I have heard people say that a eurosceptic MEP should not go to Brussels and Strasbourg - Daniel Hannan rightly ignores them. Unfortunately the Conservatives have the odd, odd member who believes in the EUssr - fortunately Daniel Hannan is not one of those and James Provan lost his seat at the last election due to UKIP gains.
The EU is a bad thing. This isn’t too simplistic a description.
Anyway, you’ve heard this all before so I shall defer to Daniel Hannan’s most recent briefing issued today:
The following article appeared in the most recent edition of The Sunday Telegraph.
Time for an amicable divorce
If you ask an MP from any party where he stands on the EU, he is likely to say something like: “I want a Europe of democratic nations, working together, but keeping their own identities”. Fine. Who doesn’t? The trouble is that such a Europe is not on the menu.
When we politicians talk about “a Europe of nations”, we are being both presumptuous and dishonest: presumptuous because it is not in our gift to dictate how other countries relate one to another; and dishonest because we are holding out to our electorate the prospect of something that is not on offer.
The idea that the EU might abandon its founding ideology in order to humour Britain is one of our more enduring self-deceits. It lay behind Harold Macmillan’s original application in 1961, which was launched on the basis that “the effects of any eventual loss of sovereignty would be mitigated if resistance to Federalism on the part of some of the governments continues, which our membership might be expected to encourage”.
Even in Macmillan’s day, this was wishful thinking – although, with the EU not yet five years old, it was perhaps excusable. It is less excusable today, when we have half a century of hard evidence to the effect that the Treaty of Rome means what it says about “ever-closer union”. Yet still we delude ourselves, imagining that the other members are on the point of coming round to our point of view.
The funny thing is that there is always some apparently plausible reason for believing this. Every enlargement round, for example, was hailed as likely to lead to a looser Europe. In practise, of course, the EU has deepened each time it has widened: the accession of Spain and Portugal led directly to the Single European Act, that of the Nordic countries to the Amsterdam Treaty, and that of the ex-Comecon states to the European Constitution.
Alternatively, we are asked to believe that a domestic change of government somewhere on the Continent will lead to a more decentralised Europe. Absurd as it now seems, Jacques Chirac, Silvio Berlusconi, José-María Aznar and even Gerhard Schröder were all written up in advance of their elections as likely British allies.
Now we are being proffered a new reason for optimism. “These recent ‘No’ votes in France and Holland will change everything,” we are told. “The EU can’t just carry on as if nothing has happened”. Oh yes it can. It did after Denmark’s “No” to Maastricht and Ireland’s “No” to Nice; and it is doing so today. Most of the institutions that the constitution would have authorised are being set up regardless – the European Defence Agency, the External Borders Agency, the Human Rights Institute, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Public Prosecutor, politico-military structures, a collective security clause, a space policy, a diplomatic service.
What else does Brussels have to do to shake us out of our complacency? In its refusal to accept the verdicts of the French and Dutch electorates, the EU has demonstrated beyond doubt that it will allow nothing to divert it from deeper integration, neither its own rule book nor the expressed opposition of its peoples. Surely the time has come to admit to ourselves that the EU is set on full amalgamation.
The pertinent question is not what kind of Europe we might ideally like, but how we should work with the one actually on our doorstep. Are we content to submit ourselves to a European polity with its own president, constitution and military and policing capacity? And, if not, what kind of relationship ought we to have with it?
My sense is that most British people want to retain our trade links with the EU, and to accompany them with close inter-governmental co-operation, but not with political assimilation. Is it feasible to have our cake and eat it? Absolutely.
Consider, as an example, the members of the European Free Trade Area: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Each of these countries has struck its own particular deal with Brussels, but the main elements are the same. They participate fully in the four freedoms of the single market – free movement, that is, of goods, services, people and capital. But they are outside the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, they control their own borders and human rights questions, they are free to negotiate trade accords with non-EU countries and they pay only a token sum to the EU budget.
Unsurprisingly, they are much richer than the EU members. According to the OECD, per capita GDP in the four EFTA countries is double what it is in the EU. Euro-apologists are, naturally, quick with their explanations. “You can’t compare us to Iceland,” they say, “Iceland has fish”. So, of course would Britain, but for the ecological calamity of the CFP. “We’re nothing like Norway”, they go on, “Norway has oil”. Indeed; and Britain is the only net exporter of oil in the EU. Then my particular favourite: “But Switzerland has all those banks”. Yes. And Britain, in the City of London, has the world’s premier financial centre – although it is, admittedly, being slowly asphyxiated by EU financial regulation.
I am not arguing that Britain should precisely replicate the terms struck by these EFTA nations. On the contrary, we could do far better. We are a larger country for one thing, and, unlike the EFTA states, we run a massive trade deficit with the EU. Indeed, the easiest way to answer Tony Blair’s claim about the millions of jobs that depend on the EU is to point to the astonishing fact that the EFTA nations export more per head to the EU from outside than does Britain from the inside. EFTA stands as a living, thriving refutation of the assertion that we must choose between assimilation and isolation.
We can call it renegotiation, or associate membership or leaving the EU and striking a different kind of deal with it. What we call it matters less than the content. It is perfectly possible to enjoy full access to EU markets while freeing ourselves of the accompanying costs of membership. If 4.7 million Norwegians or 280,000 Icelanders are able, through bilateral free trade accords, to furnish their peoples with the highest standard of living in Europe, how much more could Britain achieve?
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There is nothing more pressing in the political sphere right now, and we must make sure the EU does not damage England and the UK.
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