward for Britain is to negotiate not to join an EEC based on the 1957 Treaty of Rome which simply does not suit our interests, or those of Germany for that matter, but to negotiate a new Community of Europe treaty.  Britain’s real interests require a free trade area in Europe, excluding only agricultural products, not an elaborate system of official price-fixing, and more urgently, our interests require a new defence treaty which allows for a complete withdrawal of American forces by about 1974, and which recognises the improbability that American cities will ever be exposed to nuclear attack to save European cities from Russian aggression.

These objectives, one economic, the other military should be the basis for negotiations with the Six.  But the major problem confronting Western States in the years ahead is likely to be social.  Here we have everything to lose by any form of political union with other European states.  We have no wish to add to our own prolems France and Italy’s comunist influenced politics, Germany and Holland’s catholic-protestant struggles, Belgium’s language strife, nor Sweden and Denmark’s obsession with pornography.

Both the Continent and ourselves have something to gain from closer association, but each arrangement should be designed to achieve something definite, like Concorde and the centrifuge project, and not be an airy-fairy wish for closer association for its own sake.  Switzerland, a tenth of our size, though anxious for freer trade, is not panicking about exclusion from the EEC and neither should we.