Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [339]
But the Greek Danegeld had to be paid. I was alone in Brussels in arguing vigorously against the size of the bill we were presented for the ‘Integrated Mediterranean Programmes’. The Germans seemed strangely reluctant to defend their own financial interests and refused our attempts made at ministerial and official level to set up a working partnership with them. Even France and Italy turned out to be net contributors. Greece could expect a bonanza.
At Brussels I also launched an initiative on deregulation designed to provide impetus to the Community’s development as a free trade and free enterprise area. It was intended to fit in with our own economic policy: I have never understood why some Conservatives seem to accept that free markets are right for Britain but are prepared to accept dirigisme when it comes wrapped in the European flag. In my statement to the Council, I employed a little ridicule to make my point about the way in which directives spewed forth from Brussels. I noted that the Treaty of Rome was a charter for economic liberty and we must not allow ourselves to change it into a charter for thousands of minor regulations. We should seek to cut the bureaucracy on business and see that labour markets worked properly so as to create jobs. Some Community legislation had been amended up to forty times: we should think what this meant for the small trader. I pointed to a large pile of directives in front of me on VAT and company law. There had been fifty-nine new regulations in 1984. Of these my three favourites were: a draft directive on sludge in agriculture; a draft directive on trade in mincemeat; and a draft directive amending the main regulation on the common organization of the market in goat meat.
I received a good deal of support for the initiative; but of course it was for the Commission — the source of the problem — to follow it through. It would take more than this modestly useful gesture to change the way the Commission worked: and soon we would entrust still further powers to it.
It was at Brussels that the new Commission was approved with M. Delors as its President. At the time, all that I knew was that M. Delors was extremely intelligent and energetic and had, as French Finance minister, been credited with reining back the initial left-wing socialist policies of President Mitterrand’s Government and with putting French finances on a sounder footing. The French socialist is an extremely formidable animal. He is likely to be highly educated, entirely self-assured, a dirigiste by conviction from a political culture which is dirigiste by tradition. Such was M. Delors.
I nominated Lord Cockfield as the new British European Commissioner. I was no longer able to find a place for him in the Cabinet and I thought that he would be effective in Brussels. He was. I always paid tribute to the contribution he made to the Single Market programme. Arthur Cockfield was a natural technocrat of great ability and problem-solving outlook. Unfortunately, he tended to disregard the larger questions of politics — constitutional sovereignty, national sentiment and the promptings of liberty. He was the prisoner as well as the master of his subject. It was all too easy for him, therefore, to go native and to move from deregulating the market to reregulating it under the rubric of harmonization. Alas, it was not long before my old friend and I were at odds.
In retrospect, the Dublin