17/09/2015
In almost Soviet style, President Juncker's "state of the union" speech has been bundled with other material
into a pamphlet for distribution to the comrades. One could even imagine copies being scattered by air over England in the manner of Hitler's "last appeal to reason" of 19 July 1940, as we gaze at the sky in awe.
Meanwhile, after the summer break, the tempo is beginning to pick up and the political pulse of the nation quickens â only to be distracted by the media's obsession with political theatre rather than the reality, as it devotes most of its column inches to that Corbyn show.
With the next general election over four years away, one of the least important figures in national politics is the leader of a party which has twice failed to get elected. The next political event of significance is the EU referendum and, in this,
what Corbyn thinks is irrelevant.
The very nature of a referendum, as we have been wont to remind everyone, is a situation where our representatives step aside, to allow us to make a decision on a matter they have failed to resolve. For a time, the politicians are not centre-stage. They are the supplicants, the direction of grand policy dictated not by them but by us, the people.
Whether Mr Cameron truly knew what he was letting himself for when he promised a referendum is an interesting question, and there is a view abroad that he has little real conception of what he is dealing with. Political horizons in Downing Street are said to be focused on immediate events. There is little in the way of long-term vision and the attention span is measured in days rather than weeks.
As the domestic media, addicted to their diet of trivia, have fallen into the same trap, it is left to
Reuters to come up with the closest (but not very close) approximation of the state of play in the ongoing foreplay which will lead us to a referendum by the end of 2017.
Illustrating what we've known for some time, as Cameron rings the changes in strategy as each one falls, a senior [British] diplomat is cited, to tell us that: "We're making it up as we go along". There is no great plan â no strategy - simply a corralled animal being guided inexorably to the crush.
Clues as to the direction come from the first real acknowledgement of the playbook we've been charting for some time. Reuters is telling us that British officials "place some hope in German calls for change to treaties to help the euro zone withstand more shocks like the Greek crisis". London could have its own changes then, they say.
One senior diplomat in Brussels, we learn, understands that Britain would accept a form of promise of future changes to be effected at the next broader treaty revision. Mutual pledges could, as with Denmark in 1992, be enshrined in a separate EU-British treaty on the subject, lodged with the United Nations.
This is the so-called
Danish option and if we now add the timetable - and a broad hint that this is an agreeable proposition from Juncker's speech (which also gives us the timetable) - we have the skeleton of the playbook which is going to shape events.
The odd thing about this â as we learned from accounts of the
Better Off Out meeting on Tuesday, while I was also in London â is that the runes have been completely missed by the eurosceptic orthodoxy. They quite deliberately insulate themselves from fresh thinking, locking themselves into sterile debates about issues which have long ceased to have any importance, and which will not even feature in the wider campaign.
Their "angels on the head of a pin" style of discourse, and the saturation negativity about the EU from other sources, will be of no consequence to that wider campaign, the nature of which is neatly summed up by Reuters. Cameron, it says, will have to convince voters that any deal he makes with Brussels is legally watertight, at the very least, "legally binding promises to change EU treaties".
This, of course, the "colleagues" cannot deliver, and thence the referendum will narrow down to the single issue of whether Mr Cameron can be trusted at some future time do deliver a treaty change that he promised for the referendum but has not been able to deliver. Our response will be to decide whether we should cut our losses and leave, in order then to precipitate immediate negotiations which could lead to a faster and better outcome.
Here, the balance of advantage now swings to the "Brexiteers" for, as
White Wednesday points out. all Mr Cameron really has to offer is second-class status in the EU. The
status quo has flown out of the window as people learn that the alternative in his playbook is further integration, forcing us to join the euro.
The only protection we will get from Mr Cameron is a vague promise of associate membership, dressed up in taffeta â the details of which have yet to be resolved and may not materialise. Against that, we can project the certainty that, if we vote to leave, we can demand negotiations over which we will have far greater control, completely by-passing any risk of further integration.
With the comfort blanket of the
status quo stripped away, either option involves a period of uncertainty. Whether we vote to remain or leave, there will be protracted negotiations on future relationships. The question we have to confront is whether Mr Cameron can be trusted to deliver, or whether we want to push for a much better deal under the Article 50 procedure. It actually comes down to a choice of Article 48 or Article 50.
As to associate membership, it is easy to argue against this â although we will have to use grown-up language to convey the essence of the debate. Since this is all about relationships, what we have to say is that there are two types on offer: supranational or intergovernmental.
Supranational, or "above the nation", is the EU. Accept that and we are voting for a supreme government of Europe, which enforces its will via qualified majority voting. The wishes of individual members states can be over-ridden and we become subordinate to an alien government, of which our political leaders become part.
On the other hand, the intergovernmental relationship is one of agreement between independent sovereign states, one enunciated by the first Executive Secretary of UNECE (the organisation Churchill favoured). This was Gunnar Myrdal, formerly the Minister of Trade of Sweden, who sought to bring agreement by unanimity, this avoiding votes, a practice
⦠founded upon recognition of the fact that no economic problem, indeed no important problem whatsoever, concerning sovereign governments can be solved by a majority decision in an intergovernmental organisation, but only by agreements between as many governments as are willing to consent.
There is a more detailed discussion of this in an
earlier post, one of the more important that I have written.
The task for the marketing geniuses who are seeking to make their name in the coming referendum is to sell intergovernmentalism to a modern audience, who have little appreciation of the meaning of that word. It was familiar to politicians in the 1950s, but since has disappeared from view, while "supranational" is almost unknown.
Yet the nature of this contest is the choice between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. At the very best, Cameron can give us a watered-down version of the former (and even that is doubtful), the effrects of which are
plain to see. Brexiteers want intergovernmentalism, and we have everything to gain by demanding something Cameron can't deliver and wouldn't even if he could.
