Tory wars over Europe

[Sheilbh]

A headline from any point over the last 20 years. It's madness.

EU referendum: cabinet crisis for David Cameron as ministers break ranks
Michael Gove and Philip Hammond say they would vote to leave European Union
Nicholas Watt and Rajeev Syal
The Guardian, Sunday 12 May 2013 20.39 BST

David Cameron is struggling to maintain Tory discipline over Europe after cabinet loyalists Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said on Sunday that they would vote to leave the European Union if a referendum were to be held now.

Gove, the education minister, confirmed for the first time that he believes that leaving the EU would have "certain advantages", while Hammond, the defence secretary, later said that he too would vote to leave if he was asked to endorse the EU "exactly as it is today".

The remarks, which follow similar calls by Lord Lawson and Michael Portillo last week for Britain to leave Europe, are particularly significant because they are the first cabinet ministers to say they would vote to quit if an immediate referendum were held.

Dozens of Tory MPs are preparing to vote in favour of a backbench amendment to the motion welcoming the Queen's speech, which is expected on Wednesday, regretting the absence of an in/out referendum on Britain's EU membership.

The remarks by Gove, described as "unhelpful" by party officials, went slightly further than Hammond, who said that it was "defeatist" to argue in favour of withdrawal because the prime minister will negotiate a better deal for Britain.

Gove told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 that he would abstain in the vote after No 10 said ministers would be free to take the rare step of declining to offer wholehearted support for the Queen's speech. No 10 is offering backbenchers a free vote and ministers the right to abstain.

The prime minister says that, if elected with a majority in 2015, he would hold a referendum by 2017. This would take place after a renegotiation of Britain's membership terms.

Friends of Gove told the Mail on Sunday last year that Britain should leave the EU unless substantial powers were repatriated. Asked whether he stood by those private remarks, he said: "Yes, I'm not happy with our position in the EU."

Gove said he supported the prime minister's plan to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership after the election. But he then added that life outside the EU could have benefits. He said: "My preference is for a change in Britain's relationship with the European Union. My ideal is exactly what the majority of the British public's ideal is, which is to recognise the current situation is no good, to say that life outside would be perfectly tolerable, we could contemplate it, there would be certain advantages.

"But the best deal for Europe, and for Britain, would be if Britain were to lead the change that Europe needs." Explaining his abstention, he said: "I'm going to abstain ... it's an exercise in letting off steam."

Hammond, interviewed for Pienaar's Politics on BBC radio, later said: "If the choice is between a European Union written exactly as it is today and not being a part of that then I have to say that I'm on the side of the argument that Michael Gove has put forward."

Theresa May, the home secretary, said she too would abstain. But she declined to say whether she would vote to leave the EU if a referendum were held now. The prime minister will be in the US when the Commons vote is held.

Ministers have been excluded from a free vote granted to Tory backbenchers to support the rebel amendment – with about 100 MPs expected to take the rare step of formally criticising their own government's legislative programme. At least two parliamentary private secretaries are expected to vote for the amendment.

Supporters of the amendment believe that the party must take on board traditional Tory voters' views after large numbers voted UKIP in this month's local elections.

Weirdly until this government gave us fixed term parliaments () an amendment to the Queen's Speech would require the PM to resign as a vote of no confidence. It still seems mad though. And I don't remember the nineties well enough to understand just how weird the Tories get over Europe

Edit: Also it looks very likely that whoever succeeds Cameron as Tory leader will be a better-off-outer.

[11B4V]

Sounds like the Tory's are the British equivalent of the Tea Party. 

[Neil]

Sounds like the Tory's are the British equivalent of the Tea Party. 

Don't be silly.  For one thing, they're not racist hillbilly retards.  For another thing, it's debatable whether the EU is a good thing.  It is not debatable that the 19th century is over and so thing like taxes, gun control and black people voting are a part of reality.

[11B4V]

taxes, gun control and black people voting are a part of reality.

Unsure of your point. We have taxes, sane gun control, black people can vote, and we have a black president. Only thing left this Teh Gays and they'll get their due.

Don't be silly.  For one thing, they're not racist hillbilly retards.

Cultured hillbilly's. 

For another thing, it's debatable whether the EU is a good thing. 

Well duh. Those knobs over there have never gotten it together. Nice attempt, but it will fail in the end.

I say the UK should pull out.

[Neil]

Unsure of your point. We have taxes, sane gun control, black people can vote, and we have a black president. Only thing left this Teh Gays and they'll get their due.

The point of the Tea Party is to get rid of taxes, eliminate restrictions on guns, and to keep uppity blacks in their place.

Well duh. Those knobs over there have never gotten it together. Nice attempt, but it will fail in the end.

I say the UK should pull out.

Hard to say.  At least when they're in there, they're acting to restrict anything that the French or the Germans might try to pull.  Those two peoples tend to get pretty much everything wrong, so somebody needs to babysit them.

[alfred russel]

Sheilbh, presumably the purpose of putting forward a referendum date of 2017 and one contingent on winning a majority in the next election is twofold: a) get support in the next election from skeptic voters, and b) present a credible walkout scenario to Europe to strengthen Cameron's hands in negotiations.

Since Cameron is on record supporting the EU, the party actually needs serious backbench (and even cabinent) contention on the issue if they are to be credible with such a strategy.

[Sheilbh]

The other thing is that he wouldn't have the support of the Lib Dems in legislating for a referendum in this Parliament and he probably doesn't want the two years in the run-up to an election spent negotiating with Merkel.

The intention of putting forward a referendum at all was to calm down the restive Tory right and stop the party from 'banging on about Europe' as they used to in the 90s. It's been a limited success

[alfred russel]

The other thing is that he wouldn't have the support of the Lib Dems in legislating for a referendum in this Parliament and he probably doesn't want the two years in the run-up to an election spent negotiating with Merkel.

The intention of putting forward a referendum at all was to calm down the restive Tory right and stop the party from 'banging on about Europe' as they used to in the 90s. It's been a limited success

These aren't the best days for the EU. Symbolic steps "banging on about Europe" are probably healthy considering how out of touch the conservatives would seem if everyone stuck to pro EU party lines.

This is one of those places that having the Lib Dems in a coalition is probably helpful for Cameron. 

[Josquius]

Instead of pulling out of the EU we should just nuke Russia and wait for them to shoot back. The effects won't be that much worse. It would be suicide to pull out.

I just hope despite the frequent rhetoric that the general population would vote sensibly.

[Sheilbh]

These aren't the best days for the EU. Symbolic steps "banging on about Europe" are probably healthy considering how out of touch the conservatives would seem if everyone stuck to pro EU party lines.

I disagree. Most people don't care about Europe but it's all the Tories talk about and what they fight over. It's not healthy. If they were fighting about economic policy at least it would be relevant to most voters. This is the tail wagging the dog.

Official Tory policy isn't even that pro-EU. At the last election they ran on renegotiating our membership and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Now Cameron's moved them to still leaving the ECHR and renegotiating but after the negotiations there'll be an in-out referendum. When he fails to win the next election I imagine his successor will ditch the renegotiation and go straight for a referendum.

[Iormlund]

...present a credible walkout scenario to Europe to strengthen Cameron's hands in negotiations.

A walkout from the Common Market would completely obliterate the City and much of the remaining industry (and contrary to popular belief the UK still has sizable manufacturing).
Only the most delusional of people think the Tories have any leverage to negotiate a better deal, on either EU or EFTA.

[Sheilbh]

Just read this very good piece in the Telegraph:

An EU referendum is the political mouse that roared
David Cameron's promise of a new deal has won few friends. To too many eyes, it looks like compromise
By Matthew d'Ancona4:51PM BST 11 May 2013335 Comments

Political absurdity is often the face of deep-rooted complexity; especially so in the case of a coalition. This week, it is probable that an amendment regretting the absence of an EU referendum Bill from the Queen's Speech will be called, and force a most peculiar outcome.

As things stand, Tory backbenchers will be granted a free vote on the motion tabled by two of their number, John Baron and Peter Bone, while members of the Government will abstain. However, as The Sunday Telegraph reveals today, some Lib Dem ministers are now expected to complicate matters further by voting against, as their pro-EU convictions dictate.

This is not the first time that the dynamics of Coalition have spawned psychedelic, multi-dimensional politics. In December 2010, as tuition fees gave the Lib Dems their first bitter taste of government's moral quandaries, Vince Cable came close to commending the reform to the House – and then abstaining on it. As John Denham, then shadow business secretary, asked: "When was the last time that a minister – a secretary of state and a member of the Cabinet – came to the House to defend a policy that he drew up, on the same day on which he told the BBC that he might not even vote for it?"

When indeed? To its latest dilemma, No 10's response has been Confucian in form: "When you see a mouse come in to a room, you can either say 'there's a mouse', or you can jump on a table, screaming." Safe to say, I think, that the mouse in this kung-fu riddle is the EU referendum, or perhaps the amendment itself, and that the screaming is all the fuss that the political and media class is making.

The Prime Minister's distaste for panic has undoubtedly served him well over the years, not least in the mind-numbing maze of bipartisan Government. The Cameroons are right to complain that some in their party act as if the Tories were not in coalition, or the Lib Dems could be safely ignored. That arrogance cost the party the boundary review and perhaps the next election (the constituency reorganisation would have been worth about 20 seats to the Conservatives). What should worry Cameron is the resilient lack of trust between himself and a significant core of Tory MPs. When they demand a draft referendum bill, they are saying: we take all your points about Clegg and the Lib Dems and what you can and can't do, but even so – sorry, mate – we still want it in writing.

Considered in this context, it is remarkable that the PM's speech on Britain's relationship with the EU in January – promising the first referendum on our membership since 1975 – made so little impact upon the debate it was meant to calm, or upon the rise of the UK Independence Party. According to one loyalist member of the Government: "The fact is that people don't trust us."

What Alastair Campbell once called "this huge stuff about trust" is the binding force in all of this, at every level. The perception that Cameron broke his own "cast-iron guarantee" to hold a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty compounded the ugly legacy of MPs' expenses, Iraq, spin, sleaze, "Back to Basics" and much else besides. This is an era of institutional frailty: Parliament, the press, the financial sector, the BBC, all have been traumatised by scandal and deceit. And never before have politicians been subject to such relentless scrutiny: the tools of the digital revolution have the paradoxical effect of forcing honesty upon those who govern, while reducing trust among the governed.

Against this backdrop, the sleek élites of the late 20th and early 21st centuries already look dated. Those who point at Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage and say they don't look like men of government are only bolstering their credentials and their voter appeal. The Mayor of London and the Ukip leader prosper precisely because they have the scuffed honesty of amateurs – real human beings who have not been bred in laboratories, and speak their mind rather than parrot the "line to take".

In reality, of course, both men are politicians to their finger-tips; Boris is the second-term mayor of a global city which last year hosted the Olympics, while Farage is masterminding a deft electoral guerrilla strategy that suggests he has talents that transcend saloon-bar charm and Barbour chic. But they understand that a deeply suspicious electorate values "authenticity" more than anything else.

Alongside the historic collapse of trust, Cameron has to confront a no less dramatic shift in the foundations and fortunes of the EU. As the late Hugo Young argued in his magisterial account of Britain's relationship with Europe, This Blessed Plot, Eurosceptics were always open to the charge of "lack of realism". Writing in 1998, Young observed: "The world they defended seemed, in the end, to be nostalgic and narrow: assailed by demons, racked by existential confusion."

But, 15 years on, their world and the EU's look very different. The Continent is racked by the eurozone crisis, and it is no longer as easy to argue that Britain outside the EU would suffer economically. As Lord Lawson wrote last week in his Times article calling for exit: "The heart of the matter is that the relevant economic context nowadays is not Europe but globalisation, including global free trade, with the World Trade Organisation as its monitor."

Lawson is close to George Osborne, and his article reflects views that, it is safe to assume, he has already discussed with senior Tories in the Coalition. Michael Portillo's piece in the same newspaper was angrier, more overtly hostile to Cameron's position and, in Latin style, scornful of today's Conservative leadership: "They whinge about Europe, but don't have the self-confidence to pull out." Portillo accused the political class of "defeatism" and invited the reader to imagine "Margaret Thatcher approaching the issue in such an insincere and political way".

At such moments, one recalls that Portillo is not only the father of Tory modernisation – too rarely recognised as such by its beneficiaries – but was also a close disciple of the Iron Lady. In arguing that there is a "fundamental mismatch" between Britain's ambitions and those of the EU, one that cannot be "resolved by a little renegotiation", he spoke, I suspect, for the majority of Tory MPs and for a growing percentage of the population. Cameron's best line is that Britain is in a "global race". It is getting harder with each passing month to argue that our membership of the EU is a help, rather than a hindrance to our performance in that contest.

To his under-acknowledged credit, this PM has offered the public a referendum on British membership. But his promise of a new deal, a fresh beginning worth waiting for before we decide, has gained little traction and won few friends. To too many eyes, it looks like compromise rather than half of the logic. This week's amendment is only one of the many interventions, ploys and stunts he can expect, intended to push him further, faster, on this central question of the nation's identity. In politics, the mouse sometimes roars.

[Sheilbh]

A walkout from the Common Market would completely obliterate the City and much of the remaining industry (and contrary to popular belief the UK still has sizable manufacturing).

I don't think it'd necessarily be disastrous. I probably wouldn't support leaving the EU but I'm not convinced it'd be the end of the British economy

[alfred russel]

I disagree. Most people don't care about Europe but it's all the Tories talk about and what they fight over. It's not healthy. If they were fighting about economic policy at least it would be relevant to most voters. This is the tail wagging the dog.

I can't speak to the volume of rhetoric--if it is dominating it I agree with you (I don't follow UK politics enough to get a sense of that).

Official Tory policy isn't even that pro-EU. At the last election they ran on renegotiating our membership and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. Now Cameron's moved them to still leaving the ECHR and renegotiating but after the negotiations there'll be an in-out referendum. When he fails to win the next election I imagine his successor will ditch the renegotiation and go straight for a referendum.

On the balance, I am strongly pro EU. However, there are obviously problems with the way things are going--and that is arguably the most important economic issue in Europe right now. A renegotiation would probably be healthy.

[Warspite]

A walkout from the Common Market would completely obliterate the City and much of the remaining industry (and contrary to popular belief the UK still has sizable manufacturing).

I don't think it'd necessarily be disastrous. I probably wouldn't support leaving the EU but I'm not convinced it'd be the end of the British economy

It wouldn't be the end of the British economy - we'd stay a rich country - but I don't see how withdrawal would do much good either. I suspect a lot of the EU regulatory costs would remain in some form or another, and the loss of labour mobility would not be beneficial to certain key sectors.

Never did I expect that my Croatian nationality, of all things, would potentially be my key to easy movement around the EU one day