Mark Lennox-Boyd, the parliamentary under-secretary of...

Mark Lennox-Boyd, the parliamentary under-secretary of state with the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office , spoke Monday on “Britain and the New Europe” at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. His speech was co-sponsored by Los Angeles World Affairs Council and the British-American Chamber of Commerce. From Lennox-Boyd’s address:

On Britain’s objectives in the European Community

“There are . . . important objectives we wish to secure. . . . The first is to complete the single market. By the end of December . . . we aim to bring to an end the remaining restrictions on trade and exchanges inside our 12 countries. Ninty percent of that work has been done but it’s always, of course, the last 10% which is the hardest.

And the last 10% includes matters of standards in particular goods, matters of doing away with those devices which individual governments use to protect their own pet industries against competition. And the single market will remove them. And that is really the most fundamental and important contemporary activity of the community.

It will be reinforced by stronger rules about competition and state aids so that businessmen do not find themselves competing on an uneven, unlevel playing field because of the help which their competitors receive from their governments. . . . We have no interest, in Britain, in a fortress Europe, indeed we’re actively against a fortress Europe.”

On Working Together

“The success of our economies has depended on openness, on trade with the rest of the world. It is very important that the world should not subdivide into blocks which distinguish themselves by raising barriers against each other. That is an impoverishing and not an enriching process. . . . We also say in Britain that Europe is not politically homogeneous.

It is 12 and it’ll be more. It’ll be 17, 18, 19, 20 states with different sets of laws, different languages, different political institutions, monarchies, republics, presidential systems, parliamentary systems. They’ll all jostle, side by side, in some glorious, political marketplace and it’s not desirable to remove those differences. . . . We must actively preserve those differences and make out of them a richer cooperation on the things which Europe has to do together.”

Looking Ahead

Monday: Richard Kimball, Director and co-founder of the Center for National Independence in Politics, will speak on the 1992 Election and “Project Vote Smart,” 6:45 p.m., Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, 385 E. 8th St., Claremont. Free and open to the public.

Tuesday: Ambassador Winston Lord, Chairman of the Carnegie Endowment National Commission on America and the New World, will speak on “Changing Our Ways: America and the New World,” noon, at the Biltmore Hotel. Sponsored by Town Hall. Call 213-628-8141.