25/05/2015
The news
yesterday was that Labour's acting leader, Harriet Harman, has abandoned her party's opposition to an EU referendum. Harman and Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, finally accept that people should be allowed a vote for the first time in more than 40 years.
"We have now had a general election and reflected on the conversations we had on doorsteps throughout the country", these two politicians say. "The British people want to have a say on the UK's membership of the European Union. Labour will therefore now support the EU referendum bill when it comes before the House of Commons".
While some of the legacy media are leaping on this development to claim that this might allow Mr Cameron to bring the date of the referendum forward,
other sources remind us of the obvious. The Bill is likely to face concerted attempts to delay or re-write it from Labour and Lib-Dem opponents in the Lords, who outnumber the Conservatives by almost two-to-one.
On that basis, we are still looking at mid-next year before a n EU Referendum Act takes effect, and then another nine months before there can be a poll. We are well on track for an October event, giving Mr Cameron time for his stage-managed "Heston moment", when he declares to the world the brilliant outcome of his "renegotiations".
Nevertheless, this will not stop other newspapers
continuing to speculate, and they
will do so right up to the moment when an early referendum, even in their terms, is no longer a possibility. Then they will move on without the slightest acknowledgement that they got it wrong â again. But that is what the legacy media does.
Rather than accept their prattle, we should continue to
remind ourselves that the pundits got it wrong at the general election. In the more complex and unfamiliar scenario of an EU referendum, they are unlikely to perform any better. In fact, most of them are already out of their depth.
Whether through its own ignorance, or design, we certainly see
the BBC getting it wrong. It is labouring to frame the debate as an economic issue, offering a distorted definition of the EU that happens to fit its playbook. The European Union, the BBC tells us:
⦠is an economic and political partnership between 28 European countries. It began after World War Two to foster economic co-operation with the idea that countries which trade together are more likely to avoid going to war with each other. It has since grown to become a "single market" allowing goods and people to move around, basically as if the member states were one country. It has its own currency, the euro, its own parliament and it now sets the rules in a wide range of areas - including on the environment, transport, consumer rights and even things like mobile phone charges.
That this is a deliberate distortion is perhaps best illustrated by the BBC itself, which goes on to record that Mr Cameron "is expected to demand an opt-out from one of the EU's core principles of forging an 'ever-closer union' between member states". Yet this "core principle" is hardly compatible with the idea of "an economic and political partnership between 28 European countries".
Forgetting to tell us that the EU is a supranational treaty organisation, with the aim of creating a federal "United States of Europe" is a rather convenient omission. But it is also a necessary one, as only by this means can the BBC present as two of the principle contenders: Business for Britain; and Business for New Europe (BNE).
The former, we are told, "wants big changes to the UK's relations with the EU and says the UK should be prepared to vote to leave if the changes are not achieved". BNE, we are helpfully advised, "is a coalition of business leaders who support the UK's membership of the EU and 'oppose withdrawal to the margins'."
Neither, it seems, wants to pull out because we want no part of a future "United States of Europe", but since the BBC hasn't told us that that is the aim, this should matter to us lowly plebs. The BBC wants this to be a debate about pro-EU business, versus lukewarm business, and that is how it shall be.
Interestingly, the left-wing
Independent also favours this line-up, against which all the feeble Leo McKinstry for the
Express can manage is that this issue "is not just about economics". Therein lies the problem: even our supposed allies are failing to correct deliberate attempts to distort the debate.
Fortunately, one journalist can see through the charade. Peter Hitchens in his
own column sketches out the likely scenario. The Tory Party leadership and its backers in business and elsewhere, he says, will in the next few months, appear to merge themselves with "Eurosceptic" opinion, reasonably accepting that British independence is practicable and may even be desirable, railing against EU "bureaucracy" or some other vague characteristic.
To keep up the momentum, Mr Cameron himself will strike increasingly nationalistic poses at gatherings of EU leaders, similar to his non-existent veto. Then there will be negotiations at which we will be told the EU has abandoned some of its "red tape" or diminished its demand for ever-closer union, or postponed some other power-grab.
When Mr Cameron, haggard and exhausted after night-long negotiations, emerges into the Brussels dawn to claim his triumph, the rest of the EU will keep quiet about the fact that there is no triumph, just as they kept quiet about the fact that he did not actually wield the veto in 2011. Winners don't need to boast. They can let the losers vaunt themselves and brag, if it helps the real winners get their way.
At that point we see the faux eurosceptic Tories, who have cosied up to real anti-EU campaigners, come out of the woodwork. They will say: "Mr Cameron, with charm and grit, has won a great and historic deal for Britain. Now we can in all conscience vote to stay in. So should you. Please join us". Then says Hitchens:
⦠this mingling is the real purpose of "Euroscepticism", to gull and soothe genuine secessionists with what looks like friendship and agreement, the more powerfully to abandon and undermine them when the decisive moment arrives.
And precisely because they have feigned sympathy so well, and pretended to be in favour of leaving if the right conditions aren't met, their defection will be all the more effective. The nation will vote heavily to stay in, and the issue will be dead until the EU itself breaks up under its own strains, spitting us out into a pitiful loneliness we weren't brave enough to choose when it might have been some use to us.
That, as near as damn it, is exactly as I see the campaign panning out â and especially if we allow our enemies dictate the shape of the campaign and who the key players are going to be.
On the other hand, the line-up of the Labour with Mr Cameron, already alongside the Lib-Dem rump gives, us a three-party pro-EU line-up and the ideal opportunity to cast this contest as people
versus politicians. While the BBC and its friends want to set-up a biff-bam business debate, with the people as passive spectators, we must sideline them and fight on issues that really matter.
This referendum is an opportunity for us to correct a historic mistake, when politicians gave away our powers to a supranational authority in the wrongheaded belief that this would improve our trading and manufacturing performance. It didn't, and now we have chance to set Britain back on its proper course.
This is too important for games, and certainly not a platform for
failed politicians to re-launch their careers. We have to win this, and if we the people don't, no-one else will.
