Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [48]
We had put forward our own proposals on the budget. But the Commission had come up with some of its own and I was prepared to accept their basic approach as a starting point. First, they proposed that action be taken to shift the weight of Community expenditure generally away from agriculture towards structural and investment programmes. The trouble was that this would take too long — if it happened at all. Second, they proposed, in addition, specific spending on UK projects to boost our receipts. But there simply were not enough suitable projects. Finally, on the contribution side, the 1975 Correction Mechanism had so far failed to cut our payments. If it were reformed on the lines the Commission was proposing, it could help reduce our net contributions — but still not by enough: we would still be contributing about the same as Germany and much more than France. Something far more radical would be required.
I made one other point which was to prove of some significance. I said that, ‘the arrangement [must] last as long as the problem.’ It seemed to me then, and even more so by the end of the Council, that we simply could not have these battles every year, all to establish what common sense and equity ought to have made self-evident from the beginning.
It quickly became clear that I was not going to make the other heads of government see matters like this. Some, for example the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Andries Van Agt, were reasonable, but most were not. I had the strong feeling that they had decided to test whether I was able and willing to stand up to them. It was quite shameless: they were determined to keep as much of our money as they could. By the time the Council broke up Britain had been offered a refund of only £350 million, implying a net contribution of some £650 million. That refund was just not big enough and I was not going to accept it. I had agreed that there should be another Council to discuss the matter further, but I was not overoptimistic after what I had seen and heard in Dublin. For me it went much further than hard bargaining about money, which was inevitable. What I would not accept was the attitude that fairness as such did not seem to enter into the equation at all. I was completely sincere when I had said that Britain was asking no more than its due; and my anger when such a proposition was regarded with cynical indifference was equally genuine.
It was while reflecting on the quintessentially un-English outlook displayed by the Community at this time and later that I came across the following lines from Kipling’s ‘Norman and Saxon’ in my old, battered collection of my favourite poet’s verse. The Norman baron with large estates is warning his son about our English forefathers, the Anglo-Saxons, and says:
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing’, My son, leave the Saxon alone.
At the press conference after the Council, I gave a vigorous defence of our position. I said that the other states should not have ‘expected me to settle for a third of a loaf. I also refused to accept the communautaire language about ‘own resources’. I continued to state without apology that we were talking about Britain’s money, not Europe’s. I said:
I am only talking about our money, no one else’s; there should be a cash refund of our money to bring our receipts up to the average level of receipts in the Community.
Most of the other heads of