After fierce political discussion over more than twenty years, the British commitment to Europe is now firmly established. As I have said we ask for … - Douglas Hurd
" "After fierce political discussion over more than twenty years, the British commitment to Europe is now firmly established. As I have said we ask for no exemptions or privileges. We recognise the concepts which inspired the original founders, and salute their wisdom in setting up the Community institutions. We believe that as a member of the class of 1973 we have an equal right, and perhaps an equal wisdom, to discuss the future of the Community as members of the class of 1958. We intend to exercise that right as Europeans, convinced of the essential validity of the case for Europe put forward by the Founding Fathers of the Community, anxious that we should find together the right ways of applying those principles to the new circumstances of 1982. I do not pretend that we face an easy task. But we shall apply ourselves to it with a commitment which no-one should doubt.
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About Douglas Hurd
Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell, (born 8 March 1930), is a British Conservative politician and diplomat, who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and 1995. He left the Commons at the 1997 general election and was elevated to the peerage on 13 June 1997. He retired from the House of Lords on 9 June 2016.
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Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell
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Additional quotes by Douglas Hurd
There will be shifts of sovereignty but only in specific areas which I consider debatable. The [European] Community should lead as external trade negotiator... But there must be basic areas of national sovereignty. Peace and war; law and order; foreign policy; fiscal policy. You can cooperate, but these are not matters for Community competence. Our resistance was entirely justified in the case of the Social Charter... I do not believe in the European glacier, that there is something irresistible about European integration.
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Thatcherism is not Tutankhamun's tomb, which you've got to seal up and guard. It has to fructify. It's an investment. Take what has been achieved and go on from there. Thatcherism breaks into different things: privatisation, the extension of individual responsibility, education. But the course is certainly set. I want to keep it, not change it.
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