Euro-Government would be a nightmare—Thatcher

Press, 23 September 1988, Page 8

Euro-Government would be a nightmare—Thatcher

NZPA-Reuter Luxemburg The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, at odds with European Community views on economic and political union, said yesterday that a centralised European Government would be a nightmare. After provoking her European partners the previous day with a sweeping attack on the concept of an "identikit European personality,” a defiant Mrs Thatcher took her gospel for Europe to the smallest member of the 12-nation E.C. At a lunch hosted by Luxemburg’s Prime Minister, Jacques Santer, in the historic Abbey of Echternach, founded in 698, Mrs Thatcher declared, “A centralised European Government would be a nightmare.” In the medieval Belgian city of Bruges on Tuesday, Mrs Thatcher had ringingly endorsed the sovereignty of individual European nations and bluntly rejected the E.C’s goal of abolishing all border controls in 1992.

Returning to that theme yesterday, she referred to her drive in Britain to cut back the role of Government and promote private enterprise. “We have not rolled back the frontiers of the State at home only to see them reimposed at a European level,” she said during a nine-hour visit to this tiny Grand Duchy. ■ “Of course we want Europe to move unitedly, of course we want to work more closely together, but it must not be at the expense of individuality, the national customs and traditions which have made Europe great in the past,” Mrs Thatcher added. Aides said Mrs Thatcher’s Bruges speech, one of Britain’s bluntest rejections of the E.C.’s aims in a troubled 15-year membership of the Community, had been planned to force her European partners to think more deeply about the implications of the centralisation drive expounded by the E.C. Commission’s president, Jacques Delors.

The British leader has angrily criticised predictions by Mr Delors that power will gradually pass from national Parliaments to European institutions. Mrs Thatcher, making her first official bilateral trip to Luxemburg after several visits on E.C. matters, found an ally in Mr Santer, who praised her for her frankness, tenacity and loyalty. In his luncheon address, he defended the individual character of nations and said, “The law of the sole majority” in the E.C. would not necessarily take in “the rights of existence and expression of all.”

Mr Santer said Europe needed unity in order to survive, but added, “a truly democratic community lives by its diversities and complexities.” Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the College of Europe, a graduate academy in Bruges for the study of European law and politics, generated criticism both in Europe and at home, where Opposition political leaders described it as “hooliganism.”