A Slight Disagreement Over Europe

Tuesday 14th May

The Tory party is amazing.  It has been out of office for thirteen years, largely because it’s internal wrangling over Europe so dominated the Major years that the public had finally had enough of them.  And David Cameron has tried to lead them away from Europe, time and again warning them against banging on about it.  But then he made the desperately stupid mistake of promising an in-out referendum on a renegotiated Europe (whatever that means) but like Blair before him he kicked this into the long grass, hoping everyone would forget it for a while.  And for a while his strategy seemed to work, the opinion polls narrowed, and it seemed he may have pricked UKIP’s bubble.

And now, after renewed success for UKIP the party is erupting with Euro-fever again.  And now it has spread to the Cabinet itself.  On Sunday we had Michael Gove declaring that if a referendum were held today he would vote to leave the EU.  Firstly, that is a completely hypothetical question; there is no referendum today or in the near future, so the only reason not to have sidestepped it but to have answered so positively was for purely political reasons.  And this exercise in political positioning was repeated by Phillip Hammond a few hours later.

It seems to me that potential successors to Cameron are lining up and waiting for the starting gun, which could be Cameron losing the next election, or even if by some miracle he won it then losing the referendum itself.   A self-defeating strategy if ever there was one.

The great danger in all of this is that we may well have a referendum which could easily result in us leaving the EU.  Or even before that Cameron failing to get any major concessions out of the EU.  My hunch is that the EU will diverge into two distinct groups, those within the Eurozone who will move inevitably towards closer political union; and those who are members (maybe Associate Members) of the EU but not in the Eurozone, and who have a quite different relationship with the Eurozone countries.

Though not perfect I cannot see anyone really holding the line of maintaining the status quo with any great success.  Milliband must hold firm and not promise a referendum at all, but put all his efforts into his own preferred re-negotiated European position, and the hard part – selling that to the public, who are daily being drip-fed this hatred of Europe, of Immigrants, of others to blame for our malaise rather than ourselves.   Mind you the Tories aren’t helping themselves by tearing themselves apart so publicly over Europe.  Again.