Say you have a good friend, practically family, whom you’ve known for some time and whose advice you value. Of course there are differences in emphasis. He likes angling where you prefer soccer and he occasionally forgets – where you remember – that parking wardens also have a job to do. Then one lunchtime, over a glass of tap water, he reveals that he is a long-time member of Britons Against Fluoridation and regards the addition of any chemical to his water supply as an attempt by shadowy powers to interfere with his brain. Though disconcerted, you have two options – to nod or to argue. Columnists argue.
I’ve been writing on these pages for just over two years now, and that period has been relatively free of Euro controversy. This has suited me, because Europe (in the way the word “Europe” has come to be used in media discourse) has never excited me that much. After a few years of being vaguely and doctrinally anti-common market, I eventually saw the benefit of what they call “pooling sovereignty”, but since then the stormy enthusiasms of the Philes and the Phobes for their federal states or their magically separate nation states have seemed abstract and distant.
When enlargement of the EU effectively killed the federal project, and with entry into the euro parked for my puppy’s lifetime, it just seemed a matter of making the EU we’d got work as well as possible, of letting a few more countries in and of competing like anything with the other world economic superpowers.
Then along came last week’s Brussels summit and almost everybody around the place turned out to be honorary vice-presidents of Britons Against Fluoridation. There were editorials in advance of the summit predicting dire happenings and continental splits. One even suggested that Britain might care to take a leaf out of the Kaczynski Twins Mad Book of Polish Negotiating (Chapter One: Alvays Mention Ze Var). There were columns after the summit demanding that we should hold a referendum toute suite because the frogs and the krauts were up to their old superstate building tricks again.
Is it me, I thought, or them? The debate is a bit different from the crazy Maastricht days of ’92 largely because, as a political force, the Europhiles don’t exist any more and the Europhobes are nowhere near as powerful as they used to be, chastened slightly by the electoral results of 2001 and 2005. So it should be extraordinary just how much alarm is being generated by the mostly anodyne and preponderantly technical agreements made in Brussels, and due to be presented to an intergovernmental conference later in the year.
The entire way in which we discuss this issue in Britain means playing an elaborate game. For the Government the task has been to ensure that whatever was going to be agreed could be characterised as being insignificant enough in constitutional terms to make a referendum (which it would probably lose) seem pointless. But first it had to create the impression that there was some threat in the first place for it successfully to defeat. For the Phobes the job – as ever – is to suggest that there are changes so fundamental in nature that nothing but a referendum (which they will win) can possibly do justice to their gravity. As a fall-back the anti-Europeans can deploy the Labour promise to hold a plebiscite on the defeated constitution, providing they can only convince us that the new agreement is the same as the old one.
Well, Labour may have promised a referendum, but I never did, and – looked at as dispassionately as I can manage – it’s pretty obvious that we don’t need one. First let me reiterate the point that we don’t hold referendums on much in this country. In my lifetime I have voted in two – in 1975 on EC membership and in London on whether we should have a mayor. Since then we have had sundry wars, mass Eastern European immigration, Bank of England independence, several Conservative European treaties, the incorporation of the Human Rights Act, the abolition of hereditary peerages, the abolition of the grammar school system, the awarding of several royal charters to the BBC and Big Brother on TV, all of which have had more impact on British society and on none of which have we been directly consulted through a referendum. Never mind other countries (in other countries they have bullfighting), in this country we have set the referendum bar fairly high.
What was agreed last week does not, as claimed, move us a long way towards a single European state with a single foreign policy decided by majority voting. The text specifically states that any European decisions on foreign or security policy would have to be adopted unanimously by the European Council (where sit all member countries). Defence and military affairs were exempted from any majority voting.
Britain has an opt-out on the extension of majority voting to justice and home affairs. There is hardly anything in here that wasn’t confirmed in principle at Maastricht; the main changes are to allow what has been agreed to be pursued more effectively by a foreign policy representative and a presidency. I wonder whether it isn’t the threat of a more efficient EU that so enrages some Phobes who might otherwise spend their days pleasurably lamenting the Union’s lack of ability to implement its agreements.
It is ironic that, with enlargement and economic reform, the EU has gradually become the thing that some of the original Eurosceptics said they most wanted and that the more empire-building Europhiles were most opposed to. Now we find that the time-hardened Sceptics are unwilling to claim success, suggesting that their true enthusiasm was always really for withdrawal.
Never mind the manifesto. If Mr Brown believes that a referendum is a bad idea, he should explain his thinking and be judged at the next election. The Tories have a trickier decision. First, is this a good agreement or not? Secondly, if it is, are they really going to invest huge amounts of rare political capital in arguing that it isn’t and that we need a referendum to reject it? Thirdly, what if they get their referendum, reject the treaty and then find themselves in power? Better, Mr Cameron, to ditch Britons Against Fluoridation now, while you still can.
David Aaronovitch