Douglas Carswell's Blog

They still don't get it

In today’s Telegraph, Fraser Nelson has a fascinating article that sheds a lot of light on current thinking about Europe amongst key Coalition figures in SW1.

Nick Clegg, we are told, is coming round to the view that Britain might have a looser relationship with Europe after all. Glad to hear it. George Osborne is, apparently, “letting it be known” he is jolly Eurosceptic. Wonderful.   

It is a good thing that politicians change their mind as facts come along which overturn their earlier assumptions. But there is another, less comfortable way of reading Fraser’s article. 

Many of those Fraser refers to seem to have one thing in common; they all seem to stop short of an actual commitment to an In / Out vote. It is almost as if they have started out by asking themselves “what do we need to do to avoid putting a straight In / Out choice to the people?”

Cleggy’s answer seems to be “yes” to some kind of looser relationship - provided there’s no referendum.  Others are putting it about that we need a referendum on some yet-to-be-specified new deal, rather than In / Out. Even George Osborne’s super-duper tough new stance hinges on Britain’s renegotiation demands not being met. 

The trouble is that re-negotiation means leaving it to the ministers and mandarins who got us into this mess to get us out of it.

Who would broker these new arrangement with Brussels? Perhaps it would be the same set of mandarins who signed us up to the Eurozone bailouts? 

Or those ministers who merrily doubled our IMF contributions to rescue a currency we chose not to join?

Or men like Jon Cunliffe, the chap who helped do the deal that signed us up to a new system of pan-European economic governance?  At the precise moment Europe’s economy started to tank.

You only need to ask who the deal-makers might be to see the problem with the let’s-have-a-new-deal approach.  It is time to trust the people.

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