It's not cricket
Page 50
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THE ARGUMENT about Britain's financial contribution to the EEC Budget may be over in the rest of the Community. It has hardly begun in this country.
For part of the deal negotiated by the Prime Minister at Fontainebleau a month ago involved raising the payments to Brussels — by all countries, not just Britain — from 1 per cent of the total VAT receipts to 1.4 per cent. That needs specific Parliamentary approval. And the general unpopularity of the EEC means that, despite the Government's huge Commons majority, it will not be achieved without ructions on the Tory backbenches.
This is not the place to analyse the deal negotiated by the Prime Minister. At least we are getting some of what she rightly called "our money" back. Some of the larger Community Budget might be spent on regional development and transport infrastructure projects. Most people will be grateful for that, for the fact that future Community Summits might — just might — start to try to deal with other serious problems — above all industrial decline and unemployment.
But the episode does shed light on Britain's overall lack of success in international negotiations. And this has lessons for all fields of policy, not least for transport. Before looking at road transport matters, take Nicholas Ridley's "triumph" over cheaper air fares, with the famous E49 return fare between London and Amsterdam. As a frequent air traveller (at my own expense, alas) I need no persuading that fares are too high.
Unfortunately the "New deal for air travellers", to quote the DT's headline, looks rather different on closer examination. Passengers will indeed benefit. But the major beneficiary will be the Dutch airline KLM. KLM can expect to pick up much long-distance traffic originating in the United Kingdom, and taking advantage of lower fares to travel via Amsterdam, which has long been advertising itself as "London's third airport". KLM's London passenger manager was bubbling over when interviewed on the radio about this. The small Dutch population — one quarter that of Britain's — will make the reverse flow, and hence the benefit to United Kingdom airlines, much smaller.
Now Mr Ridley might argue that it does not matter which country's airline benefits, so long as the traveller gets a better deal. That is at least a point of view. Is it also to be applied to British international road hauliers? The industry is entitled to be told. In any case it would be consoling to know that Mr Ridley actually realised what he was doing. Nothing he said in public gave any indication that he did.
Some might find it difficult to believe that a Cabinet Minister could conclude an important international agreement without appreciating its consequences. After all, are not all those civil servants there to point these out?
That should be the case. But the evidence seems to indicate otherwise.
It would be hard to deny that, whatever the reason, and whoever is to blame, Britain has got a bad deal out of the EEC. The original negotiators under Edward Heath must have totally misjudged the Budget situation. They would surely not knowingly have agreed to a formula which led to Britain — one of the poorer EEC states — paying a subsidy to richer countries. Yet that was the result.
Perhaps Harold Wilson's 1975 re-negotiation came too soon after accession for this problem to have become obvious. In any event it was not solved.
Even Mrs Thatcher's deal leaves the major cause of the EEC's financial crisis unresolved. Farm spending will still be out of control, because the Common Agricultural Policy remains unreformed. And the rise in VAT will actually increase the amount of money available to be wasted in this way.
Ironically the only area in which there has been an attempt at agricultural reform is one which will have an adverse effect on some road hauliers. Milk production is to be cut back. Agriculture Minister Michael Jopiing seems to have agreed to a deal which treats British dairy farmers far worse than those of any other country. This led even the normally mild and superloyal Edward du Cann to protest in Parliament.
Against this background it is not surprising that Mr Ridley's other "triumph" — the package deal agreed in Brussels last May — might be coming apart at the seams. Ministers agreed — or thought they had agreed — the principles of a deal on four items — vehicle weights, quotas, lorry taxation and drivers' hours. This struck a balance between those countries which favour greater freedom and those which had insisted that harmonisation, especially on lorry weights, must come first.
At the heart of the package was agreement on 40 tonnes gross weight for lorries. The political sensitivity of this in Britain was well known to the other Ministers, and Mr Ridley seemed to have played his cards very cleverly. He agreed to accept 40 tonnes as the EEC maximum on two conditions. One was the doubling of the quota. The other was an unspecified but lengthy period before Britain had to admit 40-tonners. Other Ministers, remembering David Howell's flat rejection of anything more than 38 tonnes, leapt at the offer, and celebrated it in champagne.
But now some ministers are disagreeing about exactly what they had agreed last May. As in the past the problem has its roots in the lorry weight question.
The May agreement deliberately avoided any decision on axle weights, about which there are much greater divergences of view than gross weights. This may be a nonsense in engineering terms; it made sense in politics — "the art of the possible", remember.
But now Italy is said to be insisting that axle weights must be covered; otherwise the deal, including a bigger quota, is off. And to make matters worse the German Minister is insisting that when Ministers meet in December it will not be enough for them to agree the principles of a lorry weight directive. They must actually put a directive onto the EEC statute book. Otherwise, the quota stays unchanged.
Germany and Italy are probably raising these difficulties in order to extract concessions on some totally different point. That is a familiar EEC tactic.
Unfortunately it is not a tactic used by Britain's negotiators. Their attitude tends to be that of an old-style cricketer; playing the game according to the rules is what matters, not which team wins. But it does matter who wins in Brussels. All the items in the May package affect the prosperity of road transport. Every British Minister and civif servant negotiating in Brussels should have a piece of paper on the table in front of him. On it should be printed, in large type, the words "It's NOTcricket!"