Britain should start to pull back from the European Union, according to former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who on March 18 branded the 15-nation bloc "fundamentally unreformable".
In a new book Statecraft, serialised in the Times newspaper, the "Iron Lady" stopped short of calling for a total exit from the EU, but advocated policies for a future Conservative government that would withdraw Britain from some of the EU's key activities.
"It is frequently said to be unthinkable that Britain should leave the European Union. But avoidance of thought about this is a poor substitute for judgement," Thatcher wrote.
Rather than outright withdrawal, Thatcher said she would prefer to retain some existing arrangements with Brussels, while opting out of "present and future mechanisms which harm our interests or restrict our freedom of action."
"The objectives would be a withdrawal from the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), an end to our adherence to the common fisheries policy, withdrawal from all the entanglements of a common foreign and security policy and a reassertion of our trade policy."
Twelve years after being ousted as British premier, Thatcher showed her legendary distrust of Europe has not waned -- nor her belief that an unstoppable drive towards a "United States of Europe", as she terms it, will end in tears.
"During my lifetime, most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it.
"That generalisation is clearly true of the Second World War. Nazism was, after all, a European ideology, the Third Reich an attempt at European domination.
"It remains for the non-European world, above all America, to try to reduce the harm the new Europe is set to do -- and then when the folly falls, as through lack of common interests it finally will, to help pick up the bits," she said.
Although increasingly on the periphery of British politics, Thatcher's remarks will stir up an already simmering debate in Britain over the vexed political issue of Britain's relationship with Europe, and in particular over whether to join the euro.
In a BBC "Panorama" current affairs programme on Sunday evening, audience members from across the country narrowly voted against joining the single currency.
(China Daily March 18, 2002)
