Britain Will Now Be More Open to Economic Unity in Europe

It was Margaret Thatcher’s unbridled scorn for creating a common currency for the European Community that generated the cascade of events that led to her downfall last week as Britain’s prime minister after 11 years in office.

But while all three of the candidates to succeed her have expressed a degree of reluctance to move full tilt toward European economic unity, Great Britain undoubtedly will emerge from the Conservative Party balloting that begins today more sympathetic to the notion of economic union.

The contenders--Douglas Hurd and John Major, members of Thatcher’s current cabinet, and Michael Heseltine, who quit the cabinet in protest in 1986--have declared during the one-week campaign for party leader that they would adopt a cautious approach to linking Britain’s fate with that of continental Europe.

“It’s more than possible that we will be in the slow lane of a two-lane Europe,” said Patrick Foley, deputy chief economist of London’s Lloyd’s Bank.

Still, none of the candidates has expressed his sentiments with anything like the dripping sarcasm of Thatcher when she refused to join in a statement by the other 11 European Community heads endorsing establishment of a common European central bank in 1994.

“What will happen if the other 11 go ahead?” asked Alan Davies, head of the economics department of Barclay’s Bank in London. “Will we now be more prepared to compromise? I think--I think--the answer is yes.”

Foley ranked Major, who as Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer is closely identified with her positions on European economic unity, as the least sympathetic of the three candidates to linking with the continent.

Heseltine, a former defense minister, is the most pro-European of the three, he said. That leaves Hurd, the foreign minister, in the middle--and Foley placed him closer to Heseltine than to Major.

During their brief campaign for the votes of the 372 Conservative members of Parliament, all three have shied away from renouncing Thatcher’s arm’s-length approach to Europe. For example:

* Major, in what Davies called a “very Maggie-like statement,” said he could not imagine a single currency for the 12 EC nations for at least 15 years. Being a good European, he said, does not mean accepting every idea put forward by the EC bureaucracy in Brussels, but “arguing for what you think is right for the development of the whole European series of nations.”

* Hurd, as foreign minister, has sought a unified European approach to foreign policy. But on the issue of a common currency, he said, the poorer EC nations, such as Portugal and Greece, could not participate with the likes of Germany and France unless they received massive economic aid.

* Heseltine, arguing that “the French and Germans are going ahead with economic union whether we like it or not,” said Britain should not put itself in the position of being left out of the process. At the same time, he urged a cautious approach to joining the movement toward a common European currency.

A sound British economy and a stable pound, he said, would “produce an economic bedrock in which a single currency could emerge as part of an evolutionary development--if people want it.”