Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [466]
The overall strategy was simple. It was to bring Conservative voters — so many of whom were thoroughly disillusioned with the Community — out to vote. Perhaps it might have worked if the message had been got across with greater conviction and vigour by the candidates themselves and if we had been free of highly publicized attacks from Ted Heath and others. In fact, at the very last moment — as the regular polling information which I received subsequently confirmed — there was a late surge to the Green Party which undercut our vote. People had treated the European elections rather as they would a by-election, voting not to effect real changes in their lives but to make a protest against the sitting government. Labour were the beneficiaries and gained thirteen seats from us. For all the mitigating factors, I was not happy. The result would encourage all those who were out to undermine me and my approach to Europe.
THE MADRID EUROPEAN COUNCIL
This did not take long to occur. I have already described how Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson tried to hustle me into setting a date for sterling’s entry into the ERM and how I avoided this at the Madrid Council in June 1989.* In fact, as I had expected, the ERM was something of an irrelevance at Madrid. The two real issues were the handling of the Delors Report on EMU and the question of whether the Community should have its own Social Charter.
I was, of course, opposed root and branch to the whole approach of the Delors Report. But I was not in a position to prevent some kind of action being taken upon it. Consequently, I decided to stress three points. First, the Delors Report must not be the only basis for further work on EMU. It must be possible to introduce other ideas, such as our own of a hard ecu and a European Monetary Fund. Second, there must be nothing automatic about the process of moving towards EMU either as regards timing or content. In particular, we would not be bound now to what might be in Stage 2 or when it would be implemented. Third, there should be no decision now to go ahead with an Inter-Governmental Conference on the Report. A fall-back position would be that any such IGC must receive proper — and as lengthy as possible — preparation.
As regards the Social Charter, the issue was simpler. I considered it quite inappropriate for rules and regulations about working practices or welfare benefits to be set at Community level. The Social Charter was quite simply a socialist charter — devised by socialists in the Commission and favoured predominantly by socialist member states. I had been prepared to go along (with some misgivings) with the assertion in Council communiqués of the importance of the ‘social dimension’ of the Single Market. But I always considered that this meant the advantages in terms of jobs and living standards which would flow from freer trade.
The Foreign Office would probably have liked me to soften my stance. They liked to remind me of how Keith Joseph in Opposition had written a pamphlet on ‘Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy’. But the sort of ‘social market’ Keith and I advocated had precious little similarity with the way the term ‘Sozialmarktwirtschaft’ had come to be used in Germany. There it had become a kind of corporatist, highly collectivized, ‘consensus’-based economic system, which pushed up costs, suffered increasingly from market rigidities and relied on qualities of teutonic self-discipline to work at all. The extension of such a system throughout the Community would, of course, serve Germany well, in the short term at least, because it would impose German