Basic HTML Version
PAGE 16
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JULY 8, 1986 •
The analogy of the frog doesn't actually hold true, of course.
The
European Community••. is increasingly a force to be reckoned with.
The
bureaucreatic institutions of the Community are together slowly but surely
becoming the dominant regulatory force in Europe, gradually absorbing
prerogatives once exercised by the EC's component sovereign states. The
concept of Europe as
a unit grows every year.
Not everybody is happy
about this development; especially the British, who are beginning to
realize that their hallowed independence and sovereignty is being
compromised as never before by, as they view it, the suffocating
envelopment of EC bureaucracy.
In an article in the June 23 TIMES of
London,
Paul Johnson, one of Britain's most incisive journalists,
expressed dismay at the way the British government
is
accepting monumental
changes in the EC constitution almost without a whimper.
A political
union is being created--why haven't the British been protesting, he
wonders.
The government has accepted, and Parliament is now enacting,
legislative changes in our relations with the European
Community which will affect the lives of every man, woman and
child in this country.
These changes. are fundamental and
irreversible.
Yet the event is passing almost without
comment•••• When Britain was deciding in 1972 whether to join
the EEC, at least there was a national debate.••• Now we are
taking a gigantic further step in our commitment to the
Community, •••and no one seems at all interested.
One reason is the sheer soporific effect of the leaden jargon
with which the EEC conceals its doings•••• The somnolence with
which Parliament has treated the question has been compounded
by the trance-inducing character of
[Britain's Foreign
Secretary] Sir Geoffrey Howe.... It would have been quite a
different matter if Mrs. Thatcher had taken an interest in this
business. When she picks up an issue, instantly the air begins
to crackle with tension, hackles rise, men unsheath their
adjectives. But she has no enthusiasm for the EEC, which she
regards as a regrettable necessity, and has little but contempt
for its doings. Uncharacteristically, she has allowed herself
to be persuaded by Sir Geoffrey that the bill now going through
Parliament is unavoidable, part of the tiresome process of EEC
membership, just more of the same.
But it is not more of the same•••• The title of the
legislation, the European Communities (Amendment) Bill, is
misleading. So, indeed, and perhaps deliberately, is the name
of the international agreement to which it gives effect:
"The
Single European Act".
It is not an act at all.
It is, --rii
effect� a completely new treaty, which ought properly to have
been placed on a level of significance equivalent to that of
the original Treaty of Rome. For what the act, and therefore
also the bill, do is what successi�rTtisli""gov�nments have
repeatealysaid-tneywould not do:
take Britain int"oa
European polTticaf""union. Indeea tne preamE"!e of the a�ays
as much.
It will transform relations among the EEC states
"into a European union" and it will "invest this union with the
necessary means of action". The select committee appointed by
the House of Lords to scrutinise such proposals concluded
bluntly and bleakly•••: ·The powers of the United Kingdom