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ON THE RECORD
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE 13.12.92
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JONATHAN DIMBLEBY: Good afternoon and welcome to On The
Record, on as it were, the morning after the night before. No not a Christmas
Party, but the European Summit, which tottered to an end only a little over
twelve hours ago. I'll be asking Douglas Hurd whether the British Presidency
really has healed the divisions in the European Community or if he and his
colleagues have simply applied a little sticking plaster to a still festering
wound.
As well as the Summit, the headlines are
all this morning about the future of the monarchy. There's a great sheaf of
them you can see here, suggesting that public faith has been severely shaken by
the events of the last few weeks. The Foreign Secretary has been prominent in
support of the Royal Family in their difficult days, so when I went to see him
this morning I asked Douglas Hurd first whether these polls were a cause for
alarm.
DOUGLAS HURD MP: It's happened before, it may happen
again. The monarchy is bound to have its ups and downs and it's had a shock
this last week. I'm sure it will reassert itself. In fact I think in a way
after the shock wears off it's easier..it's going to be easier for the Prince
of Wales and the Princess of Wales to go on doing their job as I saw them doing
it the night before last. I think in fact it may become rather easier and they
will be able, all of them, to show once again that the monarchy is the focus of
a lot of service in this country, if you lose that you lose something very
important.
DIMBLEBY: But the Prime Minister in the House of
Commons said there was no constitutional bar to having a King and a Queen who
were formally separated. These polls seem to suggest there is a great deal of
scepticism about whether that is a reality or not?
HURD: Well we're talking about something a
long way off we hope. What the Prime Minster said is the constitutional fact,
I think that's all we can rest on at the moment.
DIMBLEBY: What is your reaction to those who are
saying in one of the polls it's a close to a majority that even if the monarchy
is a good thing, even if there is great service in the monarchy they don't
actually believe that's it's going to be there in forty or fifty years time.
HURD: I think if you'd asked people in the
middle of Queen Victoria's reign or in the middle of George III's reign, to
take the two last long reigns, whether the monarchy would be there is fifty
years time most people would probably have said no. But it endures, it lasts
because it is actually very important in this country.
If you take it away and start fooling
around with some idea of presidential elections you raise huge numbers of
questions to which there aren't any answers and you lose, you destory something
which actually is very important to the great majority of people in this
country.
DIMBLEBY: Does that mean that government, monarch
and Royal Family can afford to ignore such polls?
HURD: Of course not and I don't think anybody
has but the sense here that the Queen's government must be carried on and the
Queen and members of her family have to go on doing the job which they have,
that I think will see the monarchy through this.
DIMBLEBY: That constitutional matter aside, the
Foreign Secretary has spent the last six months at the heart of a great wrangle
over the future of Europe. It was not until late last night that the twelve
finally reached a compromise on the Community budget, allowing them all to go
home, insisting, as so often in the past, that victory had been snatched from
the jaws of defeat. But what has really been achieved, are the Danes really
back on side, is the ratification of Maastricht now all but a foregone
conclusion, or did the Edinburgh Summit simply paper over a number of yawning
cracks in a Community that is divided and uncertain. John Rentoul reports.
***********
DIMBLEBY: Late last night Foreign Secretary, the
Prime Minister said that the outcome at Edinburgh had been a breakthrough.
DOUGLAS HURD MP: Yes.
DIMBLEBY: Are you really persuaded that Lazarus,
in the form of the goal of European Union, is really up and walking again?
HURD: Oh, we didn't solve all problems in a
very remarkable two days but we solved the problems that have got to be solved
and we can now spend '93, instead of sratching away at all these problems that
we've spent so much time on this year, we can actually get on to some things
which matter as much or perhaps even more. We've cleared the decks, we've got
the Community back on the track, to use the Prime Minister's other phrase.
DIMBLEBY: But it's a pretty sour, embittered
little bunch of people in there isn't it?
HURD: No, absolutely not. We sat there with
the Kings and Queens of Scotland looking down and the tapestries in Holyrood
House. It's an amazing forum really because there are no votes. You've got
twelve people who run their countries with their Cabinets and you have
to...they all have to agree. The idea that this is a sort of superstate
wouldn't survive a moment of sitting in Holyrood House in the last two days.
It's an amazing business, the Prime Minister handled it extremely well. He's
very good at this business of chairing a meeting to a conclusion and other
people were very helpful too.
We all knew in fact that if we didn't
solve this set of problems, not all of them the most important problems of the
world, but if we didn't solve them this time then the Community in '93 and '94
would not be doing its right job for its citizens or in the world.
DIMBLEBY: And would have begun to unravel?
HURD: Yes, I think so, you know operations
postponed or illnesses allowed to fester, do fester, they get poison in them.
We've got rid of them atmosphere now. Last night, as we broke up very late,
there was a very strong feeling of relief, pleasure and indeed congratulation.
DIMBLEBY: Now, I want to find out whether that
congratulation - self-congratulation in a generic sense..
HURD: No, not self, congratulation to the
British for handling it.
DIMBLEBY: Alright, patting yourself on the back
whether you are legitimately patting yourself on the back....
HURD: Others patting us on the back.
DIMBLEBY: Whether you deserved it then I want to
test a little bit.
You have got to be persuaded now that
there is no realistic doubt but that the Danes are going to ratify Maastricht
in that referendum that they are going to have - you can't be certain of that?
HURD: No, of course not. They will hold
another referendum but the representives of Denmark who were there beleive that
the deal they got, the decision which was taken, will help them to do so
successfully. They will be able to say to people in Denmark "look, by a small
majority on June 2nd, you let you anxieties and fears about Europe and about
this Treaty govern your vote, you were perfectly entitled to do that.
We believe we can now prove that those
anxieties and fears have been dealt with or were not so, were not real, in the
Treaty which we will ask you to ratify. So please look at it again rather than
go into isolation. Now, that will be what the Danish leaders, and not just the
government, will now be able to say.
DIMBLEBY: But of course they believed before the
first referendum that they would have the votes and in Denmark there are a
great many sceptics, much greater in number and no less in intensity than the
sceptics in Britain. They will want to know what is the status of what you are
offering them. They will want to know, amongst other things, are the opt-outs
that they have got in any significant sense legally binding?
HURD: Yes indeed. We spent hours on this.
Lawyers expounded this case to us, not British lawyers or Danish lawyers, it
was a French lawyer in fact, working for the Council of Ministers, who made,
I've heard it three times now, a very effective presentation on this point.
Yes, it is a decision, it is legally binding and it does put on paper..show the
way the Danes can use the different choices which are there in the Treaty and
which we're using too, for example, on the single bank and on the single
currency, to deal with some of the anxieties which they ran up against.
DIMBLEBY: But the opt-outs that they have, those
four opt-outs, do they have the same status as the British opt-outs that are
within the Treaty of Maastricht?
HURD: No, they're in a different form because
the story of them has been different. We negotiated our opt-out from the
single bank and the single currency saying that it must be for the British
Parliament at the time to decide yes or no. We negotiated that as part of
Treaty. The Danes had a similar protocol but obviously on June 2nd this year
the Danish people didn't find that a hundred per cent convincing. I hope it now
will be.
DIMBLEBY: But Foreign Secretary, if they don't
have the equivalent status and they are different, that means they don't have
the same right to be taken before the European Court?
HURD: No, it's not the question of the
European Court. What we agreed as regards the Danes yesterday is a legally
binding decision..
DIMBLEBY: Who enforces that?
HURD: If necessary the International Court of
Justice. But it's legally binding on all of us. We had hours of discussion on
this point, it caused difficulty for some people but, in the end, after a lot
of legal and political argument everybody agreed that this format, suggested by
the British, was the best answer and an adequate answer for this particular
problem.
DIMBLEBY: Which has priority when there is a
conflict, potential conflict, which is why they want them to be legally binding
between the Maastricht Treaty and their opt-outs - which has precedence?
HURD: Well the...what you call the
decision..what we took yesterday was a decision covering four Danish points.
They aren't all opt-outs, they're expressions of the way in which Denmark will
use the choices which are in the Treaty, so there's no clash between the two.
DIMBLEBY: There can never be a clash?
HURD: There can't be a clash, these are
compatible with the Treaty, this was one of the requirements. They are
compatible with the Treaty, therefore, the Treaty doesn't need to be
re-negotiated or re-ratified.
DIMBLEBY: They will also want to know that their
opt-outs are there, secure in perpetuity, in real terms secure, but you can't
give them that because they lapse do they do when Maastricht comes up for
review?
HURD: No, they don't lapse, any more than
Maastricht lapses but what we all do in '96, as provided in the Treaty, the
Danes don't question this, is sit down and look whether we want to make any
changes, if so, what they'd be. A very important point here, which we
negotiated at Maastricht, which helps the Danes as well, nowhere in the Treaty
is it said that in '96, we're going to move in a centralising direction, it's a
completely review.
DIMBLEBY: Now the sceptics are also going to be
very concerned about subsidiarity, this wonderful Euro term. Your guidelines,
elaborate and long as they are, designed well-meaningly to clarify what
subsidiarity means, do no more, I put it to you, then to make a little bit
sense of an extremely woolly doctrine.
HURD: There's been a change around. Who would
have though that a couple of years that a Commission document - not ours -
would say that the presumption must be national action, Community action only
when that national action won't work, whether burden of proof is on the
Community. I've come up through years of argument, and so have you, with
people who thought Community action in itself was a good thing. Now the
Commission is saying that is not so and is producing for the first time a first
list, it's only a first list, of actual measures which they propose to
withdraw. Who'd have thought that conceivable two years ago. That's only the
beginning, but that is happening.
DIMBLEBY: But that's not the central point, is it?
HURD: It seems to be the practical point.
DIMBLEBY: It may be the practical consequence of
the pressure from the Council of Ministers, the central point for the sceptics
is, are these guidelines anything more than an expression of goodwill.
HURD: That surely depends if they produce
results. What we've began to do, before the Treaty of Maastricht is ratified,
is to make this bit of it a political fact. We are beginning actually to
operate what is called subsidiarity, we are beginning to ask the Commission,
the Commission is beginning to come forward with lists of measures it intends
not to pursue because they're too finicky, because they get into people's hair
in a way which isn't necessary.
DIMBLEBY: Foreign Secretary, as you well know
exactly what you're saying now leads the sceptics in Denmark to listen to the
kind of things that the sceptics in this country, led by people like Ken Baker
say, that this is all hogwash, what you need is something that's legally
enforceable, and it's only legally enforceable if those guidelines are legally
binding and they ain't.
HURD: When the Treaty is ratified with the
help of people like Ken Baker, then there will be a legal underpinning into
what is now happening. But we're not just talking about legal underpinning,
we're talking about what is actually happening, how the Commission, the
council, the parliament - the three institutions are going to work, and what is
happening is something which Britain has been urging for several years now,
that the Community, not only drops the number of directives it produces, which
is now down to fifty this year, fifty proposals compared to a hundred and
thirty...in the hundreds in the last few years, but actually looks at what's
already there in the pipeline or on the statute book, this is due we actually
need to do this, and now that is now happening. It wouldn't have been
conceivable at the time of four or five years ago, it's quite a substantial
change and it's only beginning.
DIMBLEBY: Foreign Secretary, this grand sounding
set of guidelines (I'm not saying that you're sounding grand) set of guidelines
under what are called conclusions of the Presidency, have all, it seems to me
the rigour and the power and authority of one of those other conclusions of the
Presidency, the one last year...sorry this year, June in Lisbon which declared
solemnly that the ratification of Maastricht had to take place before the first
of January, 1993.
HURD: Well it has for ten and it hasn't for
two. Two will ratify during 1993.
DIMBLEBY: It would make a big difference, would it
not, if one of those two, namely Britain, were to demonstrate the enthusiasm
for Maastricht which might help the Danes along in what is going to be a very
difficult referendum, by saying we're not going to foot drag, we're not foot
dragging as all our critics say in Europe, we'll go for it and we'll go for it
before their referendum, but you haven't got the political courage to do that.
HURD: It's a question of political facts, we
have started the British Parliamentary process which is longer, more detailed,
more complicated than I think in any other country with a parliamentary
process. The House of Commons is now looking, as it's a right to do, in great
detail at the different parts of the legislation and therefore of the Treaty.
That is our parliamentary process, three of them have had referenda, the others
have parliamentary process, ours is probably the most detailed, you know,
the government doesn't dictate that, it is parliament...the British parliament
which decides and it has to have the time to go through that process.
Two days ago, you woke up and over your
toast and marmalade, you read universal stories that they were putting a
pistol at John Major's head, you've got to ratify by July 1st, half-baked and
it didn't actually happen.
DIMBLEBY: You mean the pistol wasn't put to the
head, they were just saying, for God's sake, do it.
HURD: These were some press officers and all
your colleagues in the press centre hared off after a half-baked story, it
didn't actually....the two dogs that didn't bark yesterday, we preserved
absolutely, almost without attack, the British rebate on the budget because
everybody knew in advance they weren't going to get that and nobody seriously,
there were some hints, but nobody seriously proposed a deadline. You can't
propose a deadline for a parliamentary process because it's parliament that
decides.
DIMBLEBY: You say that and you....
HURD: I have to say that.
DIMBLEBY: ...and you...I know you have to it and
you bang on about it but then what I find difficult to understand is how it was
that at Lisbon you signed up for...the British government, you, John Major,
signed up for ratification by January 1993, you didn't have all these problems
then in your mind.
HURD: No, we didn't and it wasn't possible to
do it in that time.
DIMBLEBY: You said we want to ensure the entry
into force of the treaty on January the 1st.
HURD: Yes, it would have been better, but it
wasn't possible.
DIMBLEBY: You were telling me just now, you can't
have deadlines, you set yourself a deadline.
HURD: It wasn't possible to deliver it, which
is one very good reason for not setting another deadline...
DIMBLEBY: But what intervened of such substance as
to make it impossible for you to carry on and not to renege on that commitment?
HURD: Black Wednesday and the French
referendum. But, I mean, we're now on course in the House of Commons, you've
seen what happened in the Paving debate, you've seen we've started the
committee stage, we will go on with the committee stage. I don't think it
will be a high drama but the House of Commons will be doing its job in a
parliamentary democracy and will be making up its mind bit by bit, issue by
issue on whether this country should ratify this treaty and we can't be bossed
about from outside about the timing of that. The Prime Minister said we intend
to get the Bill through all its stages during this session and we will hold to
that intention.
DIMBLEBY: Is it your position that you will get it
through by July so long as no-one tells you you've got to do that?
HURD: No, it depends to some extent on the
date of the Danish referendum which we don't know. They're talking about late
April early May and I hope that that may be possible but the two...the Danish
process and the British process are different but they'll go forward in
parallel. And at the end of the day in the House of Commons, there is a
majority for this Bill and this Treaty not because it's magic but because most
people can see now that it's not a recipe for a super state, that it is the
agreed framework, the only conceivable agreed framework for Europe, for the
Community to make sense and get on in the next five or six years.
DIMBLEBY: You say that the French referendum and
Black Wednesday stopped you doing it, it didn't stop any of the others doing
it. Italy had a big problem, they'd already gone for ratification. The French
went for ratification. The Germans have ratified. It's pretty feeble if you
really have the courage of your convictions now to say, Oh, well, we were
proved wrong, we couldn't get it when we wanted it and now we don't know when
we can get it but we hope to get it sometime.
HURD: No, we will get it, I think it's clear
now, we will get it. Each country has its different procedures. The Italian
procedure is quite different from ours, they sometimes wish it were liker(sic)
ours and it's different public anxieties, we have to meet those.
DIMBLEBY: But if you say you can get it because
the votes are there, there's nothing to stop you going for it. All this stuff
about having full length debate and endless debate is nothing to do with
anything other than your fears that you won't get it.
HURD: Have you see the number of amendments
down? The Chairman of the Committee..it's technically a committee and not the
speaker, will certainly allow a lot of those amendments, we can see that
already and it's...we have no appetite for saying to the House of Commons, you
can't discuss these things. Of course people should be allowed to discuss
these things.
DIMBLEBY: But you must have known these things
were going to want to be discussed when you said you could get it through by
January the 1st '93. You're much too astute a politician not to know that
people would want to lay down every kind amendment, put every sort of hurdle
that they possibly could in your own party in the way of it.
HURD: If we'd tried to bang the thing through
in the autumn, we would probably have lost the Bill. We don't intend to lose
the Bill, we intend to win the Bill, we intend to ratify the Treaty and we are
saying to our partners, better a Treaty delayed by months than a Treaty lost
and that I must say is a convincing argument.
DIMBLEBY: It may be but it suggests that it's not
that you are running scared of your backbenchers but that your backbenchers
could have, in the process of defeating you, have broken the party.
HURD: Well they could have broken the Treaty,
they could have broken a central part of the government's policy but, anyway,
that's in the past - we've avoided that.
DIMBLEBY: I just want to clarify something that
comes very much out of that though. Is that the reason, that fear, why, in the
last moments of the paving debate, that the Prime Minister promised prominant
Euro-sceptics that the ratification, the Third Reading by Britain, would come
after the referendum?
HURD: After the Danish referendum.
DIMBLEBY: Sorry - yes.
HURD: He said - and he's set this out in the
House of Commons afterwards - that the two processes go in parallel and that if
the Danes, as he expected then and we now expect again, have their second
referendum around the end of April or the beginning of May, then our Third
Reading in the Commons would naturally come after that, but not long after
that, and then it would go to the House of Lords.
DIMBLEBY: You say.. you said it went in
parallel. The Euro-sceptics in question believe that he told them that it
would follow, that the British Third Reading, would follow the Danish
referendum. Did the Prime Minister say that it was contingent upon the
referendum or is it an accidental by-product of the process?
HURD: I don't think these were mostly
conversations with the Prime Minister at all - at any rate I wasn't present at
any of them. I just know what the Prime Minister has said and the policy which
we are pursuing, and that's what I've said.
DIMBLEBY: Pretty embarrassing for a Foreign
Secretary, who's a key player in this, not even to be party to conversations at
which a key apparently, KEY votes shifted so that you didn't lose the paving.
HURD: Well, no-one who's been in the House of
Commons on a turbulent evening would I think that that was a point.
DIMBLEBY: But it was rather critically important.
I think they might do. It swung the vote and, in the process, the
Euro-sceptics were led to believe - and still believe, still believe - that the
Prime Minister is telling them "Don't worry, there are no circumstances under
which I would allow us to go to Third Reading until we know the outcome of the
Danish referendum". Is that, or is that not the position?
HURD: I go by what has been said in public and
that is what we are holding to - that is what we've been expounding to our
partners, to the Parliamentary Party, to everybody. That's the course we are
following. I am encouraged by the last two days to think that that course is
going to work. If course it depends on things which we don't control. It
depends on the House of Commons, which we don't control; it depends on the
House of Lords, in which I think there may be some personalities who have an
opposing view - it's possible. And it depends, to some extent it depends, on
what happens in Denmark and in other countries. But we've set out what we
intend to do.
DIMBLEBY: You tempt me down the Baroness
Thatcher route, but I'm not going to take it - perish that thought. I am going
to pick up with you this central point. I want to know from YOU, as Foreign
Secretary, as a member of Government, not what other people are saying, or
might have said or might not have said, I now want to know from you (and I'm
sure you can give an unequivocal answer) - is the Third Reading of the
Maastricht Bill in the House of Commons contingent upon the outcome of the
Danish referendum; does it have to the follow the Danish referendum, or not?
HURD: We think it will follow the Danish
referendum on the time-table now sketched in both countries. In any event, as
the Prime Minister said before, we intend, our intention is - subject to
Parliament - to get the Bill through all its stages so that we can ratify the
Treaty during the present session of Parliament.
DIMBLEBY: Now you will know, because you're a very
straight operator, that you haven't answered my question. My question is a
different question. You believe that it will follow; the question of
substance and principle that I think I'm putting to you is - is it contingent
upon the referendum in Denmark preceding that vote? If, for one reason or
another (and as you rightly have said, you can't tell what Parliaments do, you
can't tell what other countries do) - if the Danes postpone the referendum, if,
for one reason, another debate erupts and it doesn't go ahead, do we go,
regardless of the Danes, or are we in the slipstream of the Danes?
HURD: But I have answered that. In the second
part of what the Prime Minister has said. We intend to get the Bill and to
ratify the Treaty in the present session of Parliament, so that our question
has been answered.
DIMBLEBY: It has now very clearly been answered.
Let me just....
HURD: And before..
DIMBLEBY: Forgive me then, and before. And let me
just make it clear for those who, who, who may not have exactly got it, it's
this - If for one reason either the Danes go beyond this session of
Parliament, and don't go for a referendum before the end of OUR session of
Parliament, we will nonetheless have the Third Reading and seek to ratify?
HURD: The Prime Minister has said that that is
our intention - it is our intention, it's also commonsense.
DIMBLEBY: The problem would be made a lot easier
for a government which, as you've said, does not control Parliament - you've
got big problems in your own Party, you don't know what the Labour Party's
going to do - if you heeded public opinion, you talk a lot about having a full
debate, public opinion is saying very loudly indeed "Trust us - we want a say",
and you say to them "Sorry, no referendum". That's treating them with
disrespect.
HURD: It would be if we had a referendum in
our Constitution, but I remember Margaret Thatcher leading us into the lobbies
in '75 as a Conservative Party AGAINST having a referendum then on the question
of British membership of the Community. I mean either you have a Parliamentary
democracy or you have some other kind of democracy. Some countries DO have
referenda. Yeltsin in Russia is now discussing what sort of referendum he
should have. But we don't have that, and there are plenty of people...
DIMBLEBY: There's been a referendum ....
HURD: Against our advice and votes. It isn't
actually a sensible way of dealing with it. Of course, there is.. when people
are asked in the street "Do you want to be asked, do you want a referendum?,
they tend to say "Yes", but if you actually go through the business, the
hassle, of electing a Parliament you're electing people to take decisions for
the country - that's their point - and if you don't like the way they do it you
kick them out, and that's, you know.....
DIMBLEBY: But the Danes, the Danes have a
Parliament. They got elected. They had a referendum and politicians in
Denmark aren't so arrogant as to say that the Danes can't have a say - that's
the feeling of the people. It's unfair. Why shouldn't we have a say?
HURD: There's no arrogance in following your
Constitution. We don't have a harmonised European Constitution which tells us
we have to do things the same way. We have twelve countries and three -
Denmark, Ireland and France - have a referendum system. We don't, the Germans
don't, others don't, and, I mean... the House of Commons is now, as we've just
discussed, looking at this matter week after week, detail after detail.
It'll give it a much more thorough and
detailed examination I think probably than it's had anywhere else, and that
really, I think, is in our system (I'm not talking for the Danes or the Irish)
in our system is a better way of setting about it. All this fully in public,
accompanied by this kind of discussion on the merits of particular things.
There are lots of things you and I haven't talked about which are relevent.
DIMBLEBY: But you see, you earlier in this
interview talked interestingly about the shift in public mood which made it
difficult to deliver what you'd hoped to deliver, namely, a ratification by the
first of January is one aspect of that. Do you against that background think
that at least the politicians in Westminster should be allowed to vote on
whether or not a referendum would be desirable?
HURD: Well, I expect.. they may well do so, I
don't know, that's not a matter for me.
DIMBLEBY: Would you welcome it?
HURD: I would..I'm certainly not against
having a discussion of that. I would vote against it as I did in '75, because
I think it weakens a Parliamentary democracy. We have to, we are accountable.
We can't go, Members of Parliament are not there to go up and down with every
barometer of public opinion. Public opinion on Europe has shifted over and
over again in the last twenty-five years that I've been watching. What
Members of Parliament have to try and do, and it isn't easy, is to say well,
let's look a little bit longer ahead than next week's opinion poll, and let's
try and see what is in the interests of this country and then, of course, you
have to defend it, otherwise you're kicked out. And that's what we have to do,
that's what we're there for.
DIMBLEBY : But do you appreciate too that if there
is no decision about whether or not a referendum might be held in Parliament,
and if there is no referendum at all, then a public which, for one reason or
another, remains very sceptical about the virtues of Europe, will say "This is
a deal that's been done over our heads". And, given that scepticism, is it
not wise governments to say "Yes, we have a system, but we have a very flexible
Constitution and, therefore, the use of a referendum might be desirable in
persuading people that it is indeed in their interests that we are doing what
we're doing".
HURD: Is that what happened after the last
one? Of course not. Of course not. It doesn't work like that. You ask
people a question in a referendum and, as President Mitterrand has often said
to us, you get all kinds of answers to all kinds of other questions come
flowing in, and it doesn't settle the matter, why should it?
DIMBLEBY: Is it dumb to answer the right
questions?
HURD: No. If you were a passionate
Euro-sceptic you might fall quiet a bit after a referendum which gave a
favourable result but, of course, it wouldn't alter your convictions, why
should it? I really don't think....
DIMBLEBY: ...I'd see a majority in favour of the
other way and I might actually pipe down a bit.
HURD: Yes, you'd pipe down a bit but it
wouldn't alter your convictions and it wouldn't alter your votes. In any case,
you know, at the end of the day it's Parliament that takes the decisions and
if you don't, you know, if you believe in a Parliamentary democracy I believe
the way we're setting about it is the right one.
DIMBLEBY: You say that you - that the Danish and
the British process are going in parallel and, therefore, you expect the
British vote to come after the referendum. What happens if the Danes say No in
their referendum?
HURD: Well, then the Treaty will fall. There
was a good deal of discussion about this at Edinburgh and we had to make it
clear (well, two things really) the legal point the Treaty is a Treaty for
twelve, and the political point that even though you could go into a.. X
members could go into a corner and negotiate a new Treaty for a smaller number,
that wouldn't include us. That it's not a political reality to suppose that
we would sit down at once and negotiate a new Treaty, wherever it might be,
with eleven members without Denmark. We've always said that Denmark could not
be excluded.
DIMBLEBY: Now that is extremely interesting thing
that you've just said..
HURD: It's a very important point.
DIMBLEBY: And it.. I do not, no-one listening to
it would dissent from that, because what you are saying is "If the ten decide
to go ahead regardless in the event of the Danes saying 'No', (a) we would
obviously not bother to go ahead with the ratification process, because you say
that Maastricht will be dead, and (b) you would not be in making that ten
eleven - you would be with Denmark".
HURD: There are dangers in that, there are
dangers in that because one principle reason for ratifying the Treaty is that
it's actually good for this country, it certainly does not lay the foundations
for a super state, for the first time it defines the ever closer union of
peoples which we'd been committed to for many years, as including co-operation
between governments. So..but if.. there is a danger that if we don't ratify,
that others - maybe not immediately - will go ahead on the....with schemes
which will powerfully affect jobs, prosperity, security of this country but in
which we have no part. It was the mistake we made in the fifties, we shouldn't
make it again.
DIMBLEBY: You see what you're left with now is
that the future of Europe in the context of Maastricht is up to the Danes.
HURD: They have to have another referendum and
we, the British Parliament, has to agree the legislation. Neither of those
things has happened yet, so it's the British Parliament and the Danes, who have
a referendum system, who have, of course, power over the future of the Treaty.
Similarly, the Germans would have had if the ....
DIMBLEBY: I'm dealing with the future now...
HURD: ...the British and the Danes.
DIMBLEBY: Yes, but as the Danes are going to go
first, if the Danes were to and heaven knows they may well still say No, as
you'd be the first to acknowledge, if they say No, we claiming to be at the
heart of Europe, say, you say No and stay away from it and as you've just
outlined yourself in your judgement, appalling consequences, we stay away from
it as well.
HURD: The Treaty has to be ratified by twelve,
by New Year's Eve, I think ten will have ratified, the Germans I expect will
ratify this coming week. Two haven't, so, of course, the future of the Treaty
depends on the two who haven't - the Danes and the British going forward
through different channels, each one following their own process.
DIMBLEBY: The Danish Prime Minister said that if
the Danes don't ratify - he's reported to have said, I should say - if they
don't ratify in the second referendum, they'll be no place for Denmark in the
European Commmunity.
HURD: Well, that would be a matter for them to
decide, it doesn't follow, it doesn't follow. Denmark could perfectly well
take the view that she'd continue under the treaties which exist, she simply
wouldn't be taking part in the new treaty. But that would be for Denmark I
suppose to react and for us to try and cope with whatever they decided. But I
hope that won't be.....
DIMBLEBY: We, Foreign Secretary, in this interview
so far, have been discussing the very important nuts and bolts of the
constitution, organisation of the Treaty. Meanwhile, while this inward looking
process has been going on, outside we have the most appalling mess, women and
children being murdered in Yugoslavia, Serbian planes bombing in Yugoslavia.
In Eastern Europe: poverty, unemployment, huge uncertainty. A potential
disintegration on..in national terms, with ethnic, racial conflict. Can I
suggest to you that this is evidence of a community which is infeebled, that
has no sense of direction, no vision, no courage, no purpose.
HURD: We can't, of course, sort out problems
and suffering outside our own frontiers but I agree with the thrust of what you
say. One reason why I'm pleased that at Edinburgh we have sorted out the
problems which had to be sorted out, is that in '93, we are now free actually
to talk and act on things which in the long run are more important and you've
mentioned some of them. I would add a new American administration, showing and
working with the Clinton administration, showing that Europe is not just a lot
of decadent no-goods, is crucially important.
If we spent all of next year scratching
away at the timing of ratification of Maastricht, of subsidiarity, of its
openness. We can now go on. One thing we decided at Edinburgh, better than I
expected, was that they were going to start at once negotiating with Sweden,
Finland and Austria for full membership, that's something we'd been pressing
for for a long time and we agreed that we would move ahead in our relationships
with central and eastern Europe. We British would like to have...given more
opportunities...Poles, Hungarians, Czecks, to trade with us, to sell their
stuff to us. We want to get ahead with those relationships.
Russia, as you rightly say, what is
going to happen there? What is the best way in which we in the West, not just
the Community, but including the Community, can help cope with that. We will
have more, thanks to Edinburgh, we will now be able to spend more time and more
energy in...on these matters than we have in '92. We have been inward looking
because we had a lot of unsolved inward problems - political, financial. We've
now found a way of settling them.
DIMBLEBY: IF, If, the Danes vote Yes and therefore
the British ratify, Foreign Secretary, thank you very much.
...oooOooo...
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