Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [458]
I had a long discussion with Geoffrey Howe and my officials. We argued through each element. It seemed to me that the discipline was going to prove tighter and more effective than I had earlier thought — and perhaps than others had really understood. So when the full Council reconvened I was able to join in giving broad support to the proposals in the paper which was now circulated.
Anyone who imagined that it would now all be plain sailing underrated the French. The agreement we had reached covered the main agricultural products at issue. But it assumed that the other products for which stabilizers had been agreed at Copenhagen would also be covered. To everyone’s surprise President Mitterrand and M. Chirac would not agree to this. A heated argument erupted which lasted more than four hours about their proposal to have the stabilizers for ‘other products’ referred to the Agriculture Council. In the end a Danish suggestion that it should go to a Foreign ministers’ meeting in ten days’ time was agreed. Ruud Lubbers and I insisted that our agreement to the overall package was conditional on the Foreign ministers not reopening the Copenhagen agreement on ‘other products’. In fact, the French had to concede the issue when the Foreign ministers met.
I was right to settle when I did. I had secured my basic aims: effective and legally binding controls on expenditure, measures to reduce agricultural surpluses in which automatic price cuts were the principal weapon, no Oils and Fats tax, and Britain’s rebate which had saved us some £3 billion in the past three years secure. I had had to concede a little on the threshold at which stabilizers began to work. I had had to compromise over the structural funds. I had reluctantly agreed a new 1.2 per cent of GNP ceiling for Community ‘own resources’. But it was much better than a draw. Agricultural surpluses started to fall quite sharply and the new measures to enforce budget discipline were successful. None of that, of course, changed the fundamental direction or defects of the Community. The CAP was still wasteful and costly. Britain was still making a financial contribution which I considered too high. The bureaucratic and centralizing tendencies remained. But within its limits the February 1988 Brussels Agreement was not at all bad.
FREE TRADE V. PROTECTION
It is fair to say that from about this point onwards — early 1988 — the agenda in Europe began to take an increasingly unwelcome shape. It also began to deviate sharply from that being pursued in the wider international community. That does not mean, however, that my own relations with other European heads of government worsened at a personal level; far from it. I was sorry — though not surprised — to see the Right beaten in the French presidential elections. But I sent a message of congratulations to President Mitterrand and went to see him in Paris that June to talk about the international scene in general and the forthcoming Toronto G7 summit and Hanover European Council in particular.
I found him in understandably good humour now that he had been freed from the domestic torment of ‘cohabitation’ with the Right. He was pressing a scheme — not dissimilar to one advanced by Nigel Lawson — to tackle the crippling level of Third World debt. I would have had more sympathy with his ideas if France had not been so determinedly protectionist, an approach which did far more harm to poorer countries than any amount of overseas aid did good. The French line was expressed — or rather concealed — in a splendid piece of Euro-jargon: the concept of ‘globality’. That is to say progress must be made on all the issues before the GATT at roughly the same pace, a transparent device for avoiding concentration on the thorniest issue — that of agricultural subsidies and protection. He was also keen to have a committee of ‘wise men’ set up to report on how to achieve economic and monetary union; he specifically hankered after a European Central