EUROPE: We’re going to lose
No Tory should want a referendum on the European constitution
Getting what you want
Is hypocrisy such a bad thing? Certainly in the coming reign of virtue it ought perhaps to be a sinful thing stamped out only come the second term. In office, of course, the attitude of men like Michael Howard and Michael Ancram to what’s loosely, and often incorrectly called “European integration” seems surely to have been very different to their pose in opposition? As I will argue, these particular ‘men of Maastricht’ are still quite faithful to their Majorite pedigree, and fully in keeping with that tactically disastrous legacy, are setting both the Tory party, and the cause of British resistance to absorption in a wider European state up for a defeat which will set us back another generation. Neither on grounds of expediency or principle should the Tory party wish to see a referendum on the European constitution. Above all else, we should hope that it never actually is held, for if it is, we will lose.
To begin with hypocrisy is obviously to consider the fact of the referendum itself. The Prime Minister until today said he was against one, and now he’s in favour of one. So up and down like zoo-bound monkeys wrestling over a teenager’s discarded fag, the parliamentary Tory party bounces out its outrage. Wearisomely we all remind ourselves, ‘but, erm, yesss, Blair was against referenda, but now he’s conceded one, which was rather more than, for example, Mr Major’s government did over Maastricht’. Now, in Irish rhetorical cliché, it is quickly going to become evident even to the meanest intelligence that this article is, in part, going to be a sustained exercise in “whataboutery?” That is to say, it will senselessly rake up our transgressions as we go about the business of casting stones at other folk. Now why, other than aberrant socialisation, should anyone do this? Simply this: if the very basis of the case we’re making is one of high principle, it would be useful to know what, for instance, Mr Howard’s are, and quite when on European issues he acquired them.
There’s another part to what will be a semi-constant harping on about Maastricht, and it’s just this: which treaty was worse for Britain? The quasi-Giscardian constitution currently still being negotiated and filleted, with all its evident inter-governmentalism, or, the Treaty of Maastricht which not only contains that dreadful, imperative lexicon (cf. ‘ever closer union’) that this current thing specifically does not, but also served as the indispensable building block for the EEC making any progress to being a genuine union? My argument is that the latter was much worse than the former, and that the blithe disavowals of Mssrs Howard and Ancram are all of a piece with their attitude to Maastricht as ministers under John Major. You see, your sins do catch up with you.
How are we going to vote?
It would be stupid to the point of being Bernard to list all the dozens and dozens of times men like Michael Howard outlined their principled objections to referenda whilst ministers before 1997. The Prime Minister has done this already in the House of Commons, and who’s to argue with him? After all, we’ve changed our minds about oh so very much since 1997: this is not then a ‘big deal’. We’ve flip-flopped, we’ve moved on. The party now, it seems, believes that European treaties when brought home from Brussels should be subject to a popular plebiscite. Let’s, though, for a moment remind ourselves why stalwart and principled men like Michael Howard used to be against the noxious device if the referendum.
In classical form the Tory case against them went something like this: 'the will of the people' is a useless way to decide anything; we distrust the people, but as we feel can no longer say this quite so bluntly, so we take refuge in notions of efficiency and accountability. If you have to have democracy, then the only way to do it sensibly is by electing politicians whom you trust to express something resembling your views, with them left then to keep an eye on political reality (ideally sitting no more than say four or five months every year). And then, and you can feel the waves of disapproval roll over you even for thinking this, this body of men collectively recommends things to the crown, in other words, the executive decides, parliament disposes. And as one last fundamental objection to referenda per se, Toryism doesn’t tally too well with the witless single-question, yes-or-no quality of it all. Blunt is not the word.
Anyway, those were all reasons why we used to be opposed to referenda, but patently they’re all inoperative now. Why? because holding one would suit us politically? Presumably, given that no ideological or doctrinal reasons have been promoted for the shift from then-think to now-think. But the arguments against referenda go deeper still, and in this specific instance, ought to be pretty much overwhelmingly as far as any Tory is concerned.
What we’re likely to get
One of the chief cat calls against the Government by the Tory leadership is that ‘they should have the vote now’. As the poor old regime has pointed out, this would mean inevitably that we would have a “pre-legislative referendum”. Which is to say, that the will of Parliament would be dictated to by a plebiscite. Again, with our old principles, we used to be opposed to these. In the case of Scottish and Welsh devolution (where both the Home Rule bills were preceded by referenda in each country) we, with our then shadow constitutional affairs spokesman milord Ancram to the fore, squealed as loudly as we could on this point. One high idiocy of the Government’s behaviour in doing this (having the referenda first ie before the bill was passed) was that ‘the people’ didn’t know what precisely they were voting on, because though the poll was held, the legislation hadn’t been settled. Nine tenths of the point to these rigged contests from new Labour’s point of view was to over-awe the House of Lords from amending the devolution legislation too much, and in the worst part of William Hague’s leadership, this is precisely what happened.
In the present circumstance of the European constitution [sic], the official, incredible Tory position is that we should have a vote now, even before we can conceivably know precisely what it is we are to vote on. This Dianafication of politics — we feel we’re against something, even though we don’t, as it happens know the concrete details — is all very well and good, but it’s not quite Tory, is it? There’s a score of other objections rooted in dreary realism to such a course — having the referendum next weekend — but we’ll settle for just two of these dreary facts. The first, as the Government, to be fair to it, keeps furiously winking at us, is that it’s still as likely as not that due to the actions of other countries, there won’t be a European constitution to vote on. In which case, on grounds alone of a general disinclination to squander public money, we shouldn’t want to rush into having ours first. Let the Europeans screw this up if they want, as that brings us to the second reason why a British referendum now is so painfully daft a policy. It is plain to any honest man that if Britain blocks the constitution it will not be the same as if any other EU member, whether large or small, does just this same thing. As we will examine below, the fact of this is the central defect of Michael Howard’s intrinsically fraudulent European policy, but for now, we should merely note that Britain’s interests do have to come first. And unnecessarily picking a fight neither major political party in this country truthfully wishes to win constitutes a childish definition of realism indeed. If, as Michaels Howard and Ancram proclaim, the purpose of their policy is to keep us in the EU, but prevent the adoption of the constitution, by far the best way to secure this objective is by letting some other state or states block it.
What voting does, or why this is such a bad idea
What with all the party’s successes, too numerous to detail here, since the ejection of Mr Duncan Smith, an understandably heady atmosphere pervades Conservatism. In such a climate, dull old pessimism struggles to raise its traditional head, but we do to bear this old friend in mind, for he’s a very useful fellow. The Tory pessimist will point out first and foremost about any poll on any European issue, ‘what if we lose? we did last time’. Mind you, in 1975, ‘we’ wasn’t as clear cut a matter as it is today, what with a broad majority of the party being fully in support of keeping us in the thing we had so recently taken us into. But as we have to keep reminding ourselves, the world moves on. Mrs Thatcher stopped being an enthusiast for Brussels, so it’s hardly charting out too long a march to see the two Michaels making a similar sort of journey. But what if we did lose? Well before we can properly answer that, we have to assess how feasible a proposition it is, and this surely is where Tories must pause most fearfully at the thought of a referendum.
Why are we going to win? because, we like to mumble to ourselves, our arguments are so jolly good, and because the public is on our side, and because, and ‘y’know, we’re all grown-ups, Rupert’s on board’. Our arguments are self-serving incoherent tripe, deployed by two of the most tarnished figures from the worst Tory government ever; the public are as fickle as a cat predicting the weather; and, Rupert, dear, dear Rupert — there’s a friend indeed. Daily does The Sun remind us of his stalwart goodwill as far as the Tory party is concerned. ‘Ah’, but the well-informed will assure us, ‘this, this is the cause dear to his heart: everything else is business, this is belief’. Oh how many guises our whorish old accomplice ‘principle’ wears. To put this as gently as possible, whether from his lifelong habit of picking winners in his native Australia (ie plumping for the party that seems set to win the federal election), to this convinced anti-communist’s ability to kow tow lustily to the Red Chinese, Rupert Murdoch is not a man to let sentiment get in the way of the bottom line. And the bottom line in Britain is that after the next general election there will be another majority Labour government.
Given this webzine’s illustrious predictive track record, I’ll make another one: if such a poll eventually does have to take place, at least one of the British NewsCorp stable of papers will back Tony Blair. Probably The Sunday Times, on the cited grounds that the government’s near-certain line of the time is correct, and that really the constitution is a trivial, 3rd order affair, but don’t rule out The Sun. As it already apparent, any referendum will, as any referendum must more or less unavoidably be (it’s another reason to abhor them), be about almost everything saved what will be printed on the ballot paper. In other words, a cynic could easily foresee a situation where The Sun convinces itself that the Labour party has to win, and the Tory party has to lose, and the referendum vote is purely an instrumental means to that end. I say ‘convinces itself’, but that obviously not quite what I mean, and nor do I mean that R. Wade will be doing the convincing either. Resting on the support of Rupert Murdoch for the winning of this referendum is foolishness itself, and things get steadily more dismal from this point on, in terms of our friends in the press.
In a surge of neo-Beaverism, the Express will doubtless back Britain, and be solidly for a No, but that’s not quite the boon it once was. Of the broadsheets, the FT, the Guardian, and The Independent will all be as neurotically and unthinkingly in favour as even the Liberals. The Times will be as unimpressive as it has been on every major political issue since at least the laughable advice it offered voters at the time of the 1997 general election (a list of Eurosceptics, as you won’t recall and didn’t heed at the time). Which leaves us with the Mail titles and the Telegraphs. Odds-on the latter will say No, but by that stage will be German-owned. Call me a chauvinist, but if you want good, decent patriotic British fare, it really does take a Canadian to ladle it out. It won’t be the same, so we’re left solely with the Rothermere press to save Britain, and if any of their titles have a reader left who doesn’t know yet how to vote, you do have to wonder what people do with their Mails? Are they all left out directly for the daily? A hardly heartening list, but it leaves out the biggest problem of all for the No campaign in either 2005 or 2006. This, but of course, is just the problem the No campaign faced in 1975: the BBC. How endlessly intelligent we were not to stick the boot in them after Hutton.
Finding anti-Europeanism
You could perversely make the case that the BBC comprises the most wishfully Eurosceptic organisation in the country, in that its ability to ferret them out in the lost unlikely places is unequalled. After all, where other than in the mouths of Blairite propagandists will you hear the ludicrous claim that our very own leader, or his little Scotch friend are ‘anti-European’? That, still more madly, they harbour secret desires, despite what they say, and have done, and have done, and have done, to ‘take us out of the EU’? There is only one place, and it’s in the unrelenting pro-European poison that the BBC will wash over any referendum. Doubtless there is some astute reason why we could be blasé about this certain eventuality, but I have to admit, whatever it is, Guy Black hasn’t told me yet.
One place — does this matter even slightly to pro-Westminster sovereigntistes? — where one won’t find a great plurality of Eurosceptics is of course in the House of Commons. There, like the House of Lords, but much, much more so, sits an over-whelming ‘pro-European’ majority. This we are not going to allow to distract, because although the supposed point of our argument is to defend the right of parliament to legislate as it sees fit, we of course don’t really believe that parliament should do anything of the sort. We Eurosceptically wish for a parliament full of Eurosceptics. This is an understandable hypocrisy on our part, but we may as well admit it for what it is.
Michael Howard is not an anti-European: he tells us that, and we don’t have much choice but to believe him. His record speaks for itself. From 1983 to 1997 he in very single went through the pro-European lobby in the House of Commons. On the pro-EU credentials of milord Ancram, we won’t linger, save to say that no spectacle in recent Tory history has been more risible than his flaunting of pretendy scepticism since our Malkie tried the same shtick when he was Foreign Secretary. These two men do not want Britain to leave the EU, but this, as the government, and its friends in the BBC, will painfully expose during any referendum campaign is where a credible Tory policy would have to allow for us ending up.
Clever Mister Tony
Why do we think that the government said it would hold a referendum? The press, I suppose, we most of us assume: certainly their inflated egos will be quick enough to tell us that this is all the handiwork of the 4th estate. That wouldn’t be a very Tory state of affairs either, but then it patently isn’t the case. Tony Blair is still the percentage shot gambler he has been from the very moment he assumed the Labour leadership: he has called this vote for the short term purpose of removing one slogan from the Tory war-chest, but it has far more serious origins than that. We first of all should concede the hard governing one: Mr Blair gains from this referendum’s putative existence a weapon to use against his brother EU leaders. In other words, it’s an intra-governmental negotiating ploy: ‘give me this, or else we’ll end up with losing my vote, and you don’t want that’. If that sounds in any way odd, ask yourself only this question: who is the most Eurosceptic head of government in the EU? However you end up doing your sums, you’ll find out that any which way Tony Blair has more than enough points to end up in one of the medal positions. And it can’t be otherwise, because at the end of the day, Mr Blair negotiates according to the logic of Britain’s position, not of his own, or even that of the broader Labour movement: and Britain is fundamentally antithetical to much of the European project. We have sent a born-again Europeanist to Brussels and even so, he has ended up amongst the most sceptical in the host.
It’s harder to divine this, at this point, but I’d argue that the second main reason why Tony Blair has called this vote is that he thinks he is going to win, and that in winning this contest he will cut any other number of Gordian knots domestically. Thus it’s going to be a platform for the renewal of Blairism, and incidentally of ‘Britain’s European mission’, tufted as that is always going to be. This is not an opportunity we should be happy that the Prime Minister has presented himself with.
At a much lower level, one has to suspect that the smarter end of the Labour party are already looking forward to the sort of fratricidal self-indulgence the likes of Lords Heseltine and Howe will engage, as and when this poll rolls round. And though no Eurosceptic really likes to admit this, the Blairite calculation will be that, ‘the Tory party rabbiting on about Europe all the time, well, it’s delivered the goods before for the left, hasn’t it?’
Just as there was no need for the Constitution itself (‘Europe’ could have baffled on just as readily with the present structures as it will with the new ones), there is no absolute need for this referendum from Labour’s point of view. That one has been conceded must suggest that the Government thinks some kind of chance exists which ought to be seized.
Saying No and meaning it
We haven’t considered what a yes vote will mean because we’re presently too arrogant to believe one is possible. Yet with a supreme carelessness, what we discount is our still deeper suppression in European institutions. For if we lose — and we will if such a vote is called, for it won’t be about the detail of such a contest, instead it’ll be a popularity contest leavened by hysterical BBC claims as to a fictional Tory desire to leave, and there is no reason not to be pessimistic about the outcome of such a contest — we’ll suffer all of the appalling consequences of having had a referendum. It will used, just as the last one was, to suppress debate. Fully one generation has gone by since 1975: if we let ourselves be bamboozled into another similar poll, we risk the same thing happening again. That, though, is the thing: much as even Michael Ancram might seriously be opposed to what’s probably going to pass for amounts to this ‘constitution’, there is no basis for believing he has developed at long last a spine. And what goes for Michael Ancram goes for the rest of the leadership on this matter. Despite all the teenage optimism of Tory anti-marketeers since Bruges, a substantial majority of Tory Mps remain committed to ongoing British membership of the EU. If that end conflicts with the rhetorical consequences of our opposition to the constitution, it is the latter that will suffer.
So let us then suppose a NO. As I have said, I think this is the less likely outcome of a poll, but let’s imagine. Britain has voted No, either in advance of Parliament passing the legislation or more sensibly afterwards. What then? The fuss of the moment is any suggestion that we might be expected to vote again, just as the tadpole Irish and Danes were after their unwise and transient national verdicts. Britain differs from these states, in that although it scarcely seems possible anyone in our political class has believed this for more than forty years now, we can’t credibly be forced to do anything we don’t want to by the rest of the EU. We’re too big for that. What, however, is equally true is that we cannot force the rest of the EU to do what we want, if they all want something else: they’re too big for that. This is a point of crucial importance: the only context in which this vote is going to take place in Britain is if no other European state has already spiked the Treaty. It therefore follows that a British No will be Britain against the rest.
Clearly it is both unrealistic, and for what it matters, unfair to suppose that Britain’s minority viewpoint could impose itself upon the united majority viewpoint. Which brings us to what the reaction, which is to say, what the line cooked up between Berlin and Paris, would be ‘from Europe’ in light of a popular British No. I’ll tell you what it would be: they’d say to us, ‘oh well, we always thought it might come to this. Look, we’re, understandably we trust you’ll acknowledge, pushing on. As far as we’re concerned, there are two ways forward for you, and we don’t really much care which you opt for: either clear out of the project, wave goodbye, hugs all round and that’s that, or, we’ll give you a figleaf of sorts, and you can put that to your public again as being proof of some sort of triumph of renegotiation, and this time you’ll wise up and get back on board’. Labour will take the second choice, regardless of who is Prime Minister after any No vote, the current crop of Tories, even in opposition, won’t take the first choice. This is where all the present Tory rubbish about renegotiation, whether as regards the CAP or the CFP or anything else under the aegis of the Accquis falls down: we’re deluding ourselves that we’re talking about ‘negotiations’ being how we’ll secure any of our announced EU policy ends, when in truth we’re simply assuming we’ll turn up, assert and the rest of Brussels will roll over. They won’t: it won’t be in their interests to, and they don’t need to. And most of all, we can’t them force them to.
This then is why a British No will entail the resumption of the question to us, do we want to be in or don’t we? For we can’t be in solely on our terms, we have to be in on their terms. All us latter-day Powellites are happy enough with that, as we never wanted to be in at all, but this assuredly is not the stance of the broad majority of the Tory leadership, and will be revealed to be so in the wake of any ‘successful’ No vote. All a No vote will achieve is to reanimate the fundamental, cross-party pro-Europeanism of the British political class. There will come a day when the Tory party will be a in a position to redeem itself for ever taking us into the EEC, but we are currently a terribly long way away from that moment. A No vote taking place now will push us ever further away from that.
Kit Kildare was ERO’s political correspondent; he now works in Brussels for the provisional Government of South Sudan
Kit Kildare, April 20, 2004 11:08 PM