Government Organization and Support for Private Industry: the United Kingdom Experience

It used to be an agreeable habit of some British participants in international commercial negotiations to try to enliven the tedium of the proceedings by contributing occasional light-hearted offerings for the amusement of their colleagues. As the Stockholm meetings at which the European Free Trade Association was established drew to a close, the British delegation circulated a draft ‘Convention for the Frustration of Trade’. Its first Article declared the establishment of an ‘Association for the Frustration of Trade’, trade being defined as ‘the benefits which it is feared may be conferred by the Convention’. And Article 3 read as follows: The objectives of the Association shall be: (a) to frustrate the normal tendency of trade to increase and to ensure its diminution. (b) to frustrate all measures that any Member State might attempt to introduce in pursuit of the first objective; and (c) to ensure, by use of subsidies, by the encouragement of dumping and by discrimination on all possible grounds, that the following provisions of the Convention, in so far as they may apply, shall be circumvented.