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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 21, 1982
PAGE 7
In an unprecedented vote, a majority of EEC governments approved
more than 60 new Community regulations to implement the price
package beginning Thursday. The price increases now had legal
force throughout the 10-nation EEC. Britain, Denmark and Greece
did not participate in the voting, they said.
Diplomats said there were angry exchanges among ministers as the
voting was concluded. British agriculture minister Peter Walker
told reporters the unprecedented� violated the basis .£!2 which
Britain had joined the EEC, 2£ Common Market, in 1973•..•
Diplomats said Walker: warned his colleagues the decision would
wreck the consensus politics under which the EEC worked. In a
bitter attack on the French and West German ministers, he told
reporters it had made "an impetuous decision which on reflection
the majority of ministers would come to regret." Britain would
be "urgently considering the implications of this new and
dangerous principle," walker said.
The Common Market decision has obviously come at a very awkward time for
Britain, considering its desire for firm support from the EC over the Falk
lands crisis. Another REUTERS dispatch, a day later (May 19) from London
reported the following:
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said today a decision by Common
Market countries to override a British veto on farm price
increases had provoked the greatest crisis in the European
Economic Community in nearly� decade.
She said her government would consider the matter carefully and
would not rush into a reaction to the unprecedented move by seven
EEC farm ministers who yesterday pushed through the price package
over the objections of Britain, Denmark and Greece.
Mrs.
Thatcher has come under strong pressure from politicians and the
press to retaliate� cutting off British contributions to the
budget of the 10-nation community.
Britain said the vote broke a 16-year practice--the. so-called
Luxembourg Compromise created at the insistence of late French
President Charles de Gaulle--under which members are allowed to
block decisions vital to their interests.
In Greece and Denmark, which both joined Britain in abstaining on
the vote on farm prices, government officials said they were
profoundly worried� the apparent change in the way the commu
nity worked. French President Francois Mitterrand said the farm
prices decision was not a break with precedent and added that the
existence of the community had been at stake. In a French tele
vision interview from Algiers, he said the� raised questions
� ot about the principle of unanimity but about the role Britain
intended to
E.!!Y
in Europe.
In a wider perspective, Geoffrey Godsell of the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
delves into the split between the English-speaking Protestant and Spanish
speaking Catholic worlds in the newspaper's May 11 issue: