Our politicians need to tackle the fundamental problem at the heart of our membership
In all the brouhaha over a Euro-referendum unleashed in the wake of that surge
in the polls by Ukip, it is hard to know who is talking the emptiest fluff.
We really are paying the price for all those years when our politicians and
media were so keen to bury our European system of government out of sight
that they have little idea of the harsh realities of the situation in which
we find ourselves.
We have Tory MPs piling in to demand an in-out referendum before 2015, which
they are not going to get. We have former political heavyweights such as
Lord Lawson, Denis Healey and Norman Lamont queuing up to say that if there
were such a referendum they would vote to leave. We’ve even got Nick Clegg
and those poor little BBC presenters locked in a 13-year-old time warp,
trying to tell us that, if we did leave, 3.5 million British jobs would
vanish because our trade with our European neighbours would somehow dry up
overnight.
None of this bears any more relation to where we actually are, as one of the
27 fully signed-up members of the EU, than David Cameron’s threefold dollop
of wishful thinking that, if only we re-elect him in 2015, and if only he
can somehow persuade his EU colleagues to hand back a few unspecified powers
of government –– in breach of the most basic principle on which the EU was
founded – he can somehow lead the “Yes” campaign in 2017 to a referendum
vote for Britain to stay in.
It is true we may one day by law have to have a referendum, whichever party is
in power, because sooner or later the drive to give Brussels even more
powers in its efforts to save the doomed euro will require a new treaty. But
in the meantime Mr Cameron is terrified that, unless we stay in the EU, we
will lose the right to trade freely with its single market. Lord Lawson, in
his own muddled way, seems equally to think that, by leaving, we would
indeed be excluded from the single market, but that this would be OK because
it would somehow bring us “a positive economic advantage”.
The truth is that there is only one way we can get what they, and most people,
seem to want, but none of them, except occasionally Nigel Farage, ever
mentions it. The only way we can compel our EU partners to negotiate a new
relationship which would still give us access to the single market is by
invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Only thus can we negotiate
precisely the kind of relationship already enjoyed, in their different ways,
by the two most prosperous countries in Europe, Norway and Switzerland,
which trade as freely with the EU as we do, but without the rest of that
political baggage that inspires such growing resentment not just in Britain,
but in many other EU member states.
This, of course, catches out Mr Cameron, because Article 50 can only be
invoked by a country announcing its wish to leave the EU. He flatly refuses
to recognise that it is perfectly possible to continue trading freely with
the EU without belonging to it.
Lord Lawson falls into the opposite trap by also imagining that leaving the EU means being excluded from the single market, although he seems to think this could be an advantage because we could somehow make up for it by increasing our trade with the rest of the world. But both these men, like countless others, are living in cloud-cuckoo land. They will not bring their thinking back to earth by looking hard-headedly at the rules of the game.
The only way we can now face up to the reality of the plight we are in is by putting Article 50 at the very centre of the national debate. It is the only way we can get the best of both worlds that so many people say they want.
Unless we do so, we are doomed to wander on in a fog of wishful thinking that can only continue to leave us with the worst of all worlds – ruled by a dysfunctional system of government that we increasingly resent, but refuse to understand. In the words of Lady Thatcher I have quoted before, from her book Statecraft, that we should ever have become absorbed into this “European superstate” will one day be seen as “a political error of the first magnitude”.
If we really wish to remedy that error, the only practical way that can be brought about is by invoking Article 50.
Strange weather is normal
When Boris Johnson entertained his readers last week with his account of a bike ride to the Chilterns, he described how he was greeted by the sight of “hawthorn blossom like gun smoke” exploding across the hill-sides. What I suspect he saw was not an early sight of the frozen firework displays of hawthorn blossom, but this year’s late flowering of blackthorn, as I confirmed when travelling through the Chilterns last week, and seeing it still shining white in the hedgerows.
It is true that for some years the hawthorn did flower very much earlier than normal (in 2010 I saw it in Somerset on April 25). This prompted environmental journalists who know little about nature to hail it as one of the proofs, along with primroses in December, that the world was in the grip of runaway warming. But since nature has since returned to its former patterns (last year’s hawthorn didn’t come into flower until May 22), they have gone strangely quiet about such things.
The new party line, as we know, is to promote their cult by going on about anything that can be called an “extreme weather event”, as if such things never happened before, so that any unusual flood, drought or snowfall can be seen as further proof of warming that otherwise remains largely invisible.
I was lately reading the diary entries by Pepys and Evelyn, noting the plethora of “extreme weather events” in the 17th century, when scarcely a year went by when they could not describe some flood, drought, storm or blizzard as being “unknown in the memory of man”. But the 17th century, of course, was the height of the Little Ice Age, when the world was colder than it had been in 13,000 years. Those environmental zealots so eager to blame any aberration in our weather on man-made warming seem to know as little of history as they do of nature.
Arctic heroes honoured at last
The sight of 39 aged veterans lined up on the shores of Loch Ewe, Scotland, to be given Arctic Star medals, and to stand in silent memory of their 3,000 comrades who died on those 78 convoys that battled against all odds to bring military supplies to northern Russia between 1941 and 1945, marked the end of one of the more curious political blunders of our post-war history.
For 68 years successive governments refused to recognise the heroism of those who survived what Churchill called “the worst journey in the world” by giving them medals.
When in 2011 the Russian government struck a medal for the veterans, our Foreign Office forbade them to wear it. Worse still, in Parliament, a junior Tory defence minister, Andrew Robathan, contemptuously refused yet another call for a British campaign medal, saying that Britain does not “throw around medals” like Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. We award them, he said, only for “risk and rigour”.
My family took a personal interest in all this because my uncle, Lieutenant-Commander Neil Boyd, was captain of the corvette HMS Poppy, which escorted several convoys, including PQ 17, the deadliest of all. Of 35 merchant ships that left Iceland, only 10 reached Murmansk.
My uncle twice won the Distinguished Service Cross for his service in the Atlantic and North Africa, but was among the thousands of survivors of the Arctic convoys who died before
the Government finally agreed to honour their heroism in a campaign as cruelly packed with horrors as any in the war.
We should be grateful to all those who fought for so long to redress this wrong, including the Tory MP Catherine Dinenage who, in 2011, told Mr Robathan that the “disgusting” policy he supported had “brought shame on our country”.
For some, the memory of that shame is still not wholly erased.
Lord Lawson falls into the opposite trap by also imagining that leaving the EU means being excluded from the single market, although he seems to think this could be an advantage because we could somehow make up for it by increasing our trade with the rest of the world. But both these men, like countless others, are living in cloud-cuckoo land. They will not bring their thinking back to earth by looking hard-headedly at the rules of the game.
The only way we can now face up to the reality of the plight we are in is by putting Article 50 at the very centre of the national debate. It is the only way we can get the best of both worlds that so many people say they want.
Unless we do so, we are doomed to wander on in a fog of wishful thinking that can only continue to leave us with the worst of all worlds – ruled by a dysfunctional system of government that we increasingly resent, but refuse to understand. In the words of Lady Thatcher I have quoted before, from her book Statecraft, that we should ever have become absorbed into this “European superstate” will one day be seen as “a political error of the first magnitude”.
If we really wish to remedy that error, the only practical way that can be brought about is by invoking Article 50.
Strange weather is normal
When Boris Johnson entertained his readers last week with his account of a bike ride to the Chilterns, he described how he was greeted by the sight of “hawthorn blossom like gun smoke” exploding across the hill-sides. What I suspect he saw was not an early sight of the frozen firework displays of hawthorn blossom, but this year’s late flowering of blackthorn, as I confirmed when travelling through the Chilterns last week, and seeing it still shining white in the hedgerows.
It is true that for some years the hawthorn did flower very much earlier than normal (in 2010 I saw it in Somerset on April 25). This prompted environmental journalists who know little about nature to hail it as one of the proofs, along with primroses in December, that the world was in the grip of runaway warming. But since nature has since returned to its former patterns (last year’s hawthorn didn’t come into flower until May 22), they have gone strangely quiet about such things.
The new party line, as we know, is to promote their cult by going on about anything that can be called an “extreme weather event”, as if such things never happened before, so that any unusual flood, drought or snowfall can be seen as further proof of warming that otherwise remains largely invisible.
I was lately reading the diary entries by Pepys and Evelyn, noting the plethora of “extreme weather events” in the 17th century, when scarcely a year went by when they could not describe some flood, drought, storm or blizzard as being “unknown in the memory of man”. But the 17th century, of course, was the height of the Little Ice Age, when the world was colder than it had been in 13,000 years. Those environmental zealots so eager to blame any aberration in our weather on man-made warming seem to know as little of history as they do of nature.
Arctic heroes honoured at last
The sight of 39 aged veterans lined up on the shores of Loch Ewe, Scotland, to be given Arctic Star medals, and to stand in silent memory of their 3,000 comrades who died on those 78 convoys that battled against all odds to bring military supplies to northern Russia between 1941 and 1945, marked the end of one of the more curious political blunders of our post-war history.
For 68 years successive governments refused to recognise the heroism of those who survived what Churchill called “the worst journey in the world” by giving them medals.
When in 2011 the Russian government struck a medal for the veterans, our Foreign Office forbade them to wear it. Worse still, in Parliament, a junior Tory defence minister, Andrew Robathan, contemptuously refused yet another call for a British campaign medal, saying that Britain does not “throw around medals” like Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. We award them, he said, only for “risk and rigour”.
My family took a personal interest in all this because my uncle, Lieutenant-Commander Neil Boyd, was captain of the corvette HMS Poppy, which escorted several convoys, including PQ 17, the deadliest of all. Of 35 merchant ships that left Iceland, only 10 reached Murmansk.
My uncle twice won the Distinguished Service Cross for his service in the Atlantic and North Africa, but was among the thousands of survivors of the Arctic convoys who died before
the Government finally agreed to honour their heroism in a campaign as cruelly packed with horrors as any in the war.
We should be grateful to all those who fought for so long to redress this wrong, including the Tory MP Catherine Dinenage who, in 2011, told Mr Robathan that the “disgusting” policy he supported had “brought shame on our country”.
For some, the memory of that shame is still not wholly erased.
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