Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [47]
By this time, the member states of the Community knew that we were serious. On 18 October I delivered in Luxemburg the 1979 Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture, which, as the occasion required, dealt principally with foreign affairs.
I warned:
I must be absolutely clear about this. Britain cannot accept the present situation on the Budget. It is demonstrably unjust. It is politically indefensible: I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forego improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest.
We had also taken every opportunity to seek wider understanding of the merits of our case. I had talks in Bonn with Helmut Schmidt at the end of October, and on 19 and 20 November there was a two-day Anglo-French summit in London. The Germans and the French knew that I meant business.
In the run up to the Dublin Council, we examined carefully the measures available to us to bring pressure on the Community. Christopher Soames, who had great experience of the ways and wiles of the Europeans, sent me a note to the effect that the Community had never been renowned for taking unpleasant decisions without long wrangling and that I should not worry too much about the cards in my hand because a major country like Britain could disrupt the Community very effectively if it chose. I noted his advice. In this spirit, we had examined quite early on — though we looked at it again later — the possibility of withholding British payments to the Community. For practical and legal reasons this always seemed a non-starter. Nevertheless, I believed that even the possibility caused satisfactory anxiety in the Commission, whose pressure to get a satisfactory settlement was vital. We also had the lever of refusing to agree agricultural price increases, which the French and German Governments — each facing elections — wanted to see. Our moral position was strengthened, too, by the fact that the French had broken the EC law by obstructing British lamb imports: the European Court of Justice found against them on 25 September — though morality counts for little in the Community.
At the next Council — in Dublin at the end of November, the Irish having now assumed the European Community Presidency — the issue of our budget contribution dominated the business. The obvious security risk from the IRA required that I be lodged overnight in splendid isolation in Dublin Castle, the former seat of British rule. The Irish press enjoyed the idea that I slept in the bed used by Queen Victoria in 1897, though I had the advantage over her of a portable shower in my room. Indeed, I was very well looked after. The hospitality was perhaps the best feature of the visit, and contrasted strongly with the atmosphere at the meetings which was extremely and increasingly hostile. I had expected something of the sort. I went to Dublin with a newly tailored suit. Ordinarily I would have enjoyed wearing something new on an occasion as important as this, but I thought twice: I didn’t want to risk tainting it with unhappy memories. This was not, though, the only wise decision I made at Dublin: the principal one was to say very clearly, and with at least as much force as at Strasbourg, the word ‘no’.
The Council opened amicably enough in Phoenix Park at the Irish President’s official residence where he hosted lunch. Back in the Council at Dublin Castle we got down to business. My opening speech set out the facts of our case in somewhat greater detail than at Strasbourg and I elaborated on them in the vigorous debate which followed. There was a good deal of argument about the figures, at the root of which was an obscure and complex issue — how to calculate the losses and gains resulting to individual states from the operation of the CAP. But which ever way one did the sums, there was no doubt that the UK was making a huge net contribution, and unless it was mitigated it was about to become the biggest. We were not arguing that we should be net beneficiaries (though