Friday 6 November 1992

HEAD PREFECT: INTERVIEW WITH GLYN FORD

Tribune, 6 November 1992

The leader of Labour's contingent in the European Parliament talks to Paul Anderson

“I find it slightly strange that Jack Cunning­ham is responsible both for Outer Mongolia and for Europe," says Glyn Ford, the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party. "It's not his fault. But it really is a different ball game. With Europe we're talking about day-to-day legisla­tion. With Outer Mongolia you have a crisis every ten or 20 years."

Ford, at 42 one of the most senior Labour politi­cians of his generation, is deadly serious about the importance of Europe to Labour. He hopes that the party's first-ever European conference in Brighton this weekend will get MPs and activists to stop thinking about the European Community as a "for­eign policy" question. For Ford, as for a majority of his fellow MEPs, Europe is a central domestic issue - and the future of the EC is still something that too many in the Labour Party have either not thought about sufficiently or, worse, have approached as if nothing had happened to the Common Market since Britain joined in 1973.

An MEP for Greater Manchester East since 1984, he has been leader of Labour's MEPs since just after the 1989 European elections, which saw the party take 40 per cent of the vote and 45 of Britain's 78 seats in the European Parliament. He is an unashamed Euro-enthusiast who describes the cre­ation of a democratically accountable federal execu­tive for Europe as "the direction in which things are going and the direction in which we should be go­ing". Mindful, perhaps, of Labour's official hostility to what John Smith calls a "European super-state", he adds diplomatically that he does not see a federal Europe happening in his lifetime.

Unsurprisingly, he has little time for those Labour voices arguing that his Westminster colleagues should do all in their power to prevent rati­fication of the Maastricht treaty by voting against  the governments Maastricht Bill at Third Reading, although he backed the decision to vote against this week's Maastricht "paving motion".

He is in favour, he says, of ending the govern­ment's opt-outs on the social chapter and the single currency and is worried that the Tories are intent on watering down the provisions in the Maastricht treaty dealing with powers for the regions. But Maastricht "is the best we can get at the moment".

"Maastricht will allow us to move forward on eco­nomic and monetary, environmental and social is­sues," he wrote recently in Tribune. "Without it we will have a lopsided single market rather than a community, where the needs of business are paramount and the needs of citizens come a very poor second."

The core of Ford's case is simple: business is al­ready operating at a European level and, if the Left is going to have a hope of keeping capital under con­trol, it must create institutions at the same level. "What is done in a single member state does not control the multinational companies," he says. "We need economic and monetary union and political union, with elected politicians - that is the Euro­pean Parliament - having a much stronger say."

He dismisses the argument advanced by much of the Left that the conditions for economic and mone­tary union laid down by Maastricht are essentially deflationary. "The Treaty of Rome was written in the language of Keynesianism," he says. "Maastricht is written in the language of monetarism. But that's not actually a terribly important issue. The real problem in Europe is the balance of political forces -and the way to solve the problem is to get more so­cialists elected. We are in opposition in six out the 12 member states, in coalition in four and in power in two. The reality is that we don't have the majori­ty of voters on our side."

Instead of laying into Maastricht, says Ford, the left should be engaging with the reluctance of Europe's current governments to pursue co-ordinated economic policies to pull Europe out of recession. "What we should be arguing for is a pan-European reflation programme. If we win that argument, we have the capability, within Maastricht, to imple­ment those programmes. Maastricht in itself doesn't stop a Labour government from doing anything."

Of course, no one knows whether Maastricht will survive the Danish no vote in June's referendum - the reason Labour gave for voting against the Gov­ernment in this week's debate. Ford reckons that the Danes will find a way to ratify the treaty but the worst case could still just about happen: "a small in­ner core making a multilateral agreement, steaming ahead on economic and monetary union" and forget­ting all the social and environmental aspects of the Maastricht deal.

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He is confident that Labour will not treat this week's paving motion vote as a precedent for swinging against Maastricht. Last month's Labour conference gave an overwhelming endorse­ment to the pro-Europe position that has been de­veloped in the past five years, he says. "There's been a massive change of mood," he goes on, quoting the very existence of this weekend's conference as evi­dence.

It is difficult to disagree with this sentiment. While, five years ago, Labour's Euro-enthusiasts cloaked their enthusiasm with criticism of the EC, today it is the Euro-sceptics who feel that they have to camouflage their opinions by asserting defensive­ly that they are "pro-European but..."

Even in the past six months there has been no­ticeable movement towards acceptance of Europe as Labour's future, perhaps most significantly in John Smith's ready endorsement of plans to set up a Eu­ropean Socialist Party, largely to ensure better so­cialist co-ordination in the European Parliament. Neil Kinnock had always blocked any such thing, Next week, a meeting of EC socialist parties in The Hague is almost certain to back the Euro-party, of which the EPLP will become the British section.

It will, of course, be a long time before most Labour Party members see themselves as members of a British section of a European party. In the meantime Labour has some serious business to do. The next national elections that Labour faces are the 1994 European Parliament elections. As things stand, Ford is optimistic that the party can do well in them, even better than in 1989. "We're in the po­sition where we could conceivably gain seats," he says. "There are three seats which we lost by less than 3,000."

Before the polls in 18 months there is another, possibly more lucrative, challenge. Last month, after having his draft definition of "subsidiarity" rejected by EC governments, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, offered £140,000 to anyone who could come up with a definition of the idea on one side of paper. Ford reckons that the prize would be easy money.

"I don't understand why Delors was so desperate­ly looking for a definition," he says. "In the Maastricht treaty there's a definition of subsidiarity which is that things should be done at (he appropri­ate level. That's perfectly logical. You do not empty dustbins at European level. Equally, you do not make foreign policy in the parish council. There are not insuperable problems in the US about what should be decided locally and what should be decid­ed. Why should there be in Europe?"

With Labour sacking headquarters staff and the trade unions broke, maybe Ford and his colleagues should enter Delors's competition.