THE 15 March 1975 The international Catholic weekly 20p
TABLET Ir ish supplei tent •Louis McRedmond • John P eck • J. C. McGarry Garret FitzGerald • Desmond W ilson • John Costello • Brendan Clarke • Ray Carroll • Graham Greene as Monsieur Vert: Anthony Burgess Poem s by Patrick Galvin, S^an 0 Riord&in &c
The way on from Dublin As he has shown again in Dublin this week, the Federal German Chancellor Helmud Schmidt is one of Britain’s most steadfast friends in the European Community. He is a candid critic of its faults but he has consistently held to the ideal, first of permanent friendship with France the original founder member, and then the extension of this friendship to all the democratic countries in Europe so that they may together face common dangers and constructive opportunities.
colleagues at Geneva, dubbed the Community “a rather out of date creation” echoing a manifesto of the Get Britain Out campaign which called it an irrelevant anachronism. He said of this unprecedented effort in international cooperation that it was more concerned with competition than social welfare.
There has always been a fundamental unreality and a certain dishonesty in Mr Wilson’s talk of renegotiation. The term was invented and employed for party-political purposes, to suggest that our options were open and that Mr Wilson and his colleagues held high cards. This is somewhat short of the truth. There has never been and never need be any problem of cooperation in the European partnership that is incapable of solution in the ordinary day-to-day boardroom business, so to speak, of the Community. The Community as a whole knows very well that it is in its own interests to accommodate its partners in all their needs to the utmost bounds of practical possibility. Europe is economically as strong as its weakest link and since that link is Britain at present then it is in Europe’s interest to strengthen it. Mr Wilson has kept credibility with his amorphous party so far by looking over his left shoulder to the trade unions and pretending that he is building a new bridge, whereas all that has been done is to help in some under-pinning of the old bridge, mainly thanks to the cooperative attitude of his European colleagues.
Mr Murray’s opposition to Britain’s remaining in the Community must be a disappointment to European socialists. It would seem to argue a subservience to the extreme Left in this country, welcomed by the Soviet government, which while it tightly controls Comecon, the Communist counterpart to the eec, is deeply hostile to its democratic rival. Another indication of bias against the eec came last week from Mr Ron Hayward, the General Secretary of the Labour Party, who returned from East Germany announcing his pleasure in joining the Communist regime there in pursuing the ideal of international understanding and security. It was a calculated slight to Bonn on whose financial strength this country must to a large extent rely, thanks to the large Federal German balance of payments, for assistance in our present plight. The opposition to the Community on the score of its socalled reactionary character wholly ignores its work in research and its initiative in improved labour relations, its financial help to poorer regions, notably in Italy and Britain, and its recent agreement to give help to 46 impoverished nations in Africa and the Caribbean, which Mrs Judith Hart, the Minister for Overseas Development, rightly called a triumph.
They have understood Mr Wilson’s difficulties. Last week Mr Len Murray the General Secretary o f the tuc, fresh from his contacts with his Communist and other
Associate status in relation to the Community has been widely extended. The anti-Community lobby declares that if Britain left the Community it could be the nucleus of a
