Why flog a dying white elephant13

A galaxy of Ministers have gathered at the wake of Nato in Paris for the last meeting of the Nato Council there before General de Gaulle bundles the organisation and all its works out of France.

They are the Foreign Secretary (George Brown), the Defence Minister (Denis Healy), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Jim Callaghan), and the Minister for Europe (George Thomson).

De Gaulle took France out of Nato some time ago, because he said staying in meant being run by the United States and he wasn’t having that.

VETO

By the same token he proposes once more to veto Britain’s entry into the Common Market, because, in the words of the Evening Standard Paris correspondent (December 14), “he regards Mr Wilson as President Johnson’s stooge agent and so it follows for him that Britain must not be allowed to stage any Trojan horse staff for the Americans inside the Market”.

Meanwhile there was a considerable row in the House on December 12, and, according to the press, another at the Parliamentary Labour Party’s meeting two days later.

This was a result of George Thomson’s announcement that the Government had agreed to “make no changes in their troop and supply dispositions in Germany” and to go on talking with the Americans and Germans at least until next July about our share of Nato defence costs.

It had further been agreed that they would continue to “act in concert with their allies and follow the prescribed Nato and Western European Union procedures”.

CONSENT

These require the consent of our allies to reducing our commitments in Nato, however tough our economic situation, instead of cutting our Nato defence costs now and by our own decision, as the Government has so often said it would do and as the state of our economy says we must do.

The House was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of Labour backbenchers cheering Sir Alec Douglas-Home when he recalled the Chancellor’s pledge on introducing his budget last May, that the Government would secure “relief from the whole of the foreign exchange costs of keeping our forces in Germany”, and concluded that therefore George Thomson’s statement represented “a complete failure of the Government policy in this respect”.

FEEBLE

Michael Foot banged home that point: it was about time the Government understood, he said, that many of us on the Labour back benches “find the continued stalling of the German Government on this subject, and the utterly feeble response of the British Government to it totally intolerable”.

This was particularly so as when they introduced the wage freeze on July 20 they had repeated that “part of those very stringent measures involved severe cuts in the amount which we spend on our forces in Germany”.

He warned the Government that if it did not do better than that, it was going to have a first-class row on its hands.

“Manny” Shinwell, who as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party and former War Minister is no longer often a rebel, pointed out that ”this matter has been dragging on for many years”, and that “Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery, who certainly knows as much as anybody on either Front Bench about military matters, has asserted that no more than 20,000 troops are required in Germany” (instead of our present 55,000).