Douglas Carswell's Blog

Is the elite catching up with Europe or is Europe catching up with the elite?

For many years it has been pretty obvious to most folk that the European Union is a disaster.  Anyone trying to run a small business or a farm or able to read a newspaper will have had some sense of how the EU project has hampered our economy and weakened our democracy.

You more or less had to be either a politician, an academic, a media-type or on the EU payroll to not acknowledge the damage the EU has caused this country.

The Eurozone crisis means that even the elites are now having to recognise what the rest of the country could see years ago.

Yesterday in the House of Commons a "new Eurosceptic group" met to consider what we might now actually begin to do about it. Good. Today in a superb article in the Mail, Max Hastings apologises for years of Europhilia - and declares the EU a disaster.

All about us we hear the sound of the politico-media elite catching up with what those outside SW1 knew to be true all along.  But given that the wisdom of the crowd was superior to the elite that landed us in this EU mess, we cannot simply leave it to the politico-media types to get us out of it. 

Max Hastings must be commended for changing his mind - and being prepared to say so openly.  But having got the answer so wrong for so long, he seems a little too quick to tell us in the same article what the new answer has to be; leaving the EU is “implausible” apparently, we must "repatriate" powers instead.   

Yet if Max and co were wrong about getting us into this mess, why should we assume the politico-media elite have the right answers to get us out? 

My new Eurosceptic colleagues in Westminster are right to want to explore which powers must be returned from Brussels to London. But it is a little bit old hat to leave it at that.

We have had two decades of Tory-talk about “fresh starts”, “new deals” and even – I seem to remember something call “variable geometry”.  It was politicians who negotiated the dire deals with Brussels that got us where we are.  Why assume that the next deal they cut with Brussels is going to magically resolve the problems created by their previous deal-making in the first place?

It now seems likely Britain is heading towards a redefined relationship with the EU.  But the outcome of any new deal must be put to the people in a referendum.  Knowing that the people, not just the politicians, are going to have the final say might help ensure that our chief negotiators - mandarins like Jon Cunliffe - begin at last to appreciate what the national interest actually is.     

Please sign the People’s Pledge now to make certain that you – not the SW1 people – get the final say.

PS.  Last week, the government opted into yet another set of EU rules on home affairs and criminal justice.  Yet another transfer of power in the wrong direction .... 

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