The Rt. Hon. Sir John Major KG CH

Tag: 1992

  • Mr Major’s “Europe and the World Speech” – 7 September 1992

    Below are extracts from Mr Major’s opening speech to the UK Presidency Conference on “Europe and the World After 1992” held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on Monday 7th September 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Two weeks from now we will know the result of the French referendum on Maastricht. It is a pivotal event and it is in the forefront of our minds today.

    The Danish referendum has already narrowly said “no” to the Treaty. The combination of that and of a French ‘non’ would be decisive. Without the consent of all twelve Member States the Maastricht Treaty cannot proceed. It would be dead. That is a statement of fact not conjecture. Even if, as I hope, the French vote “yes” the Danish difficulties must still be overcome. And then, across Europe, national Parliaments must approve the Treaty. In the United Kingdom it may have a bruising passage since – uniquely in the Community – we in Britain will scrutinise the Bill line by line, clause by clause and vote on it in the same way. I believe myself that this is a more effective scrutiny than referenda where many votes may be cast on matters wholly unrelated to the Treaty. In Britain we do not face a referendum and, given our Parliamentary procedure, I have no hesitation in rejecting the concept.

    The Maastricht Treaty is a product of compromises by 12 nations. A hard-fought outcome. No one member state regarded it as ideal. But we all regarded it as the right outcome for the development of Europe.

    Overall the Treaty is good for Britain and good for Europe. However, important as Maastricht is, we should not let this particular strand of European development blind us to the other issues before us. Maastricht deserves approval but it is by no means the whole agenda. It is but part of a bigger agenda.

    Now, as all the certainties of a year ago are in question, there is a temptation for onlookers to think that the train could be derailed. I do not believe that is likely or desirable. It can be stalled. It can be sent off in a different direction. But it cannot be halted. The Community cannot fossilise. Europe cannot stand still as the world changes.

    The founders of the Community rightly recognised the destructive force of nationalism. But, in their reactions to that, I believe they did under-estimate the durability of national self interest, national identity and national pride. And they failed to recognise that this is wrapped up in political and economic structures as well as in culture and language.

    This is what has often brought such criticism to the Community despite its achievements. And these are many. The European concept has delivered peace, security and growth over nearly three decades. European citizens know that and few in any country will admit to wanting to dismantle the Community. Even its fiercest critics fight shy of that. But there are concerns about how it develops that European governments must address. Many European citizens fear for national self-identity. Will it be lost? Will their domestic interests be subordinated? Will they forever face frustrating restrictions?

    You could sense that debate in Denmark. It is alive in France. It is an every day currency in the German Laender. It flourishes in the UK: there are instincts rooted here deep in the blood: they are not to be swept away by rhetoric about growth or slogans about unity.

    The Community must show that these fears are phantoms. To do so it must recognise and build on national identity and national pride, not appear to ride roughshod over them. For the reality is that no nation’s identity will ever be lost. Whatever happens in the Community the French will be no less French, the Germans no less German, the Danes no less Danish and the British no less British. No legislation by politicians can wipe away the instincts of nations forged in a thousand years of history even if, as in the case of Britain, that thousand years began with English and Celtic blood freely mixed with Roman, Viking, Saxon and Norman.

    The problem is a political one. The politicians must carry their nations with them. The ten years to 1990 were years of growth, prosperity and confidence and of a favourable climate for developing Europe. In some Community countries the political parties vie one with another to be the most pro-European and they do so because for them the Community has been an undiluted good.

    The Treaty under which we are operating explicitly says that the institutions of the community cannot ride roughshod over Member governments: the governments must all agree before they propose important changes. And then the individual nations, through their democratic procedures, must have the final say. And that is why if Denmark and France, or any other Member States, says “No”, then all must think again. There can be no question of leaving one member behind. Britain would not be party to such an agreement.

    At Maastricht there were other significant developments. The Maastricht Treaty enshrines two very important ideas. The first is that the Community should only do those things which cannot be better done at the level of Member States. That implies scrapping some existing, overbearing legislation, as well as avoiding new, unnecessary regulation. This process, which makes subsidiarity a living concept is vitally important to Member States throughout the Community. The second is that we can act together in unison without necessarily acting within the framework of Community law. This is a revolutionary change. In foreign policy and in matters of interior affairs and justice we shall work together as Twelve within a Treaty framework, but that framework will be distinct from the Treaty of Rome, outside Community law, outside the sole initiative of the European Commission, outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

    The fear had always been that if we could not do things as a Community we would revert to doing them on our own, each of us going our separate ways. Now the Maastricht Treaty sets out a new way of cooperation that should reassure the sceptics and build a new cohesion. It is the key to progress. So what would be the position if the Maastricht Treaty was not ratified by all the Member States and could not be implemented? Would all those gains be lost?

    The fact is that you could not set aside the results of a hard fought negotiation and expect to keep all the gains. I believe that what we won at Maastricht is worth preserving. The easiest way to preserve it is through ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. If the Maastricht Treaty is not ratified, the arguments within the Community will not go away. They will have to be gone through again.

    So, over the next ten years, what happens outside the present borders of the European Community will be as important to our development as what happens inside the existing Community. The Community will be joined by countries who have rediscovered their nationhood. It is the nation states of the Community that remain the fundamental political units in Europe. People feel loyalty first to their country. European democracy begins with the traditional institutions that people understand and feel close to; those are the Parliaments, Assemblies, Folketings, Bundestags of each of their own countries. The Community and the countries that make it up are two inseparable sides of the same coin.

    In ten years time, I want to see a series of solid democracies to our east, on the road to prosperity and with the real prospect of EC membership. I want a Europe freer and safer. More open and more competitive, if we can do that, it will perhaps be our most important achievement.

    Maastricht reflects that view of the Community. The achievements won at Maastricht will need to be saved if the Community is to develop as we wish: liberal, open to the outside world, responding to the wishes of its citizens.

    As I intimated earlier, no Treaty is ever perfect: they are all the outcome of a hard negotiation and therefore a compromise. That is true of Maastricht. But if Maastricht did not enter into force the alternative would not be the status quo ante. The real issues which affect the Community: our economic development, enlargement, our response to international events and crisis, all require a response. To be effective that needs to be a response agreed among all of the Member States. Maastricht gives us the means of doing just that.

  • Mr Major’s Speech on Welsh Party Members – 4 September 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s speech made during a lunch in Wales to Conservative members on Friday 4th September 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Thank you very much. I don’t know why you think I’m busy – it’s quite an easy job really! Not a lot’s going on at the moment! Could I just say firstly what a pleasure it is to be back and to see what the real world looks like outside London. Find out what’s going on. Can I also say right at the outset, how delighted I was firstly, with the quality of our candidates at the General Election, and secondly with the way in which the Conservative Party in Wales fought that General Election in each and every constituency in the Principality. You had some super results. You had the best candidates. We could have done with a few more victories – some were very close. But I don’t have any doubt that providing we continue with the right policies and have the right candidates – especially important, I believe, in Wales – have the right candidates, I’ve no doubt at all that Rod will have quite a few colleagues joining him when next we have a General Election – but I must tell you it is not imminent!

    But you did work hard. You did extremely well, despite the difficulties of the recession, we came out of it with the same number of seats. And had the Opposition vote crumbled in a slightly different way we might have picked up several more seats than we did. On other occasions we’ve had 14 seats with the same number of votes that we had at the last election and only appeared with six seats. We could well have some boundary changes between now and the next General Election! And we will just have to find a bigger bench in Westminster for our Welsh Conservative Members of Parliament in the future.

    And I am confident for another reason as well. Because I do think you have had, and retain at the moment, a remarkably good team at the Welsh Office. There’s been a long string of senior Ministers in the Welsh Office who’ve done, I think, a remarkable job for the United Kingdom as a whole, for the Principality, and of course for the Conservative Party. And David Hunt follows in that tradition. He’s a very old, longstanding friend of mine, and I think he does a superb job, both for the Conservative Party and Wales.

    And you have Wyn Roberts, who occasionally breaks out of Welsh and into English, who I believe was the resident Minister in charge of Wales when William the Conqueror first came here! And I promised my daughter that her children will be able to serve with a Conservative Government and Wyn Roberts one day!

    And Gwilym, who joined us only recently, but who I must tell you has made an absolutely outstanding start to his Ministerial career. I’m very pleased with the Ministers I have looking after Welsh interests, and I can tell you that they may sometimes put the fear of God into the Opposition, and they do exactly the same to the Treasury! And that is, of course, entirely as it should be. Somewhere, sitting outside the realms of the inner markets of politics, Peter Walker will be applauding the fact that they’re putting all the pressure they can on the Treasury, and some things never change, and they’re none the worse for that.

    We’ve had the opportunity this morning of looking round at some of the things that are actually happening in Wales. Stripping away the newspaper headlines, the late-night commentary by reporters straight from university, with no experience, little knowledge but much time to fill. We can see what is actually happening in the world outside the chattering classes of Westminster. Alas, it is not an extinct species.

    And what did I see looking around Wales this morning – and I will come to the difficulties later. But we started off looking at a remarkable firm right at the sharp edge of new technology, developing optical fibres which will revolutionise the way in which we live our lives by the end of this decade. Forget about televisions, telephones, computers that will both receive and send out, that will provide you instantly with all the knowledge of every encyclopedia the world has ever written. The most remarkable progress in technology that we’ve ever seen. Tiny fibres, almost too thin for the mind’s eye to see, that will carry into your homes within a few years – should you be unwise enough to wish it to do so – every conceivable news programme from every conceivable country.

    It is here, in Wales, that the leading edge of that technology is taking place, and you can be proud. On the site of the old Shotton Steelworks, where eleven years ago today we could have stood here with our heads hanging down and said “What is happening to Wales? The great steel industry is breaking down, 8,000 people have lost their jobs and what is their future?” And there they are today, many of those same men and their families, working in a whole series of high tech and medium tech industries, with secure, well-paid careers, no longer dependent on a single industry, and leading Europe and the world with that medium and high technology. That is the change, and it’s not just to be seen on the Shotton site, but dotted about all the way around Wales.

    It didn’t happen by magic. It happened of course because it’s an attractive place to build. Of course, because over the last decade our economy, despite current difficulties, has been revolutionised. But it happened also because Nick Edwards, because David, because Peter Walker, actually went out to America, Japan, and all the way round the world and sold Wales to the world as the place to invest and to build up their industries and commerce. [Applause].

    And then I went to look at something, I suppose, which typifies the hopes and dreams of most of us – a young couple moving into their house – the 10,000th house that Homes for Wales has produced. And I had the opportunity to meet a young couple, he’d just left the army, two young children, moving into their own home, starting a wholly new life in this lovely part of the world.

    And then, at my own request, to see one of the areas of difficulty – hill farming in Wales. And it’s been a novel morning – we’ve been rained on, shone on, wind has nearly blown us over, we’ve been up to our necks in mud and sheep. I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it! And there was one marvellous moment. We were standing there on this hill being blown – if you’ll pardon the expression, I’ll use the expression my father would have used – blown from here to buggery and back again. A mass of cameras over there, and I was standing there with the Secretary of State with this great backdrop of sheep and the wonderful rolling environment and the reporter shouted out “Can we have a crook between you?”

    Discretion forbear! Discretion forbear! And every time I sit there in Westminster, and open the newspaper, listen to the news, listen to the in-talk of the in-crowd, and then you actually come out and see what the atmosphere is like in the country – they are as chalk and cheese. People today were extremely friendly – a whole primary school turning out to say hello – you actually see what the heartbeat of this United Kingdom is really like, when you actually get out and see it face to face. And that is what I want to do. And that is what I want every one of my Ministers to do – to a very substantial part of their time.

    So let us come back to Wales. Somebody once said in Portsmouth, I think it was Harold Wilson. “Why do I talk about the Royal Navy?” “Because you’re in Portsmouth, Prime Minister.” And I suppose that’s true.

    But Wales I talk about it for more reasons than just the fact that I’m in Wales. I talk about Wales for this reason perhaps above all. We are changing, in the Conservative Party – it is changing. It has been a Party that has rolled with the evolution of our instincts for 300 years in a way that no other political party anywhere in Europe has remotely been able to. We can trace our lineal descendancy right back to beginning of recorded politics – those inate instincts which make people Conservative are clear as crystal.

    But just as this country has no written constitution – it has evolved, changed, responded to the needs of the time and the instincts of the people who live there, so has our Party. We don’t have a written set of dogma, a clause 4 which becomes irrelevant as the page changes. We have a series of basic instinctive principles by which we believe people should live, and aspirations which we believe most people themselves have. And we develop them as time moves on. And there is one of those that, to me, is particularly important for the Conservative Party. And it is this. I don’t want the Conservative Party to just draw its strength from the South and the East. I want a Conservative Party that draws its strength in the South West as well, in the Midlands, in the North East, in the North West, in Scotland and in Wales. I want a strong Conservative Party in every single part of the United Kingdom, in time again, not excluding Northern Ireland. Every single part of the United Kingdom. [Applause].

    And that is why in the election we did something which I believe myself was one of the turning points of the last general election. You may recall some way into it we suddenly began to talk clearly and urgently and for days nobody would listen, about the importance of the Union within the United Kingdom. The importance that we were a United Kingdom. And I will tell you what I believe happened, I believe we stretched over the heads of people worried about their mortgage, their prospects and their jobs, and we stretched right into the deepest instincts of the people who live in these islands.

    And we of course are a Unionist Party. We call ourselves the Conservative Party, but in truth we are the Conservative and Unionist Party. And the union here in Wales between England and Wales is the oldest union of all. Older than the Act of Union in Scotland. And our futures are, have been and I hope and pray always will be, inextricably linked. We stand together, we thrive together, we suffer together, we fall together. And for me up here in North Wales that means some things political. It means winning back Delyn, for example. And winning Ynys Mon, which we had not all that long ago. We came within a whisker in April and with your help we’ll get it, Delyn and many other seats the next time.

    Why am I so confident? Not just for the reasons I’ve set out – the candidates, the Ministers – but I think it is not fanciful to say that in recent years Wales has been leading the way with the economic miracle of the 1980s. Who, I wonder, amongst the most venerable in terms of years in this room can last remember when the level of unemployment in Wales was below the national average in the United Kingdom. Not in my lifetime. Very possibly because of the imbalance of jobs in Wales right since the turn of the century, very probably not within the lifetime of anyone here. But it’s the changes in the economy, the inward investment, the £44 bn of inward investment and the 100,000 jobs that have been created that have actually made the difference. And I believe that that difference is doing something that I believe is critically important – it is breaking down that imbalance – what people crudely call the North/South divide. But what they meant by that was the prosperity of the South East compared to every other part of the United Kingdom, and we are breaking that down by lifting up the prosperity of those other parts of the United Kingdom. And that is not only right in itself, it is an instinctively Conservative thing to wish to achieve and to bring about as the very basis of policy.

    So we have more businesses in Wales than ever before. And although one can never be sure on the basis of a few months figures, the indications are that manufacturing output, indeed all output in Wales, is growing far above the levels of nearly every other part of the United Kingdom, and way above the average of the United Kingdom presently. But that is important for many reasons. And the hill farm this morning brought some of them back to my mind. What enables you to preserve cultural traditions, a quality of life, an instinct of preserving the best of what is past and building on it. You don’t do that out of grinding poverty. You don’t do that at a time of need. That’s when your culture and your traditions are thrown to one side. You do that at a time of greater prosperity.

    And yet here is a second strength of the basic, unchannelled instincts of the Conservative. He is a traditionalist. I hear you, I of course mean he or she. He is a traditionalist. He doesn’t want to change something instinctively until he knows there is something better. There is a conservatism with a small “c” embalmed in the instinct of everyone in these islands, however they may vote, whether they call themselves a Conservative or something else.

    And you certainly can’t come to Wales without being aware of your great cultural traditions. You can’t go to the opera, whether its the Welsh Opera, the English National Opera or Covent Garden without seeing the great musical traditions, without finding one or other great Welsh singer leading the way in our musical traditions. After the lunch today, Wyn is taking me – by virtue of some roads for which he will undoubtedly ask for more money! – to the sight of the new Arts and Leisure complex at Llandudno. I’ve no doubt that when there he will talk to me of other matters too. He will talk to me of the importance of the Welsh language. And it is highly likely that he will talk to me in Welsh about it! It might be appropriate if he does!

    And then if I know him – and I’ve known him since I was but a lad, but then haven’t we all! He will also talk to me of local government reform and here I return back to the instincts and the traditions of the British, and in this case the Welsh. Go out there and find me a Welshman, any age, any size any shape any political party who doesn’t want back Pembrokeshire, Monmouthshire, Merionnethshire and Anglesey. [Applause]. Well I’ve got some news for you – you’re going to get them back. [Applause]. Because David Hunt has arranged it.

    Let us not hide our eyes from the difficulties that exist at present. But neither should we overstate them. Neither should we misrepresent them. And I believe both of those latter two things are happening, not least from people within our own Party as well as beyond it. I don’t pretend for a second that for many people across our country in different parts of it that things are easy now. I know it is a difficult time for many businesses. And I understand from personal experience many years ago, how people feel, what it’s actually like to see your security, your family business, perhaps even your home disappear. I certainly recall vividly what it’s like not to know whether you will actually have enough money to last through the week and pay the bills when they come in at the end of them. There is no-one in this country who wants this recession to end more speedily or more adequately than I do, or than Norman Lamont does.

    But I will tell you something else about this recession. I want this to be a lasting recovery. Not a transient recovery. Not a recovery that takes us over the hill and down into the valley and back into exactly the same problems again and again. When we were having lunch Chris said to me, “We got through the election in a recession.” Time after time we’ve been on the way to permanently low inflation, we’ve run up again an electoral timetable, we’ve taken short term action and the problems have recreated themselves. Now we can kill them off for good. We have within our hands for the first time, in my political lifetime, the prospect of licking inflation once and for all and having permanently low inflation.

    It’s only two years ago that people were saying to me there are two great problems – inflation, getting up to 11 per cent is out of control, and stable exchange rates. Just solve that and all will be well. We have inflation at 3.7 per cent and our exchange rates are stable. And of course there are now other requirements that are laid upon us.

    But everyone I think has something about which they care particularly passionately, and I do about inflation. For some it is a slogan. But it is not just a slogan. I will give you two reasons why we should care passionately about inflation.

    The first is to consider what inflation means. Inflation means, particularly for people on fixed incomes – and as people live longer in retirement a higher proportion of our population is on fixed incomes – for every per cent of inflation you erode the living standards of people who are no longer in work and who are living on the savings and the product of their lifetime at work. I say to you bluntly. I regard it as a moral imperative as well as an economic necessity to keep inflation at the lowest possible level to protect the living standards of those people.

    Throughout the 60s and the 70s inflation went through the roof and through the 80s and still in the 90s there are hundreds of thousands of elderly people humiliated and embarrassed because they have social benefits, because inflation tore away the security that they had built up in the whole of their working lives to ensure they didn’t have to go out and ask for help from other people in their retirement years. And I do not want to see that happen to this generation or any future generation. And so we will bear down on inflation.

    But there’s a second reason. We are living in an increasingly competitive world. We may be an island geographically, but we will never ever again be an island economically. What happens in America, or Japan or Germany or France or Denmark affects us directly. Our living standards. We cannot pretend, however much some would wish to, that it doesn’t matter to us and that it will all go away. We are an inter-related world. It is that investment that has created those new jobs in Wales, it is those markets which provide the markets from which those products made in Wales will predominately be sold. And so we have to be efficient. Suppose we had inflation in this country at 4 to 5 per cent and they had inflation in America, Japan, Germany and France at 2 to 3 per cent, what does it mean. It means that they will get relatively well-off, and we will get relatively poor. It means we will lose jobs, living standards and all the sweet things of life, because we will become an uncompetitive society and it will become more difficult year after year.

    Why more difficult year after year? Because all those Eastern nations that once we were able to sell things because they couldn’t manufacture them for themselves now can. Go to Indonesia, go to Korea, go to Hong Kong, go to China; and those captive markets to which we sold things when we weren’t competitive in Europe have gone. Because they manufacture them now for themselves. And either we are successful, or we will fall behind – not just in living standards, but we will fall behind in political influence in building the sort of society at home and abroad that we want to see.

    And I will tell you a third instinct of the Briton. I actually believe, and so do the British nations, that the British instinct is a force for good in international affairs. That force for good is pushed aside and derided if you have an economically weak nation it has no political clout either.

    So we have to deal with those problems. Not because we wish to, but because we have no choice but to do so for this generation and the next. And that is why I am not in the business of soft-options. All my life I have seen Governments driven off a virtuous path of economic revival because things got difficult in the short term. Well we’ve just had an election, and we’re not going to be driven off that virtuous path. And so we are not going to devalue Sterling. We are not going to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. We are going to make sure that we get that inflation level down to the level that will secure permanent growth and prosperity for this generation and the next, that I want us to see.

    And let me just say a few further words about it. It’s fashionable, it’s very easy suddenly to say it’s terribly difficult here and to blame somebody abroad and to say if only they’d do something it would all be better. I know what the instinct is in this country, they say of Europe: “Well, they’re foreigners; and of course we should be in the Common Market, it’s very important the Market and we understand all that, but I just wish we could only just sell things to them.”

    Well, that is unreasonable. That is no longer the world in which we live or will ever live again if your face the hard day to day realities that businessmen face. That jobs and businesses in Wales depend on Europe. They depend on the Community. 60 per cent of our trade is with the European Community. And it isn’t just prosperity, it is peace that has been bought. If I may say so without disrespect there are people in this room, as I look around, who will remember the Second War very clearly. They’ll also remember from their history books that it was the Balkans that brought about the First World War, as they look at the events of Yugoslavia.

    But let us say something about the Second World War. The greatest virtue of the Community for all its faults – and I’m no Europhiliac, believe you me, I see all the faults and dislikes of it, but I see its advantages too – when you look at the European Community, what is its greatest thing? Is it the growth that it has over 30, 40 years brought to Europe? No, it isn’t. What it is is that it has so intertwined the trading of those great Western nations that it is inconceivable that nations that twice fought the whole world at war would ever be in military conflict again. And that is why we want to extend that Community across Eastern Europe, so that we bring in those newly democratic nations – The Czechs, the Slovakia, Hungary, old friends of ours. Bring them over time into the Community so that we can extend that impossibility of conflict right the way across eventually our continent of Europe. A course to the North, to the Scandinavians, a course down to Austria and then to the Eastern part of Europe.

    Those are the policies that we must pursue in the long term. And if we pursued them successfully it will mean something that I think would be valuable to all of us here. It would mean that our children and our grandchildren would never live under the threat of war that many of the people in this room have lived under and in some cases experienced for much of their lives. It is a long policy, but it is the right policy and it is a Conservative policy, for it is instinctive for the Conservative Party to look beyond one generation. We are not a mono-dimension Party. We are the only Party in this country and the Party most fitted anywhere in Europe, to look down cascading through the generations and frame policies now that will bear their greatest fruit long after we have ceased to have any direct influence on them. And I think that is what is happening in Europe at the moment, despite the frustrations that many feel about it.

    I’ll tell you why we won on April 9th. It was become in some remarkable subliminal way those instincts communicated themselves to people. For all the difficulties that there were with the recession, that heaven alone knows is now stretching to every part of this world, there was the belief that people would be safer with us. Safer economically and safer in other ways. And I think that is because our Party understands the instincts of the British. They want to keep more of what they earn. They want its money to keep its value. They want low inflation and low taxation. They want the kind of choices and opportunities that their parents only dreamed about and they know that their children will want for their children opportunities that were denied to them.

    They want better education. They want an absolute determination to concentrate on the basics of education – Neighbours out, Shakespeare in – which is the basic instinct of the Conservatives in this country. And they want people to read, to write, to learn to do sums, then they want to put them in the Treasury! They want a Britain where people with talent and who work hard can go all the way to the top no matter what their background or where they may have started from. That is what they want in this country.

    And then they want something else – two things I think. They want a Britain where after a lifetime’s hard work they can pass on what they have built up to their children and grandchildren, and not pass on what they have built up to the taxpayer. [Applause].

    And they want a Britain safe at home and respected abroad.

    So we can take this opportunity – there’s only a transient opportunity in politics – to celebrate that victory on April 9th. But the best way to celebrate that victory on April 9th is to make use of it. To make use of it to build those things we care about. To stick with them firmly, rigidly, with conviction but with understanding even when times are difficult, for that is the way we believe we can build something better for ourselves and for future generations. For if I may come back almost to where I started, that is the instinct of the Conservative, and we are Conservatives and that, I promise you, is the instinct of your Government.

  • Mr Major’s Tribute to Dickie Bird on “This Is Your Life” – 3 September 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s tribute to Dickie Bird on “This is Your Life”, recorded on Thursday 3rd September 1992, and shown on 7th October 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Hi Dickie! Good evening!

    Cricket has thrown up many great characters over the years and you have become one of them. Everyone in cricket respects you as an umpire; millions of people beyond cricket know you, have heard of you and go to watch you at cricket matches as well as the players. In the long line of cricket umpires there is one direct line of real importance – from Frank Chester to Dickie Bird, both the best.

    Well done! Have a great evening!

  • Mr Major’s Comments at London Conference – 27 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s comments at the media briefing during the London Conference, held on 27th August 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Over the last few days, we have had co-operation and I believe we have achieved significant results.

    The first result will be new negotiations for a settlement, starting in Geneva next week, under the Chairmanship of the United Nations and the European Community.

    The talks will be on the basis of clear principles on which all the participants, without exception, have subscribed.

    That means that the Yugoslav parties have pledged themselves to a code of conduct.

  • Mr Major’s Speech to the London Conference – 26 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s speech made at the London Conference on Wednesday 26th August 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    May I firstly welcome you all to the London Conference, a conference sponsored jointly by the United Nations and the European Community. I think no explanation is necessary to the people present today as to why we are here or to the size of the problem that lies before us. What we are hoping from this conference is that it will prove to be a decisive turning point, that it will mark a decisive new phase in the search for the peace in the former Yugoslavia territories that all of us wish to see.

    What I fear we can see daily as we look around is the tragedy of Yugoslavia unfolding and throughout the world all our fellow citizens in each of our individual countries have seen the waste, the despair and the growing danger of the continuing conflict in Yugoslavia.

    In this room are the people who can stop this war, end the bloodshed, reach a lasting settlement. I do not believe that world opinion will readily forgive anyone who impedes that work over the next couple of days and beyond.

    The people that we represent at this conference have been appalled by the destruction, the killing, the maiming and the sheer cruelty which has disfigured the former Yugoslavia. We all seek a just peace and against that background it seemed to the Secretary General and to me that the United Nations and the European Community should join together in holding this conference.

    Fortunately, we will not be beginning our work from scratch. The European Community has given monitors and sponsored a peace conference. Lord Carrington, to whom I pay a very warm and very well deserved tribute, has made substantial progress and we should build on that. The United Nations has passed resolutions bringing in an arms embargo on Serbia and Montenegro. Ten days ago the Security Council agreed that all necessary measures could be used to deliver humanitarian aid. The UN agencies have supplied and distributed emergency aid and cared for refugees and individual countries, many represented here today, have contributed too, often by taking in large numbers of refugees.

    But I think we have all felt that the time has come to broaden and to intensify our work. And let me suggest to you, as co-Chairman, how I believe we should tackle that task.

    Firstly, humanitarian help. Even if peace were achieved tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of people would still be involved in hunger, sickness, desperation, and those problems are bound to worsen as winter approaches.

    The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that some two and a half million people remain in the former Yugoslavia and over one and a quarter million of these will depend on outside help with shelter, food and medicines to see them through the coming winter. Without that help many of that 1.3 million may not survive. And this is not a natural disaster we are dealing with, it is a man-made disaster and it needs a man-made solution and this conference can make its contribution to that.

    We must ensure that humanitarian supplies are distributed to the victims of this conflict, particularly those victims still trapped in the war zones in Bosnia. I believe that the humanitarian agencies have done an outstanding job, they have put their lives on the line to assist in the survival of others. The Security Council Resolution 770 is a guarantee the international community have given that we will not leave the United Nations and its agencies without help and protection in the task they have overtaken.

    It cannot be done by force but it must be done in safety. And that is why my country and others are willing to provide armed escorts to help the relief convoys on their missions of mercy. We have no hostile intent to any party in Bosnia, but I have to say to the conference that we will not be deflected from our determination to deliver aid wherever it is needed.

    And thirdly, therefore, we must work for peace with justice with as much energy as we relieve those already suffering from war as a result of injustice. It is clear that we need a peace process and that this should be coupled with the necessary international pressure to bring success.

    That peace process is vital but it must be based, I believe, on certain fundamental principles. The first is that frontiers cannot be altered by force, the international community will not accept that Bosnia can be partitioned by conquest. Those who suppose they can secure international acceptance of military advantages gained by force are mistaken in that judgment.

    The second principle is that within those fixed frontiers minorities are entitled to full protection and respect to their civil rights, this applies universally whether in Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia. And those two principles go together, neither can be effective without the other.

    And so the principles and how we hope to achieve them are set out in the two key documents which I hope the conference will adopt. The statement of principles sets out the basic international standards which must govern a settlement, I cannot believe after further discussion that any of us here will not be able and prepared to subscribe to it.

    But what counts of course is not just the acceptance of those principles but the subsequent application of those principles and they are in reality not being completely fulfilled by any of the main parties to the crisis at present.

    We must therefore help the parties to come closer to doing so and that is the purpose of the work set out in the action programme. This conference will remain in being and will remain active. Its work will be handled in partnership by the United Nations and the Presidency of the European Community and in addition we urgently need a high level international task group to tackle each main problem that we face. Those task groups will build on the work already done by the European Community peace conference and the United Nations. They must then get down to work energetically and unremittingly on the problems they have been set and we must also strive for further practical progress during the conference on various key questions – humanitarian issues, confidence-building measures and the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions.

    We shall also be looking tomorrow at two further documents. These are the draft statements, one on Serbia, one on Bosnia. I hope that all parties will be able to adopt them. Like the statement of principles, they should be uncontentious. We believe, for example, that they are consistent with Mr Panic’s recent letter to the United Nations Security Council which struck a note of realism and of moderation.

    It is essential that this is followed up in deeds as well as in words and if all the Yugoslav parties at this conference, including Serbia, are prepared to subscribe to the draft statements this will be an encouraging sign. And if not, if not, the world will be entitled to doubt the goodwill of those who stand out against it and to draw the appropriate conclusions.

    What are those conclusions? Those conclusions must mean bringing pressure to bear on governments or factions which do not abide by those principles. That in turn means sanctions. We need to enforce them more effectively and if necessary intensify them and that will be an inevitable issue at this conference and perhaps beyond it too.

    No-one should under-estimate the anguish that is felt around the world at the events that unfold daily. The different former Yugoslav delegations, and in particular I think those from Serbia and Montenegro, must ask themselves this question: Do you wish to be considered as part of Europe? Do you wish to belong to the world community? If so, good, but that does mean accepting the standards of the rest of Europe and of the world community.

    In this conference and beyond it we are ready to work with the republics of the former Yugoslavia to settle the final new constitutional arrangements in accordance with the principles set out. Our aim is to take into account the legitimate interests of all parties. Parties who choose to ignore settlement by negotiation will find no support from other governments or international organisations. All the countries and organisations who have a role to play are represented here today at this conference. They will all set out their own view but I believe there is a common determination.

    For those who accept negotiation, and that means a willingness to make concessions and a genuine desire to find compromises, we have everything to offer. We will speed up your integration into the international community, we will begin with reconstruction aid, we will offer economic help through trade agreements, through export credits, through a full partnership in Europe. But if we do not get cooperation, the pressure will inexorably increase, condemnation, isolation, parties who stand in the way of agreement can expect even tougher sanctions, even more rigorously policed. No trade, no aid, no international recognition or role. Economic, cultural, political and diplomatic isolation. Those are the choices.

    So I see our task at this conference as ensuring humanitarian help, restoring respect for human rights and setting in hand a process which will lead to a just and enduring peace by agreeing on the necessary principles, on the pressures needed to put those principles into effect, and on the intensive programme of work needed to bring our process to success.

    That is what lies ahead of us at this conference and in the continuing work that may follow it. This I hope will prove to be a decisive break towards peace in the former Yugoslavia and that, I hope, is why everyone who is here has chosen to attend.

  • Mr Major’s Comments on Iraq (II) – 18 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s comments on Iraq made during an interview held on Tuesday 18th August 1992.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked what the current position was in Iraq].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    What we’ve said to the Iraqi authorities is that we’re now perfectly clear that they’re engaged in systematic repression of the Shias in the south of Iraq and that isn’t acceptable and that has got to stop.

    What we propose to do therefore is to monitor the whole area from the air, and whilst we’re doing that, to ensure the security of both the Shias and of the aircraft, we will instruct the Iraqi’s not to fly in that area.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked what would happen if the Iraqis did fly in the banned area].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    If they do, they’ll be perfectly well aware that they’re likely to be attacked.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked if they would be attacked].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    They will be attacked if they fly in the area that is proscribed, yes.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked what would troops do if the Iraqis fought back].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    I think we have seen in the past that they would lose, but I hope that that won’t be the case. I hope they will accept the fact that the coalition, especially the Americans, the French and the British would be there in force monitoring what happens from the air and I hope and believe that they will accept the edict that will be laid before them and not fly in that area.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked if the troubles could now just escalate].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    I think you have to realise why we’re doing it, we’re not doing it for no good reason. It’s happened because there is clear evidence now of the systematic murder and genocide of the Shias. Bombing by Saddam from the air on the Shias, reports not yet confirmed, but fairly good reports of napalm being used and this has been going on for some time. Increasing evidence of this is coming to light and it’s no longer tolerable.

  • Mr Major’s Comments on Iraq (I) – 18 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s comments on Iraq made during an interview held on Tuesday 18th August 1992.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked if it was inevitable that Britain would have to return to Iraq?]

    PRIME MINISTER:

    I think the scale of what is happening – and precisely what is happening to the Shias in the south has not been as evident in the past as it is at present – what has made the difference in the last week or so is receipt and examination of the report by the UN Commissioner Mr van der Stoel, who set out the details of the brutality against the Shias. That is beginning to add up with other evidence.

    There comes a time when behaviour that you dislike becomes behaviour that you can no longer tolerate and it has become clear over the last few days that the Iraqis have crossed that line.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked if he was worried that this would lead to another full-scale war].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    I think the first thing to say is that we cannot allow the full-scale persecution of the Shias in the way that we have seen. I think that has to be the point from which we start.

    I don’t believe it will create the sort of circumstances you have said. The Iraqis are very well aware that the Allies have overwhelming air superiority. The only effect of the Iraqis putting planes in the air against the British, French and American coalition is that they will lose those planes. I can’t be certain that they won’t do it, but I don’t myself believe that they will. I believe they will have to obey the “No Fly Zone” that we propose to create.

    QUESTION:

    [Mr Major was asked if people thought that the US President was leading this for domestic political reasons].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    Well if they do, they will be wrong. The view about what is happening there is just as strongly held by President Mitterrand in Paris, who has no elections to hand, and just as strongly by me, who has an election behind him not in front of him, as it is by President Bush, and I repeat, the catalyst that has brought this about has not been a request of any individual leader but the report to the United Nations of the United Nations High Commissioner who has seen and reported upon the persecution of the Shias, that is what has created the action.

  • Mr Major’s Comments on Bosnia – 8 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s comments on Bosnia, made on 8th August 1992.

    [The Prime Minister was asked about his telephone call to President Bush].

    PRIME MINISTER:

    I did have the opportunity of discussing a whole range of matters with President Bush. We have been looking at a series of options for some days. We’ve been looking at them with the Americans, with the French and with some of our other allies. That work collectively – collectively I stress that word – that work is still going on, when we’ve concluded it, we can reach decisions about what needs to be done.

  • Mr Major’s Comments on Former Yugoslavia – 7 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s doorstep comments made on the former Yugoslavia on 7th August 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    We have been looking at a whole series of options over the last few days. They clearly need very careful consideration. They need a good deal of consultation with our allies.

    I think there’s nothing more I can say about that at the moment, but clearly everyone who saw that will be disturbed. It’s a very disturbing report.

  • Mr Major’s Statement on Yugoslavia – 7 August 1992

    Below is the text of Mr Major’s statement on the situation in Yugoslavia, made in Barcelona on 7th August 1992.

    PRIME MINISTER:

    In recent days there has been growing evidence of human rights abuses at the camps in Bosnia. I think everyone who has seen or learnt about those issues will be shocked. It is perfectly clear that those abuses have to be stopped and have to be stopped speedily.

    I believe the first thing that is necessary is to have independent observers in those camps, with full access, without delay. The moment they are there we must move further and make sure that those camps come under international and independent supervision. We will be promoting a resolution in the Security Council to his effect and promoting that resolution very speedily.

    I believe there are two other things that follow. We need to pull together internationally all the evidence that different nations have of abuses so that those responsible for those abuses can be caught, can be tried and can then be brought to book. And of course, in addition to that, it is necessary for us to continue with the Security Council resolutions to protect the humanitarian supplies that are presently going into Sarajevo and elsewhere. It is essential that those continue.