The credulity of the remaining Tories about David Cameron never ceases to amaze.
For instance, one contributor wrote : ‘I have a lot of respect for Peter Hitchens, but this time he has got it spectacularly wrong. There seems little doubt that Cameron was betrayed by other gutless EU leaders influenced by Merkel who was running scared of the possible election of a political opponent. This article does little to reduce the danger and disaster of an elected Labour government in 2015.’
Nor is it meant to, not that any 'danger' 'or 'disaster' actually exist. The disaster has already happened, thanks to the repeated gullibility of Tory voters. This cry of ‘Vote Tory or you’ll let Labour back in!’ is the last crumbling sandcastle on the Tory beach. But millions have now grasped that this is an empty warning, because Labour *are* back in. Not only has Mr Cameron been adopted by the Blairite press, which is committed to attacking Ed Miliband. There’ s no significant policy difference between the Tories and Labour, except (as I ceaselessly point out) that Labour would never have dared smash up the armed forces as badly as Mr Cameron has done. The utter destruction of the Tory Party is in fact the only hope for conservatism in this country, as it would create the possibility( no more) that a properly patriotic political party would emerge to fill the space left byb a Tory collapse. A nominally Labour government, no different from the actual labour government we now endure, would be a small price to pay for that, and many who voted UKIP last May will do the same next may because they have made the same simple calculation.
My suggestion that Conservatives might consider voting Labour in protest at the infantile personal campaign against Mr Miliband was an expression of disgust at the Stalinizing of our politics and their reduction to a crude, moronic and evil playground game in which someone's personal appearance is more important than his actual political opinions. I was just as furious against the similar dismissals of William Hague because he was bald, but as this nastiness was being done by Labour supporters I could not approach it as I approach the denigration of Mr Miliband.
Some may have found it shocking. They should be far more shocked by the techniques against which it was a protest, techniques that will, if not stopped, destroy our free society.
But then again, how many actual Tories still survive? Even the strongest and richest Tory associations are now increasingly short of members and money, and the general state of the party is (I am reliably informed) far worse than official figures show. Oddly enough, after all the many insults and splats in the face which the Party leadership had delivered to the membership during the last 40 years, it was the issue of same-sex marriage that proved to be one thing too many.
I suppose those who remain in the Tory Party are more or less immune from facts or logic, and are moved by a rather touching loyalty, which is not in any way reciprocated by their leaders. It is a sad thing to see, like a loyal dog which remains at the side of a cruel master. I do wonder how anyone manages to feel loyalty for a political party. I could no more feel loyalty to a burger bar or a recycling depot, myself. Political parties are by their nature cynical things, involving necessary compromise within the bounds of principle.
But as soon as principle is cast aside , they are nothing more than vehicles, and guess who is providing the motive power, and guess who is doing the driving? If people realised how much negative power they actually possessed, by simply withdrawing their endorsement from these people, they would make much more use of it.
Anyway, let’s just examine, for a moment, some of the Prime Minister’s claims on his own behalf, that his lone objection to Jean-Claude Juncker as EU Commission President was a principled fight. And also the claims of the lobby, who were all told to write that this battle moved Britain a step closer to leaving the EU, and all duly wrote it as if it were true. There is not one half-ounce of evidence for this claim.
What was the principle? Whom did Mr Cameron prefer to Mr Juncker, and why? What matter of principle distinguished this perfectly normal Eurocrat from any of the other possible candidates for the job? If you don't like palm trees, stay away from the South Seas. If you don't ike kangaroos, don't go and live in Australia. If you don’t like federalism, then don’t belong to the EU. Belonging to the EU and decrying federalism is like not liking Chinese food, and always going to Chinese restaurants to eat. Daft. (The question of whether Mr Cameron really doesn’t like federalism will be dealt with in a moment).
The European Union is and always has been committed to ever-closer union. The politicians of EU countries are committed to this too. They have all signed a treaty saying so. It is the whole point of the EU. Edward Heath may famously have lied to the nation that no sacrifice of sovereignty was involved in joining the Common Market, but that lie has been repeatedly exposed, and even Mr Cameron (who I sometimes suspect of quite severe historical ignorance for one of his education, and who by all appearances pays little attention to public affairs) must be aware of the truth.
Why, Britain is even now involved in a tangle over how much of our legal system we will submit to EU direction, a tangle which has put him on the spot about the European Arrest Warrant. This Warrant, whether you like it or not (I don’t), is a gross interference in our internal affairs. It is also one from which Mr Cameron could, if he wished, now extract us, simply by deciding to do so. This is thanks to a unique episode in which, for the only time in its history, the EU has agreed to cede powers back to nation states which it had previously taken from them. My understanding, from all reports published of his view, is that Mr Cameron intends to refuse this opportunity to return significant sovereignty to Britain, and to opt back in. How does this square with his claim to be an opponent of federalism?
The answer is that it doesn’t square with it at all.
So which is true? The public bluster or the behind the scenes readiness to concede sovereignty even where he has the power to assert it?
Anyway, what is the Juncker fuss about? The Lisbon Treaty (remember, the one Mr Cameron had a cast-iron pledge to hold a referendum on, and then didn’t?) gave the European Assembly the right to approve the European Council’s choice of President. This was expected to be done on the basis of votes for the Assembly. Reporting of the Euro-elections in this country may have given the impression that whole EU was convulsed by an anti-Brussels wave. It is true that UKIP did well, and so did some rather different movements in other EU countries. But it was not so generally. The Christian Democrats in the EPP alliance remain the largest single grouping. And Mr Juncker was their nominee. Hence the difficulties for Angela Merkel, whose own party belongs to the EPP.
Mr Cameron miscalculated. Someone had told him (correctly) that the European Council didn’t like Mr Juncker and might dump him, to assert the power of the Council over the power of the Assembly. This might, at one stage, have been possible. And so Mr Cameron, by joining in the unhorsing of Mr Juncker, could have appeared (as he always intended) to be ‘tough’, and claimed this as a British victory – by hugely exaggerating the importance of whether the job is held by Mr Juncker, or Herr Buncker, or Mrs Duncker, or Signor Zuncker, or Pan Zhuncker or whoever it happens to be.
(By the way, if Mr Juncker is so bad, how was Mr Cameron able to say he ‘could work with him’ after it is all over. Wouldn’t it have been more honest, and kinder to the old Luxemburger to agree to his appointment at the meeting? )
But as soon as the supposedly tough Mrs Merkel was confronted with jibes from the German media (and her own party) that she was being weak by dropping Mr Juncker, she rallied round him to prove (as weak people do) that she was strong. At this point Mr Cameron, who had made a small fool of himself in the eyes of the well-informed, rewrote the entire fairy-tale.
Now he would not be (because without Angela at his side he could not be) the triumphant victor in a fake battle with the Brussels dragon. He would be the heroic loner, making a last stand against the Eurocrats, their interminable meetings, their communiques and their alleged glasses of cognac for breakfast.
He would ‘stand firm’ and so transmute himself from a small fool into a giant British hero. The magic potion he needed to achieve this is called ‘The Parliamentary Lobby’, a group of men and women who understand so little about reality outside the bubble of 'managed perceptions' in which they dwell that they are seldom restrained by any need to conform with the laws of physics, arithmetic, geometry or any other hard measure.
This wouldn’t matter if these people didn’t have guaranteed access (thanks to belonging to their mystery cult) to every news bulletin and front page in the country. But they do.
Thus they can convert dross into gold, and almost anything into a triumph for the politicians they have chosen (for the moment) to serve and adore. The process by which all this takes place is described in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, originally published as ‘The Broken Compass’ and unavailable in all leading bookshops.
But was Mr Cameron’s stand especially brave or principled? Standing up against things or people on principle is unpleasant and often frightening precisely because of the danger (and sometimes the certainty) that it will cost you something important. What (apart from some petty bureaucratic revenge in the final months of his premiership) did Mr Cameron risk? He was a hero in safety.
Now, I’ve mentioned the Prime Minister’s strange lack of enthusiasm for grabbing back British sovereignty when he can do so by simply acting, no negotiation required.
All of us can remember how he used (back in 2006) to take the standard pro-EU view, that nobody was really interested in the issue.
'Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about
what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the
kids to school, balancing work and family life - we were banging on about
Europe.'
- David Cameron, Party Conference Speech, 2006
And (from the same era)
'The Conservative Party is back in the centre ground, that doesn't mean some sort
of geographical point on the map, it means talking about the things people care
about: the NHS, schools, police and crime. That's what we did all week and I think
people really got that: that we're not banging on about Europe, we're actually
where people are.'
– David Cameron, Statement on ‘webcameron’
and that those who 'banged on' about it were fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.
http://www.lbc.co.uk/david-cameron-ukip-fruitcakes-and-loonies-63456
But he is also a sort of Europatriot, as evidenced by his trip to Kazakhstan nearly a year ago – a trip in itself hilarious, given the Premier’s other great pose as the armed foe of despotism. Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, about whom I have written at length, is a regular contestant in the ‘Despot of the Year’ competition.
But at a question and answer session at the modestly-named Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan’s weird, vainglorious capital, Astana, Mr Cameron said ; ‘Britain has always supported the widening of the EU. Our vision of the EU is that it should be a large trading and co-operating organisation that effectively stretches, as it were, from the Atlantic to the Urals. We have a wide vision of Europe and we have always encouraged countries that want to join.’
Not only is he not even a ‘Eurosceptic’ , wretched and meaningless as that non-position is. Mr Cameron is nd always has been an open partisan of the EU and of its aggressive march eastwards into the lands of the former USSR.
The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt reported him as saying ‘We recognise there is a problem in the EU right now that needs to be solved.’
Cameron said the EU needed to be more flexible to accommodate euro and non-euro members.
‘We have to make this organisation flexible enough to include both sorts of country. In my view the euro countries clearly need to integrate more. If you have a single currency you need to have an integrated banking system, you need to have an integrated fiscal system. You need to make sure you have quite a lot of rules. You need solidarity.
‘So you need change in the single currency. And then you need to make the EU more flexible so that it can include countries like Britain or other countries that want to be in this trading, co-operating partnership but don't want the currency.
‘That is why I have argued for a renegotiation of the rules of the EU between now and 2017. I have said that, if re-elected, I will hold a referendum by the end of 2017 to give the British people a choice about whether they want to stay in this organisation, which would be changed by then, or to leave this organisation.’
This statement contains absolutely not one grain of hostility to the organisation itself, its purpose or its nature, only a plea for it to be more accommodating to its subject provinces.
Assuming (which is rash) that Mr Cameron is in any position to hold a referendum on anything much more ambitious than what he has for breakfast by 2017 (not Cognac, obviously), who’d like to place a substantial bet that he will then recommend a British exit? Should he by some bizarre concatenation of events be in any position to hold this plebiscite, we will hear a lot of about how ‘tough’ he has been (there may have been some ‘walk-outs’ faithfully reported by the parliamentary lobby) and that he has, by dint of this ‘toughness’, won a deal he can confidently recommend to the British people (if there *is* a British people by then). The other Euro-leaders will of course tactfully join in the pretence. They don’t want to lose our huge net contribution, or our fisheries, nor to deny themselves the pleasure of seeing a once-independent, once-free nation chained to the wall and submissively eating its prison fare.
