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DONE AND GONE IN 1990 - GEOFFREY HOWE PACKS
HIS KNAPSACK
Howe's Resignation Speech
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Go here for more about
 Geoffrey
Howe.
Go here for more about
Geoffrey
Howe's Resignation Speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
Geoffrey Howe's Resignation Speech, delivered to
the House of Commons in London, UK - November 13, 1990. |
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I find to my
astonishment that a quarter of a century has
passed |
since I last spoke
from one of the Back Benches. Fortunately,
however, it has been my privilege to serve for
the past 12 months of that time as Leader of the
House of Commons, so I have been reminded quite
recently of the traditional generosity and
tolerance of this place. I hope that I may count
on that today as I offer to the House a
statement about my resignation from the
Government.
It has been suggested--even, indeed, by some of
my right hon. and hon. Friends--that I decided
to resign solely because of questions of style
and not on matters of substance at all. Indeed,
if some of my former colleagues are to be
believed, I must be the first Minister in
history who has resigned because he was in full
agreement with Government policy. The truth is
that, in many aspects of politics, style and
substance complement each other. Very often,
they are two sides of the same coin.
The Prime Minister and I have shared something
like 700 meetings of Cabinet or shadow Cabinet
during the past 18 years, and some 400 hours
alongside each other, at more than 30
international summit meetings. For both of us, I
suspect, it is a pretty daunting record. The
House might well feel that something more than
simple matters of style would be necessary to
rupture such a well-tried relationship.
It was a privilege
to serve as my right hon. Friend's first
Chancellor of the Exchequer; to share in the
transformation of our industrial relations
scene; to help launch our free market program,
commencing with the abolition of exchange
control; and, above all, to achieve such
substantial success against inflation, getting
it down within four years from 22 per cent. to 4
per cent. upon the basis of the strict monetary
discipline involved in the medium-term financial
strategy.
Not one of our
economic achievements would have been possible
without the courage and leadership of my right
hon. Friend--and, if I may say so, they possibly
derived some little benefit from the presence of
a Chancellor who was not exactly a wet himself.
It was a great honor to serve for six years as
Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and to share
with my right hon. Friend in some notable
achievements in the European Community--from
Fontainebleau to the Single European Act. But it
was as we moved on to consider the crucial
monetary issues in the European context that I
came to feel increasing concern. Some of the
reasons for that anxiety were made very clear by
my right hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr.
Lawson) in his resignation speech just over 12
months ago.
Like him, I
concluded at least five years ago that the
conduct of our policy against inflation could no
longer rest solely on attempts to measure and
control the domestic money supply. We had no
doubt that we should be helped in that battle,
and, indeed, in other respects, by joining the
exchange rate mechanism of the European monetary
system. There was, or should have been, nothing
novel about joining the ERM ; it has been a
long-standing commitment.
For a quarter of a
century after the second world war, we found
that the very similar Bretton Woods regime did
serve as a useful discipline. Now, as my right
hon. Friend the Prime Minister acknowledged two
weeks ago, our entry into the ERM can be seen as
an
"extra
discipline for keeping down inflation."
[Official Report, 30 October 1990 ; Vol.
178, c. 888.]
However, it must be said that that practical
conclusion has been achieved only at the cost of
substantial damage to her Administration and,
more serious still, to its inflation
achievements.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Blaby
explained : "The real tragedy is that we did not
join the exchange rate mechanism at least five
years ago."
As he also made clear,
"That was not
for want of trying."
[Official Report, 23 October 1990 ; Vol.
178, c. 216.]
Indeed, the so-called Madrid conditions came
into existence only after the then Chancellor
and I, as Foreign Secretary, made it clear that
we could not continue in office unless a
specific commitment to join the ERM was made.
As the House will no doubt have observed,
neither member of that particular partnership
now remains in office. Our successor as
Chancellor of the Exchequer has, during the past
year, had to devote a great deal of his
considerable talents to demonstrating exactly
how those Madrid conditions have been attained,
so as to make it possible to fulfill a
commitment whose achievement has long been in
the national interest.
It is now, alas, impossible to resist the
conclusion that today's higher rates of
inflation could well have been avoided had the
question of ERM membership been properly
considered and resolved at a much earlier stage.
There are, I fear, developing grounds for
similar anxiety over the handling --not just at
and after the Rome summit--of the wider, much
more open question of economic and monetary
union.
Let me first make
clear certain important points on which I have
no disagreement with my right hon. Friend, the
Prime Minister. I do not regard the Delors
report as some kind of sacred text that has to
be accepted, or even rejected, on the nod. But
it is an important working document. As I have
often made plain, it is seriously deficient in
significant respects.
I do not regard the Italian presidency's
management of the Rome summit as a model of its
kind--far from it. It was much the same, as my
right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will
recall, in Milan some five years ago.
I do not regard it as in any sense wrong for
Britain to make criticisms of that kind plainly
and courteously, nor in any sense wrong for us
to do so, if necessary, alone. As I have already
made clear, I have, like the Prime Minister and
other right hon. Friends, fought too many
European battles in a minority of one to have
any illusions on that score.
But it is crucially important that we should
conduct those arguments upon the basis of a
clear understanding of the true relationship
between this country, the Community and our
Community partners. And it is here, I fear, that
my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister
increasingly risks leading herself and others
astray in matters of substance as well as of
style.
It was the late Lord Stockton, formerly Harold
Macmillan, who first put the central point
clearly. As long ago as 1962, he argued that we
had to place and keep ourselves within the EC.
He saw it as essential then, as it is today, not
to cut ourselves off from the realities of power
; not to retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality
about our past and so diminish our own control
over our own destiny in the future.
The pity is that the Macmillan view had not been
perceived more clearly a decade before in the
1950s. It would have spared us so many of the
struggles of the last 20 years had we been in
the Community from the outset ; had we been
ready, in the much too simple phrase, to
"surrender some sovereignty" at a much earlier
stage. If we had been in from the start, as
almost everybody now acknowledges, we should
have had more, not less, influence over the
Europe in which we live today. We should never
forget the lesson of that isolation, of being on
the outside looking in, for the conduct of
today's affairs.
We have done best when we have seen the
Community not as a static entity to be resisted
and contained, but as an active process which we
can shape, often decisively, provided that we
allow ourselves to be fully engaged in it, with
confidence, with enthusiasm and in good faith.
We must at all costs avoid presenting ourselves
yet again with an over- simplified choice, a
false antithesis, a bogus dilemma, between one
alternative, starkly labeled "co-operation
between independent sovereign states" and a
second, equally crudely labeled alternative,
"centralized, federal super-state", as if there
were no middle way in between.
We commit a serious error if we think always in
terms of "surrendering" sovereignty and seek to
stand pat for all time on a given deal--by
proclaiming, as my right hon. Friend the Prime
Minister did two weeks ago, that we have
"surrendered enough".
The European enterprise is not and should not be
seen like that--as some kind of zero sum game.
Sir Winston Churchill put it much more
positively 40 years ago, when he said:
"It is also
possible and not less agreeable to regard
this sacrifice or merger of national
sovereignty as the gradual assumption by all
the nations concerned of that larger
sovereignty which can alone protect their
diverse and distinctive customs and
characteristics and their national
traditions."
I have to say that I find Winston Churchill's
perception a good deal more convincing, and more
encouraging for the interests of our nation,
than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up
by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to
look out upon a continent that is positively
teeming with ill- intentioned people, scheming,
in her words, to "extinguish democracy", to
"dissolve our national identities" and to lead
us "through the back-door into a federal
Europe".
What kind of vision is that for our business
people, who trade there each day, for our
financiers, who seek to make London the money
capital of Europe or for all the young people of
today?
These concerns are especially important as we
approach the crucial topic of economic and
monetary union. We must be positively and
centrally involved in this debate and not
fearfully and negatively detached. The costs of
disengagement here could be very serious indeed.
There is talk, of course, of a single currency
for Europe. I agree that there are many
difficulties about the concept--both economic
and political. Of course, as I said in my letter
of resignation, none of us wants the imposition
of a single currency. But that is not the real
risk. The 11 others cannot impose their solution
on the 12th country against its will, but they
can go ahead without us. The risk is not
imposition but isolation. The real threat is
that of leaving ourselves with no say in the
monetary arrangements that the rest of Europe
chooses for itself, with Britain once again
scrambling to join the club later, after the
rules have been set and after the power has been
distributed by others to our disadvantage. That
would be the worst possible outcome.
It is to avoid just that outcome and to find a
compromise both acceptable in the Government and
sellable in Europe that my right hon. Friend the
Chancellor has put forward his hard ecu
proposal. This lays careful emphasis on the
possibility that the hard ecu as a common
currency could, given time, evolve into a single
currency. I have of course supported the hard
ecu plan. But after Rome, and after the comments
of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister two
weeks ago, there is grave danger that the hard
ecu proposal is becoming untenable, because two
things have happened.
The first is that my right hon. Friend the Prime
Minister has appeared to rule out from the start
any compromise at any stage on any of the basic
components that all the 11 other countries
believe to be a part of EMU--a single currency
or a permanently fixed exchange rate, a central
bank or common monetary policy. Asked whether we
would veto any arrangement that jeopardized the
pound sterling, my right hon. Friend replied
simply, "Yes." That statement means not that we
can block EMU but that they can go ahead without
us. Is that a position that is likely to ensure,
as I put it in my resignation letter, that "we
hold, and retain, a position of influence in
this vital debate"?
I fear not. Rather, to do so, we must, as I
said, take care not to rule in or rule out any
one solution absolutely. We must be seen to be
part of the same negotiation.
The second thing that happened was, I fear, even
more disturbing. Reporting to this House, my
right hon. Friend almost casually remarked that
she did not think that many people would want to
use the hard ecu anyway--even as a common
currency, let alone as a single one. It was
remarkable--indeed, it was tragic--to hear my
right hon. Friend dismissing, with such
personalized incredulity, the very idea that the
hard ecu proposal might find growing favor among
the peoples of Europe, just as it was
extraordinary to hear her assert that the whole
idea of EMU might be open for consideration only
by future generations.
Those future
generations are with us today. How on earth are
the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of
England, commending the hard ecu as they strive
to, to be taken as serious participants in the
debate against that kind of background noise? I
believe that both the Chancellor and the
Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope
that there is no monopoly of cricketing
metaphors. It is rather like sending your
opening batsmen to the crease only for them to
find, the moment the first balls are bowled,
that their bats have been broken before the game
by the team captain.
The point was perhaps more sharply put by a
British business man, trading in Brussels and
elsewhere, who wrote to me last week, stating:
"People
throughout Europe see our Prime Minister's
finger-wagging and hear her passionate, No,
No, No', much more clearly than the content
of the carefully worded formal texts."
He went on:
"It is too
easy for them to believe that we all share
her attitudes ; for why else has she been
our Prime Minister for so long?"
My correspondent concluded:
"This is a
desperately serious situation for our
country."
And sadly, I have
to agree.
The tragedy is--and it is for me personally, for
my party, for our whole people and for my right
hon. Friend herself, a very real tragedy--that
the Prime Minister's perceived attitude towards
Europe is running increasingly serious risks for
the future of our nation. It risks minimizing
our influence and maximizing our chances of
being once again shut out. We have paid heavily
in the past for late starts and squandered
opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that
happen again. If we detach ourselves completely,
as a party or a nation, from the middle ground
of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and
very hard ever to correct.
In my letter of resignation, which I tendered
with the utmost sadness and dismay, I said:
"Cabinet
Government is all about trying to persuade
one another from within".
That was my commitment to Government by
persuasion--persuading colleagues and the
nation. I have tried to do that as Foreign
Secretary and since, but I realize now that the
task has become futile : trying to stretch the
meaning of words beyond what was credible, and
trying to pretend that there was a common policy
when every step forward risked being subverted
by some casual comment or impulsive answer.
The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right
hon. Friend the Prime Minister--and, after all,
in two decades together that instinct of loyalty
is still very real--and of loyalty to what I
perceive to be the true interests of the nation,
has become all too great. I no longer believe it
possible to resolve that conflict from within
this Government.
That is why I have
resigned. In doing so, I have done what I
believe to be right for my party and my country.
The time has come for others to consider their
own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties
with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps
too long.
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