Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [273]
GM in the end were not prepared to wear this and I do not blame them. They were not willing to proceed with a deal for Leyland Trucks and Freight Rover which excluded Land Rover and so the talks ended. When this was announced by Paul to the House of Commons on Tuesday 25 March, one after another of our back-benchers stood up to say that a great opportunity had been lost and that the GM deal should have gone through. I did not disguise my irritation with them and told several later that they should have spoken up when the going was rough.
This whole sorry episode had harmed not just the Government but Britain. Time and again I had drawn attention to the benefits Britain received as a result of American investment. The idea that Ford was foreign and therefore bad was plainly absurd. Their European headquarters was located in Britain, as was their largest European Research and Development Centre. All of the trucks and most of the tractors that Ford sold in Europe were made in Britain. Ford’s exports from the UK were 40 per cent more by value than those of BL. Would Britain have really been better off if BL had taken over Ford? The notion is ridiculous. But it was not just a matter of Ford. Over half the investment coming into Britain from abroad was from the United States. Both Ford and GM were offended and annoyed by the campaign waged against them. Britain just could not afford to indulge in self-destructive anti-Americanism of this sort. Yet it would continue and was shortly to be raised to fever pitch — not just in the area of industrial policy but that of defence and foreign affairs, where passions ignite more easily.
THE US RAID ON LIBYA
I was at Chequers on Friday 27 December 1985 when I learnt that terrorists had opened fire on passengers waiting on the concourse at the Rome and Vienna Airports, killing seventeen people. It soon became clear that the gunmen were Palestinian terrorists from the Abu Nidal group. They had apparently been trained in the Lebanon, but evidence soon emerged of a Libyan connection. Certainly, the Libyan Government did not stint in its praise for the attacks, describing them as ‘heroic actions’. We and the Americans already had a large amount of shared intelligence about Libya’s support for terrorism. The question was not whether Colonel Gaddafi headed a terrorist state but rather what to do about it. Britain had adopted a much tougher attitude towards Libya than other European countries ever since the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984. But the Americans wanted us and the rest of Europe to go further still by imposing economic sanctions, in particular ending purchases of Libyan oil, 75 per cent of which was bought by the Europeans.
On Tuesday 7 January the United States unilaterally imposed sanctions on Libya with little or no consultation and expected the rest of us to follow. I was not prepared to go along with this. I made it clear in public that I did not believe that economic sanctions against Libya would work. The US State Department was highly displeased and even suggested that Britain was the least helpful of their European allies — something which was quite unjust since we were already applying stiff measures against Libya as regards arms, credits and immigration and had closed down the Libyan ‘People’s Bureau’. One reason why the United States considered Britain particularly difficult was because of my un-European habit of straight talking when I disagreed. When I discussed how to deal with Libya with President Mitterrand in Lille in mid-January he sounded a good deal more hawkish than I was. No doubt the Americans were receiving a similar impression.
In late January, February and March tension between the United States and Libya rose as US naval forces started manoeuvres in an area of the Gulf of Sirte which Libya, in violation of international law and opinion, claimed