Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [467]
When I went to Madrid I took with me a document setting out all the benefits enjoyed by British citizens — the Health Service, health and safety at work, pensions and benefits for the disabled, training provisions and so on. I also advanced the argument that the voluntary Council of Europe Social Charter was quite sufficient and that we did not need a Community document which would, I knew, be the basis of directives aimed at introducing the Delors brand of socialism by the back door.
Most of the first day’s discussions in Madrid were taken up with EMU. Late in the afternoon we turned to the Single Market and the ‘social dimension’. I have already described how I used my first speech to spell out my conditions for entering the ERM. But I also backed Poul Schlüter who challenged paragraph 39 of the Delors Report, which essentially spelt out the ‘in for a penny, in for a pound approach’ which the federalists favoured. The other extreme was represented by France. President Mitterrand insisted on setting deadlines for an IGC and for completion of Stages 2 and 3, which at one point he suggested should be 31 December 1992.
The argument then turned to the Social Charter. I was sitting next to Sr. Cavaco Silva, the rather sound Portugese Prime Minister who would doubtless have been sounder still if his country was not so poor and the Germans quite so rich.
‘Don’t you see’, I said, ‘that the Social Charter is intended to stop Portugal attracting investment from Germany because of your lower wage costs? This is German protectionism. There will be directives based on it and your jobs will be lost.’ But he seemed unconvinced that the charter would be anything other than a general declaration. And perhaps he thought that if the Germans were prepared to pay enough in ‘cohesion’ money the deal would not be too bad. So I was alone in opposing the charter.
Ironically, when — on the second day of the Council — it came to the drafting of the section of the communiqué which dealt with EMU it was France who was the odd man out. Insofar as there could be an acceptable text which advanced us towards an unacceptable objective I felt that I had got it. All my requirements were satisfied by it. We could not stop an IGC because all it needed was a simple majority vote, but its outcome had been left open and its timing was unclear. President Mitterrand’s attempt to have a deadline for Stages 2 and 3 inserted in the text was unsuccessful. To the irritation of Sr. Gonzalez, who had hoped to avoid more discussion, I made what I described as a ‘unilateral declaration’. It ran:
The United Kingdom notes that there is no automaticity about the move to nor the timing or content of Stage 2. The UK will take its decisions on these matters in the light of the progress which has by then been made in Stage 1, in particular over the completion of all measures agreed as being necessary to complete.
The phrasing was unpoetic but the meaning clear. This prompted President Mitterrand to make his own declaration to the effect that the IGC should meet as soon as possible after 1 July 1990. And so the Madrid Council came to an end not with a bang but two whimpers.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BICENTENNIAL
My disagreements with the French never led to ill-feeling. This was lucky for I was shortly to attend the G7 in Paris which had largely been overtaken by the hugely expensive — and for Parisians wildly inconvenient — celebrations of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. The French Revolution is one of the few real watersheds in the history of political ideas. For