EU’ve Got Mail
Civitas, 10 August 2011
Buried amidst the media flurry sparked the recent riots, a seemingly inconsequential nugget of news has slipped largely undetected beneath the public radar.
It all began when Anita Sega, president of the society for Oxford University graduates, penned a toxic letter to the Prime Minister, accusing him of betraying a cornerstone of last year’s Party manifesto – holding a referendum on membership of the EU. The Government has failed to “stand up” to Brussels, she argued, allowing the bureaucracy’s “imperious bombastic and arrogant pirates” to continue “plundering what remains of our heritage”.
But what makes this correspondence newsworthy is not the content of the letter itself, but the frankly extraordinary claims made in its reply.
According to the response, signed by Cameron’s private secretary Laurence Mann, “[t]here are some perfectly respectable arguments in favour of holding such a referendum”. However, Cameron’s team obviously found the “many strong counter-arguments” more compelling; principally, “we had a referendum on that issue in 1975, which produced a very clear result”.
Setting aside for a moment that this referendum was held over three and a half decades ago (meaning that anyone currently under the age of 52 was ineligible to vote), the question asked back in the 1970s was not in fact whether the UK should join the EU. More specifically, the referendum that was held under the Wilson administration asked whether we should join the Common Market, a thoroughly different entity to the Union we see today.
Even many fervent eurosceptics do not criticise the concept of the defunct European Economic Community; what they do oppose, rather, is the unforeseen baggage that the EU has bred along the way. The 1975 vote dealt with a trades union, not a political or social merger, which now involves 18 more, increasingly disparate countries than it did 30 years ago. Eurosceptics and europhiles alike must concur that the power and scope of the EU has grown in an unpredictable way.
The second humdinger of a retort, billed in Mann’s letter as “irrefutably powerful”, is that: “most people in our country want to say neither ‘yes’ to everything from the EU, nor ‘no’ to everything.”
Perhaps. But this approach entirely misses the point. By refusing to consider the possibility of a referendum, the Government is denying the public a key opportunity to express their desire to leave the bloc, relying on assumptions and guesses instead. Moreover, raising the issue of whether we should leave the EU would open up the debate as to which parts of the Union the public genuinely supports.
The letter makes the point that we have opted out of some of the more radical and controversial elements of the EU; we are not in the border-free Schengen zone, nor have we joined the Euro. Of course, this is all true, however just because we have thus far avoided some of the Union’s worst excesses does not indicate that we are not still embroiled in other undesirable elements. (Ask the owner of an SME, suffocated by regulations, for one.)
Perhaps most hysterically, the letter claims that the EU has succeeded in “ensuring that all the nations of Europe are equipped to face the biggest challenges of the 21st Century”. (No comment. But shame its President doesn’t think so.)
It could be that these concerns are overstated, if the Government were acting on its pledged aim to “use the weight of our membership to negotiate and force positive change”. However, hollow measures – such as our sovereign Parliament setting its sovereignty in an Act of Parliament, which it can only do by way of its pre-existing sovereignty – will do little to assuage fears of failure.
The more the EU expands and changes, the more meaningless the 1975 referendum becomes. The public 30 years ago opted for a trading block, not a powerful political institution. And the more Cameron relies on this reasoning, the more he allies himself with the EU’s own anti-democratic trick: “a Yes to Brussels is forever, but a No is only every temporary.”