It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements. They want to create a truly federal union, e pluribus unum, when most British people do not. The fundamental problem remains: that they have an ideal that we do not share. There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says No. It is good, and right, but it cannot stop the machine at best it can put a temporary and occasional spoke in the ratchet. There is an excellent forthcoming Bill that will assert the sovereignty of Parliament, the fruit of heroic intellectual labour by Oliver Letwin, which may well exercise a chilling effect on some of the more federalist flights of fancy of the court and the Commission.
There is some useful language about stopping “ever-closer union” from applying to the UK, about protecting the euro outs from the euro ins, and about competition and deregulation. At a time when Brussels should be devolving power, it is hauling more and more towards the centre, and there is no way that Britain can be unaffected.ĭavid Cameron has done his very best, and he has achieved more than many expected. It all involves more integration: a social union, a political union, a budgetary union. There is a document floating around Brussels called “The Five Presidents Report”, in which the leaders of the various EU institutions map out ways to save the euro. And then came German reunification, and the panicked efforts of Delors, Kohl and Mitterrand to “lock” Germany into Europe with the euro and since then the pace of integration has never really slackened.ĭemocracy matters and I find it deeply worrying that the Greeks are effectively being told what to do with their budgets and public spending, in spite of huge suffering among the population. The efforts at harmonisation were occasionally comical, and I informed readers about euro-condoms and the great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp.
When I went to Brussels in 1989, I found well-meaning officials (many of them British) trying to break down barriers to trade with a new procedure – agreed by Margaret Thatcher – called Qualified Majority Voting. In the 28 years since I first started writing for this paper about the Common Market – as it was then still known – the project has morphed and grown in such a way as to be unrecognisable, rather as the vast new Euro palaces of glass and steel now lour over the little cobbled streets in the heart of the Belgian capital. And it is important to remember: it isn’t we in this country who have changed.
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