Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2968

Photocopy of a newspaper column by Heath’s friend, John Chamberlain, King Features Syndicate, as it appeared in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner

June 26, 1967

 

 

 

 

 

Solving the Suez Issue

 

by John Chamberlain

 

If the UN is really looking to a solution for the problem of users’ access to the Suez Canal, why not recur to the proposition on non-political owner­ship?

 

  Interestingly enough, Christopher Stone, a young law professor at the University of Southern California, thinks that a proprietary corporation might be a good approach to resolving all the great problems of the oceans, providing navigational services, regulating fishing rights, and developing underseas resources.

 

  Professor Stone happens to be the son of I. F. Stone, the leftist editor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, a Washington, D.C., publication which would scarce­ly find anything to commend in the proprietary idea. But the son, who is just as radical as his father, only in an opposite direction, may be on the track of something that could be applied as a starter to the Suez waterway.

Propeller Manufacturer

As a matter of record, proprietary non-political ownership of the Suez was proposed back in the middle nineteen fifties by a retired airplane propeller manufacturer named Spencer Heath.

 

  Mr. Heath’s blueprint makes interesting read­ing today. It called for “the leading shipping interests who use the canal to form a canal owners corporation to be chartered by each one and all” of the eighteen or more governments, including Egypt, which were “most interested.”

 

  According to the Heath outline, the powers and limitations of the proprietary corporation were to be defined and agreed upon by the various governments, with Egypt being handsomely re­warded for its participation in a joint territorial sovereignty with cash payments from funds raised by the new corporation.

 

  Mr. Heath’s suggestion, in the fifties, called for the issue of new Suez corporation shares to pay for taking over the old equity rights in the canal. As of 1967, the equity rights, presumably, would be purchased from Egypt itself.

 

  Arrangements could be made to diffuse stock ownership in the new corporation to the ends of the earth, with allotments for sale in all the maritime nations. Mr. Heath thought a proprietary canal corporation would “make such profits that it could duplicate the canal,” thus allowing for “one-way traffic both ways.”

 

  As a “solvent and stable business corporation,” said Mr. Heath, “its shares would come into very wide demand . . . especially among those persons and corporations most engaged in commerce among the nations.” There would be a “covenant of non-aggression against any of the tangible or intangible properties and rights of the new corpora­tion.”

 

Nourishing a Dream

Mr. Heath’s proposition was dismissed as a pipe-dream in the fifties. Presumably, it won’t get anywhere as long as Nasser nourishes the dream of pushing Israel into the sea.

 

  Eventually, however, the Egyptians may get tired of Nasser’s pursuit of glory. The Indonesians put up with Sukarno, their own Nasser, until he had run a potentially rich island empire into complete bankruptcy. Then they decided to get rid of him.

 

  When disillusion sets in over Nasser’s inability to put Egypt on the path to an economic development that will feed its steadily increasing population, some subsequent leader might be interested in creating a proprietary canal company that would take the issue of access to an international waterway out of politics.

 

  There would be plenty of room for both Jew and Arab in the Middle East if only the political feuding could be brought to an end and commercial and industrial development be allowed to take over.

 

 

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