EU Referendum


The weak to the wall


30/06/2012



Cameron 995-yus.jpg

While I was "away", watching the antics of the "colleagues", Witterings from Witney was looking after the home front, remarking inter alia on how nearly 100 Conservative MPs had signed a letter to David Cameron urging him:
… to place on the Statute Book before the next General Election a commitment to hold a referendum during the next Parliament on the nature of our relationship with the European Union.
At that time I was suggesting that a referendum might have to be fought very much earlier, given that Shäuble, Merkal and others were talking of a new treaty, and the "quartet" had been set up with a view to devising a "master plan" for the future of the EU.

This, it was said at the time, back on 23 May, "could be a revolutionary document", looking at structural reforms, the banking union, a fiscal union and political union. And, whatever the actual content, all parties were reported to be agreed that another major treaty will be needed.

The signs that a treaty was in the offing were well evident on 5 June when Barroso trotted off to Berlin to see Merkel and Shäuble was calling for "proper fiscal union". Before there was any discussion of debt policy, he said, a new level of integration was necessary.

It hardly seems three weeks ago (on 7 June) that Merkel was calling for "more Europe" while Barroso was in Strasbourg heralding "a defining moment for European integration and the European Union".

Barroso was saying that European governments need to agree urgently on steps to forge a closer union because of the eurozone's "systemic problem". There could be no doubt as to the message, or the need for speed. Barroso was complaining, "I am not sure whether the urgency of this is fully understood in all the capitals".

This was the same day (13 June) when Mr Cameron was again burbling that people didn't want a referendum, when all the mood music was telling us that a new treaty was not only necessary but likely. That, in my view, constituted a game-changer which at last turned a British referendum into a sensible proposition.

In the event, though, the report produced by the "quartet" was a dull thing, very far from its original billing as a revolutionary document. Between late May and the lead-up to the recent European Council, something changed, most likely at the very last minute, to dissuade the "colleagues" from going down the treaty route.

Perhaps it was the intervention of the Karlruhe and the realisation that Germany would have to have a referendum. With the distinct probablity that other countries would join in, I was reporting on 26 June that I could not see ratification being a success.

Thus, after a heady month of speculation, when the "colleagues" were bracing themselves to grab the final prize of political union, they took fright and ran away. As fast as it had emerged, the talk of political union died. It disappeared so completely that it was not to be spoken of or even hinted at. It became the ghost at the feast.

Now it is all over, the calculus changes back. With no treaty in the offing, and the likelihood of the UK being relegated to the "outer circle" of the EU, we are back to playing with the idea of a straight "in/out" referendum, with all the attendant risks.

And at this moment, up pops Cameron in the Failygraph, the "practical eurosceptic", rejecting Conservative calls to leave the EU and mounting "a strong argument for continued membership". This is quite an obviously co-ordinated press initiative, as we see the story in all the main newspapers, including the Financial Times, The Times, the Daily Wail, the Grauniad, Dependent and the Mirror.

An "in/out" referendum is not the "right thing to do", says Cameron, capturing the mood music from Brussels. Now is the time for weak, frightened men to shove their heads firmly into the sand, while the world passes them by and the dreams they once had crumble to dust.

One has to observe that, in his determination to do nothing, Cameron is a true child of the contemporary "Europe". Weak, vacillating, without character, conviction or ideology, he is the perfect example of the new European. When the going gets tough, the weak go to the wall. And there we find the corpulent Cameron lined up with the rest of his European colleagues.

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