Some things never change: the Euro enthusiasts are still avoiding serious debate
1 f a week is a long time in politics, how long is 12 years? The last time I wrote this column was in September 1991. Tony Blair was just a frontbench spokesman on employment; Gordon Brown ditto on trade and industry. These I had at least seen and heard. But if anyone had said to me, 'Geoff Hoon', I would have had to answer, 'Geoff Hoc?. He was not even an MP, just a Derbyshire MEP with an improbably large moustache.
The biggest recent political excitement was the fall of Mrs Thatcher in 1990. (If people ask, a la Kennedy assassination, where were you when you heard the news that Mrs Thatcher had resigned? I can reply: at my word-processor, writing an editorial to say that she shouldn't.) The political landscape was still populated with `big beasts': Heseltine, Lawson, Howe, Healey. And many of the issues that preoccupied us then seem positively archaic today. Would Labour ever modernise and abandon Clause Four? How big would the 'peace dividend' be, now that, with our war against Saddam Hussein successfully accomplished, we were entering a new world order?
There is, however, one issue that has remained strangely constant: the issue of Europe. I do not mean that nothing has changed in the subject matter here; the ratchets have been steadily clicking for the last 12 years, and the degree of European integration now under discussion is hugely greater than what was on offer in 1991. But what strikes me is that the whole style and manner of debate on this issue has remained almost completely unaltered.
Even the personnel have hardly changed. On my last visit to the House of Commons, a couple of months ago, whom should I meet in a corridor but Bill Cash, who — it was as if he had been standing there since I last passed in 1991 — immediately drew my attention to a legal hazard buried in a clause of the new European constitution, And if the Today programme wants (as it usually does) to offer the opposing point of view, it has only to ring up Ken Clarke, the man who pushed through the Maastricht Treaty on the basis of not having read it.
I personally have lost interest in many of the domestic political issues I used to write about; but I make an exception for the European issue, which seems just as compellingly important — even more so, indeed, since the loss of this country's con stitutional independence could be legally formalised within the next year or two. Perhaps I also feel a personal interest here. For the European debate got going at roughly the same time that I entered the small world of political commentary; and for a while, in the late 1980s and early 90s, The Spectator, more than any other journal, was making the running on this issue.
I don't mean to belittle the passionate debate of the mid-1970s on membership of the EEC, nor to forget that in the early 1980s there were some (such as Tony Blair) who were even campaigning for withdrawal. But the truth is that by the mid-1980s the issue seemed to have been settled, and most people were utterly unconcerned by it. In 1986, the year before I joined The Spectator, I was approached by a Radio Four researcher who was planning a series called something like Against the Grain. The idea was that each week someone would challenge an orthodoxy: she suggested that I might like to criticise Freudianism. I said I thought that was old hat, and proposed instead that I tackle what I called the European ideology — 'ever closer union', and so on. She was very dubious, on the grounds that she could not see that there was anything controversial there — which rather proved my point. Nevertheless, she warmed to the idea gradually, and said that she would consult her boss. (I never heard from her again. But, as it happens, I did switch on my radio six weeks later to hear; 'In tonight's Against the Grain, we examine the ideology of Europe. . . ') Towards the end of my first year at The Spectator, the editor, Charles Moore, asked me if I thought we should do anything on the European issue. He sent me to Strasbourg to write a piece about the European Parliament (which appeared under the most plonking of titles, 'How Brussels Sprouts'); but I cannot claim that we were catching a public mood. However, everything changed in 1988, thanks to two people: Jacques Delors, who called for 'the beginnings of European government', and
Mrs Thatcher, who went to Bruges and called for the ending of the beginnings.
And so it was that the Great European Debate got under way. I say 'debate', because that is the standard term; but there was very little real dialogue. The E,urosceptic side did produce a lot of ideas, especially on the economic issues; people forget that the Bruges Group, when it was founded, consisted mostly of academics and economists. But the Euro-enthusiasts made little attempt at serious counterargument. The replies they gave could usually be reduced to one or other (or, curiously, both) of the following: either 'Don't be silly, nothing like that is going to happen', or 'It's going to happen anyway, so don't try to stop it.'
Seeing how successfully that combination of non-arguments operated — with the Eurification of Conservative policy at the time of Maastricht, and the EuroBlairification of Labour ever since — was a peculiarly depressing experience. In the domestic politics of the 1980s (privatisation, trade union reform, and so on), it was commonplace to observe that the Thatcher governments succeeded because they had first won 'the battle of ideas'. Yet here was a conflict of ideas in which the side with the really heavy artillery (Congdon, Minford, et al.) was winning the battles, but seemed to be losing the war.
The other side enjoyed, I think, three strategic advantages. First, the fact that they held power. Second, the apparent complexity and obscurity of the issues involved. And third, the unwillingness of key parts of the media to believe that any of this really mattered. Imagine an editor at the Today programme proposing that they invite a legal expert to discuss the implications of the European constitution — he would be laughed out of the room. But if he suggested getting Ken Clarke to come and rubbish fain Duncan-Smith on Europe, ah, that's a different matter, now we're talking real politics.
Real 'real politics' depends on real democracy: a system in which a genuine demos, or political community, elects its rulers and holds them properly accountable. This is possible, even today, even in Blair's Britain. It will not be possible in a European state of the sort framed by the new European constitution. That, quite simply, is why the European issue, still so boring to many, still matters so much to me.
Peter Obome is away.
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