Foreign Office Lying - Oil and Fish

The web pages of the FCO on the EU include one on the subject of so-called EU myths, linked here, the final one of which states: Greedy EU chiefs will snatch Britain’s North Sea oil if Tony Blair signs up to the planned EU constitution, it was revealed last night. The draft proposal for the treaty has a secret clause demanding power over Europe’s energy supply.

The Sun, 29 May 2003

The proposed EU Reform Treaty states:

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Difficulties in the supply of certain products (energy) 84) Article 100(1) shall be replaced by the following: "1. Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy." =================================== Solidarity in an energy crisis can only mean sharing the misery, in other words 'allocation' of supplies. If Britain at the time of crisis were 90 per cent self-sufficient in energy and the rest of the EU were some 90 per cent short of supplies, sharing the misery would put the UK at a shortage of maybe 89 per cent along with the rest of the Continent! That to me represents a loss of control of our North Sea oil and gas just as surely as we were illegally tricked out of our fisheries, which is now so long past that it can be brazenly stated as an EU resource very early in the draft Treaty, rather than tucked away on page 74 of 145 as may be viewed from here. The fisheries loss is repeatedly rammed home: Article 3 on Page 46: Article 3 1. The Union shall have exclusive competence in the following areas: (a) customs union; (b) the establishing of the competition rules necessary for the functioning of the internal market; (c) monetary policy for the Member States whose currency is the euro; (d) the conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy; (e) common commercial policy. 2. The Union shall also have exclusive competence for the conclusion of an international agreement when its conclusion is provided for in a legislative act of the Union or is necessary to enable the Union to exercise its internal competence, or insofar as its conclusion may affect common rules or alter their scope. And on Page 53: Agriculture and fisheries 45) In the heading of Title II, the words "AND FISHERIES" shall be added. 46) Article 32(1) shall be amended as follows: (a) the word "fisheries" shall be inserted after "agriculture"; (b) the following sentence shall be added at the end of the paragraph: "References to the common agricultural policy or to agriculture, and the use of the term "agricultural", shall be understood as also referring to fisheries, having regard to the specific characteristics of this sector." Christopher Booker has had the most to say on this topic down the years, 'Britain and Europe: The Culture of Deceit', linked here, is particularly apt, I quote: "Another revealing measure of how deeply the culture of deceit had now set in was the curious story of the common fisheries policy, and the Heath Government’s response to the crude ambush set up by the Six to ensure that, as part of their price of entry, the four applicant countries, Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Norway, would have to hand over to the Community their fishing waters, the richest in the world. ^{(all documents cited on the CFP are from PRO files in FO 30/656-9)}

On the very day the applications went in, June 30 1970, the Six hastily approved the principle that member-states should be given “equal access” to each other’s fishing waters, under Brussels control. The point was that, because this had now become part of the acquis communautaire, the body of existing Community law, the applicant countries would have to accept it as a fait accompli. Within a few years, as everyone knew, national fishing waters were due to be extended out under international law to 200 miles. Because the waters belonging to the four applicant states would then contain most of the fish in European waters, this would give the Six an astonishing prize.

In fact the Six knew their new fisheries policy was not even legal. Among the Foreign Office papers released in 2001 was an internal Council of Ministers document, dating from June1970, which shows how desperate the Brussels lawyers had been to find some article in the Treaty of Rome which could be used to authorise such a policy. There was none. The policy therefore had no legal justification, and other papers show that the Foreign Office knew this too.

But so determined was Mr Heath not to offend his prospective new partners that he decided not to challenge them. Britain would simply accept the illegal new fisheries policy, even though this would mean handing over one of her greatest renewable natural assets and would spell disaster for a large part of her fishing fleet.

Gradually the British fishermen got some idea that they were about to be sacrificed, and in the closing months of 1970 various MPs for fishing constituencies wrote to ministers asking what on earth was going on. They were fobbed off with evasive replies. Indeed, as the recently released papers show, civil servants eventually worked out a careful form of words, intended to reassure the fishermen that “proper account would be taken of their interests”. But behind the scenes, as a Scottish Office memo put it on November 9, ministers were being told how important it was not to get drawn into detailed explanations of just what problems might lie ahead for the fishermen because, “in the wider UK context, they must be regarded as expendable”.

The following year the White Paper promised that Britain would not sign an accession treaty until the Common Market’s fisheries policy was changed, Geoffrey Rippon repeated this promise to Parliament and to the Tory Party conference. But in November Mr Heath realised that time was running out. Unless he accepted the fishing policy as it stood, his plans for Britain’s entry in January 1973 would have to be abandoned. He instructed Rippon to give way, and when Rippon was questioned about this in the House of Commons on December 13, he answered with a straight lie. He claimed Britain had retained complete control over the waters round her coastline, knowing that this was simply not true. So barefaced was this deceit over fishing rights that successive governments and fisheries ministers would continue to obfuscate the truth of what had been done for the next three decades."

Thanks to some very detailed research in Denmark, which I linked from a posting on this blog last evening, doubts now also hang over Edward Heath's role as EU negotiator in 1961. Is it not now time for the Conservative Party to admit their role in this entire sorry history and put forward a new way ahead for Britain and its relations with Europe. This Reform Treaty which I have now fully read is so entirely unacceptable for any independent nation state that full debate can surely be no longer shrugged aside, especially with the FCO offering mostly untrue juvenile claptrap on its website to put against the repeated untruth's of Foreign Office Ministers, Miliband and Murphy?