With the greatest reluctance, we must congratulate the Daily Mail on securing the services of Max Hastings and printing this excellent article. It appeared on 13th December, but nothing's happened since to convince us that Hastings is not 100% right – quite the opposite, in fact ...
Clegg in a sulk. The Commons at its most infantile. And Europe led by pygmies. What a way to face a crisis!
by Max Hastings
The Commons was at its worst: raucous, cheap, devoid of dignity. Yesterday’s statement by the Prime Minister about Friday’s European Council meeting, followed by a strident, finger-wagging speech by Ed Miliband and questions from the usual suspects of all parties, showed MPs offering their familiar impersonation of pupils at a failed comprehensive.
Here we are, facing two of the gravest crises of our lifetimes — the lesser about Britain’s relationship with the EU, the graver about a threatened collapse of the European financial system. Yet no one who watched yesterday’s Commons proceedings emerged a jot or tittle wiser about what is happening or where we go next.
Perhaps Parliament was like this at other pivotal moments of history, when MPs’ inadequacies were hidden, because they were not televised. I am more inclined to believe that today’s politicians of all parties simply do not know how to rise to the challenge of conducting themselves in a fashion to match the perils threatening Europe’s stability. They do not understand how to do statesmanship.
Some of the same myopia is apparent outside Westminster. At the weekend, the most hardline eurosceptics gleefully cheered at the notion that a prime minister has at last done the big thing, telling the Frogs and Huns to get stuffed. At the other end of the spectrum, euro-enthusiasts — including most of the BBC’s commentators — talk as if any responsible British leader must shut his eyes and vote with our 26 partners, even on a day-trip to hell. They are in denial about the ghastly predicament of the whole EU project. The European financial system is threatened with collapse, which would have a devastating impact on Britain, even though we are not members of the euro.
I have a friend close to the heart of this crisis, who believes the leaders of Europe are making a towering mistake by risking everything to preserve the eurozone. He believes, instead, that its ordered break-up would prove the least painful outcome - least painful, because there are no plausible ‘good’ outcomes. He suggests that if Germany and France get their way and sustain the euro on artificial life-support, requiring southern Europe to adopt draconian austerity measures, only prolonged economic depression and political turmoil can follow.
He accuses the European leaders of seeking short-term political fixes for a long-term economic problem: the non- viability of the eurozone and the EU’s failure to address its lack of competitiveness against Asia. The Europeans want to preserve a gold-plated social model, to ring-fence themselves against the cold winds of the real world outside. However, they will fail.
The truth is that David Cameron had good reason for thinking his European partners were embarked on a road to folly, with especially pernicious consequences for this country. He said in the Commons yesterday: ‘I went to Brussels with one objective — to protect Britain’s national interest.’
But having used his veto, he’s left with a big diplomatic problem and has merely whetted the appetite of extreme Eurosceptics for going much further: they see this as the start of a glorious national voyage into the Atlantic, cutting free from Europe altogether. Meanwhile, the worst consequence of Cameron’s veto is likely to be that our EU partners will dismiss our views and, indeed, seek to punish us. The erratic President Sarkozy of France, who sometimes seems close to madness, said yesterday that there are clearly ‘two Europes’. His petulance, and fevered efforts to escape looming electoral defeat at home, has worsened the crisis. We should pray nightly for his political demise in the spring. But with or without Sarkozy, unless David Cameron boxes cleverly, the Europeans are likely to snub Britain ever more conspicuously. Of course, this would increase euroscepticism among British voters.
The Prime Minister said: ‘Our membership of the EU is vital for our national interest?.?.?.?We are in the EU and we want to be.’ This is true, but only up to a point. What most of us want is to share in the single market, while securing liberation from the anti-competitive tyranny of the European commission. But this is likely to prove hard to achieve when so many European politicians still flinch from facing reality. The commissars of Brussels will resist our attempts to cherry-pick which bits of the EU we wish to subscribe to. A tremendous British diplomatic offensive will be needed, of a kind conspicuous by its absence before Friday’s summit, to find allies alongside whom we can fight European battles.
Critics of last week’s veto, such as Ed Miliband, talk as if David Cameron had a duty to stay aboard the euro-liner even as it races towards the iceberg, merely because none of the other passengers has got off. On the contrary, just because his fellow European leaders have lost their heads in their obsession with preserving the eurozone, is no reason for our prime minister to do so, too.
It would probably be best for Britain, as well as for the Western world, if the euro collapsed swiftly, the boil was lanced. After a grim period of turmoil and pain, once the failure of the single currency was laid bare, we could get on with reshaping the whole European project.
My friend in the economic corridors of power suggests we might be pleasantly surprised how quickly the Continent recovered from a eurozone collapse, with Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal liberated and able to devalue their currencies. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that this crisis will drag on indefinitely, with many European banks close to collapse; the financial markets sceptical; just sufficient German aid pumped into the system to keep the euro afloat, while southern Europe faces near destitution. More worryingly, with democracy suppressed in Greece and Italy, political extremists could well start to prosper.
Watching the Commons yesterday, it was hard not to be exasperated by George Osborne’s smirks, the laughter and taunts of rival parties. What is happening, and what overhangs us, is far too serious for commonplace Westminster game-playing, just as it is too grave to indulge Nick Clegg’s silly, sulking absence.
Labour MP Denis MacShane, a veteran Euro-enthusiast, said Britain ‘is now ideologically fused to the notion of isolation’. My own view is that he might be right. We have never loved Europe, and now the feeling is mutual.
An outright British breach with the EU would be a huge economic misfortune for our partners as well as for ourselves. But these are desperate times. The ongoing debate about Europe’s future will take place in the fevered and bitter political climate created by recession, hardship and public fury across the Continent.
My exalted friend among policy-makers said last week that only a fool would predict the outcome of this crisis, because we are in uncharted waters. Europe needs strong and far-sighted leaders, and instead is being guided by pygmies. David Cameron has made a grand gesture to ‘stand up for Britain’. But as Churchill said of Dunkirk: ‘Wars are not won by evacuations.’
Last week’s veto in Brussels was not the end of anything, but merely the beginning of a long, long struggle to redefine Britain’s relationship with Europe, without shattering our trading partnership with it. The outcome will decide the fate of David Cameron’s premiership, but I doubt that today he has the smallest idea what this will be.
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