We hear a lot about Eurosceptics and a fair bit about Europhiles but what of us Euroreformers? Speaking as one I feel pretty much left out in the cold. I am particularly miffed that the Lib Dems, the one party that ought to adopt this position, mostly ignore it (despite a large minority of Euroreformers within the Party).
By Euroreformers I mean those of us who support the European Project but believe that it’s lost its way; that the EU needs a major rethink and restructuring to make it fit for purpose and democratically accountable to the peoples of Europe.
The Europhile stance traditionally adopted by the Lib Dems sees the primary task as being to push forward with European integration at all costs which inevitably inhibits discussion of its deficiencies, trapping us into naively supporting (albeit at times with the nose firmly held!) an unpopular and centralising establishment. In the recent election our policy amounted to little more than a proposal to ‘cling to nurse for fear of something worse’.
This is all so utterly at variance with our declared position in domestic matters that it seriously undermines our core message. It is also, of course, really bad politics for a would-be reformist party to support a bankrupt establishment – so it is no surprise that in European elections we typically finish 5-7% below our standing in the polls. I suspect (but cannot prove) that we take a hit in ALL elections because of this lack of coherence and that many talented individuals have left or never joined the Party because of our Europhile stance.
In contrast, a liberating side-effect of the Euroreformers’ view is that it makes it okay to attack the things about the EU that put people off and that need to be attacked; all are symptoms of the EU’s institutional failings. Obvious examples include the Agricultural Policy (a mechanism to subsidise landowners at the expense of ordinary taxpayers) and the Fisheries Policy (good for neither fish nor fishermen). Less familiar examples include gas (where the EU has failed to negotiate as a block and has instead allowed the Russians to divide and rule).
The obvious difficulty that the EU’s reform-minded supporters have always had is that there is no alternative on the table, no ‘Plan B’, a difficulty that was admitted explicitly immediately after the French and Dutch “No” votes on the constitution. This is, of course, why the EU establishment is pressing on with the (very thinly disguised) version of the constitution known as the Lisbon Treaty. In doing so it is rapidly losing any serious claim to legitimacy and boosting eurosceptics, not just in Britain, but across Europe.
This is a desperate pity because the idea of European nations putting aside centuries of strife and learning to co-operate for mutual benefit in a shrinking world is a powerful and attractive one. It will only work, though, if the peoples of Europe are on-side with the plan – but which plan? Not the existing one on present evidence!
Normally I would expect each of the three great political traditions to have a distinctive view on such an important issue and a plan to match, but on European matters we have only two – a socialist-inspired establishment and a conservative non-plan. The Liberals are missing in action.
Socialists can claim paternity of the existing plan, that of the Lisbon Treaty, because its roots date back to the 1950s (arguably the high water mark for socialism generally) and its principle architects were French – men like Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors (a life-long socialist) – so it is hardly surprising that its structure derives from the centrally-directed, bureaucratic and socialist-inspired French model of the time.
The Conservatives are to a greater or lesser extent eurosceptics so their alternative plan is to neuter the EU and turn it into little more than a multilateral forum for national politicians and a free-trade area – good for big corporations, not so good for people, and utterly inadequate for the challenges we face.
A Liberal plan would be bottom-up, decentralised and democratic – almost the exact opposite of the socialist-inspired EU establishment in fact. As long as there is no such plan, and as long as the Lib Dems’ official position is to support the unsupportable, it is safe to forecast that the Party will remain divided over Europe, will trail UKIP in European elections and will fail to do as well as it ought even in Westminster elections.
Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel’s motto is apparently that, “You should never let a serious crisis go to waste; a crisis provides the opportunity to do things that you could not do before”. I agree. With Lisbon still in a heap of trouble and the eurosceptic alternative deeply unattractive there is a golden opportunity to push for a Liberal Plan B.
Given a Liberal Plan B the Brussels establishment would no longer be able to claim that “there is no alternative”. Indeed, with the socialist model shattered, any alternative plan would have to be taken seriously. Conversely, if the Lisbon Treaty is allowed to stand, its provisions, however illiberal and unsatisfactory, will become set in concrete and much harder to change.
Of course, that still leaves the little matter of working out what a Liberal Plan B might look like and how we can get to it from where we are now but where there’s a will, there’s a way. So far we’ve been lacking the will and the leadership. That needs to change.
* Gordon Frankland is a lifelong Liberal and was a Hertfordshire activist for several years. He now lives in Newcastle.
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25 Comments
Surely this is what we have advocated for some time. Whilst I don’t deny there are some eurofanatics in the party (one of whom unfortunately appears to be our group leader in the EP) our policy had always been reform, democracy and decentralisation. Perhaps we just aren’t very good at expressing it, although Nick Clegg wrote a good booklet on it some years ago: http://www.cer.org.uk/pdf/e173_less_todomore.pdf
However, the main internal criticism I have heard of the recent European Election campaign was that we weren’t positive enough about Europe and pandered to Euroscepticism. I suspect whatever we say we will be criticised on Europe.
So good to read this view. I wrote recently to various in the Party, asking for a review of our stance on Europe.
I (like most people, I imagine?) don’t know the ins and outs and political whys of Europe well enough …but I do know that our system of government is far from perfect and feel we need to sort ourselves out here before launching to join other possibly flawed governments in a union.
The LibDems have winning policy after winning policy, I truly believe it is though the Europe policy that is keeping voters away.
Excellent post and one I agree with wholeheartedly. Europe is the one weakspot in what is otherwise developing into a really considered, coherent policy platform.
Clegg will need to develop a more critical pro-Europeanism than he has yet showed us. He will be aware of the glaring contradiction between his avowal of transparency and accountability in the Westminster context on the one hand, and the party’s rather slavish devotion to all things European on the other. Exactly how he proposes to square his liberalism with the democratic deficit at the heart of EU decision making is not yet clear.
But he will have to moderate his pro-Europeanism. Remember, the ramifications of the Westminster expenses scandal have not yet played themselves out. As the new clamour for transparency and accountability works its way through our politics, Clegg will find that he is simply on the wrong side of the argument on Europe. Pressure is growing for real reform and he will need to position himself carefully on that issue or suffer electorally. So expect a much more nuanced and considered approach to Europe Policy in the coming year than we have seen thus far.
But he must start now.
I Wholeheartedly agree with you.
I feel like a persecuted minority sometimes, at least here in my region…
I’m a lifelong, committed European. I have lived and worked for six years in Belgium, where my wife worked for the European Commission and eight years in France. I speak a number of European languages and have an MA in European Language and Intercultural Studies. But because I think that the biggest enemies of European Integration are the corrupt and inept European Commission and their corrupt and even more inept fellow travellers in the European Parliament somehow I’m not a ‘good’ Lib Dem.
I applaud this article and hope that we can see a sharper move toward a much more critical approach. We need to say that we approve of European co-operation and see the single market and community membership as a great bonus to our economy and our country, but state clearly and unequivocally that the elite who run Europe today in the Commission, Parliament and Council are incompetent, corrupt, unjustifiably interventionist, untrustworthy and undemocratic.
I didn’t vote Lib Dem in the Euros for pretty much the reasons mentioned, so you’re certainly on to something.
That said, I don’t necessarily agree with the seemingly automatic assumption that the only way to fix an imbalance between the EU’s power and accountability is to make it more accountable. It would be equally valid to make it less powerful.
The EU will never be able to claim any legitimacy or widespread support until the public get a say on what they want the EU to be and, just as importantly, what they don’t want it to be. Sadly for the Lib Dems I suspect the answer will be an awful lot closer to the Tories’ policies than to the LD’s, but if so that’s just going to have to be accepted because the longer that debate is put off the more support there will be for those parties who would take us out of the EU completely.
The idea that the public will swing behind the EU if only its advocates can communicate the benefits more effectively is one of the great self-delusions of our time. That argument was lost years ago and it’s time to admit it.
The Europhile stance traditionally adopted by the Lib Dems sees the primary task as being to push forward with European integration at all costs which inevitably inhibits discussion of its deficiencies, trapping us into naively supporting (albeit at times with the nose firmly held!) an unpopular and centralising establishment. In the recent election our policy amounted to little more than a proposal to ‘cling to nurse for fear of something worse’.
Can you quote some lines used by us in campaigning which would support what you say? Or find some published material from one of our MEPs which supports it?
As Anders says, what you claim we don’t do is what I see us generally doing on the EU – accetping thecase for European cooperation and teh general idea of the EU while not necessarily being in agreement with every aspect of it as it now is, and actively seeking to reform it.
It seems to me that what you are doing is actually repeating rubbish our opponents say about us. Isn’t that a bit silly?
It seems to me that what you are doing is actually repeating rubbish our opponents say about us. Isn’t that a bit silly?
It’s what everybody I know thinks about you. If they’re (we’re) all wrong then you are failing really spectacularly to demonstrate it.
Matthew: certainly “Stronger together, poorer apart” verges on scaremongering, particularly when combined with the squeeze about the pan-European arrest warrant and action on trafficking.
The rest of our manifesto quite clearly sets out the reform and scaling-back agenda but at no point did I see this mentioned in our broadcasts, our media spots, by our politicians and by our press releases: Clegg et al can moan all they like about how this election would never have been about Europe but we didn’t even try.
This is already the Lib Dem position as far as I can tell.
“A Liberal plan would be bottom-up, decentralised and democratic – almost the exact opposite of the socialist-inspired EU establishment in fact.”
That is a bizarre statement. In what way is the EU socialist? The idea of a “Common Market” hardly brings to mind the image of a red flag in my mind.
It’s only people who are inherently against the EU who are against reform of it.
Although I like this EPP defence of integration the one thing it misses out is the need for increased legitimacy.
The one big reform which we need to talk about is how to change the Council of Ministers – if the Parliament is to have any teeth then it cannot be eaten alive by the sharks at national level.
I also think MEPs should have a greater role of oversight and scrutiny over the various proliferating EU institutions to stop them spawning out of control and acting without accountability – this would more closely follow the Westminster model and enable the elected representatives to steer the lumbering monolithic bureacracy.
I mean, what is the job of an MEP now?
How can MEPs effectively represent the interests of constituents when all the channels of representation are cloaked in mystery and any records of hearings are impossible to find?
Me
It seems to me that what you are doing is actually repeating rubbish our opponents say about us. Isn’t that a bit silly?
iainm
It’s what everybody I know thinks about you. If they’re (we’re) all wrong then you are failing really spectacularly to demonstrate it.
Well, yes, I think I have made clear on many occasions that I am not particularly happy with our party’s leadership and the people responsible for our national publicity. Here you are quite right – we have too often taken the approach “don’t mention the EU, it isn’t popular” rather than fighting back against what our opponents say about our position on it.
There are many cases where something gets said so often that people believe it to be the truth even when it isn’t. I find this to be a fairly constant theme in a lot of what I post – don’t just assume something is true because it’s what everyone says, go and look to see the evidence. When a falsehood gets repeated so often that even those disadvantaged by the falsehood come to believe it is true, then the propaganda game has been won.
The idea that there are only two positions one can take on an issue, either a complete opponent of it or a fanatical supporter of it, is also a common theme one comes across time and time again in politics. Fanatics on one side often find it really, really hard to accept that anyone who isn’t 100% in agreement with them and so raises objections to some of their simplistic assumptions isn’t necessarily a fanatic supporter of the opposite side. For example, fanatical free-market/libertarian people find it really difficult to see that those of us who aren’t so extreme for these ideas aren’t necessarily supporters of soviet-style state socialism.
That is a bizarre statement. In what way is the EU socialist?
Well many Tories sometimes talk about the EU as if it was part of a left-wing plot with its working time directives and human rights etc etc.
Oddly, in Sweden one of the arguments that was often used against them joining was that it was all a right-wing plot.
Anders
Well many Tories sometimes talk about the EU as if it was part of a left-wing plot with its working time directives and human rights etc etc.
Oddly, in Sweden one of the arguments that was often used against them joining was that it was all a right-wing plot.
Indeed, and it is a mark of how far to the economic right our country has been pushed since the 1979 Tory general election victory that “the EU is too socialist” is now the predominant argument used here against it. In the 1980s, when the Labour Party here opposed it, they too used the line that it was a right-wing plot. Indeed, a fossilised remnant of that line appeared with the NO2EU list here in the Euro-elections this month. One might note that the newspapers posing as anti-EU here chose to promote the right-wing opponents of the EU and ignore the left-wing opponents.
I totally agree with this article. We need to be seen to be extending the principles of parliamentary transparency and reform that we had demanded for the UK into our policies on Europe. At the moment, it seems we are content to look for one set of standards at home, but put up with much worse standards in terms of efficiency, openness and accountability in Brussels. We should be far more critical than we are at the moment – after all, while it does have some uses, much of what the EU does is wasteful or even counterproductive. The EU needs some “tough love”.
A couple of points.
Firstly, as some comments have pointed out our existing policy is indeed to ‘reform’ the EU but changing a few policies is not going to cut the mustard. What we need is structural reform based on a different vision of how Europe could be/should be run.
Curiously, I think that Nick Clegg is of the same mind as me on this. The paper referenced by Anders (in comment #1) is spot on (with, for instance, an excellent discussion of the crucial ‘who does what’ issues that the EU has so badly muddled). Why was this not in the manifesto?
However, with the best will in the World it’s difficult to take claims that we are for reform seriously when I only saw/heard Clegg mention agricultural policy once in the run up to the election – and that was about 5 seconds worth right at the end of an interview. Yet in that brief moment he came alive, stopped being a Westminster suit, and spoke with passion and conviction. We should have taken Labour apart on its ‘landowner subsidy’ so why so little emphasis?
Secondly, to clarify a point that some seem to have misinterpreted. I did not say that the EU is “socialist”, only that its architecture is “socialist-inspired” which is a quite different point. I believe it explains the top-down, centralised approach that must change if Europe is to move forward.
It is why I think we need to approach the question of Europe with a blank sheet of paper and work out what we would really like. We may not get it all, but we will do a lot better if we have clear objectives.
How many here have actually read Lisbon? If so,please tell me why the Comission should have a co-opting role on sports policy? Even Verhorfstadt thought this was one of his red lines.
CAP is a disaster. CFP is more than a disaster, and this organisation has as its core Ever closer union. There is naff all reference to the voter who is seen as a mere irritant(see the Dutch, French and irish referenda).
Rant over.My cousin sits as an MEP (Labour tho), but like many in the UK I am beginning to get hacked off with the rise in Napoleonic dictatorship – first thingis to axe the European Parliament. It is frankly irrelevant and its job should be farmed back to the national parliaments.
On the CAP, no-one in western Europe has starved due to national food shortages in recent years. The argument is put that very few people work in agriculture and it isn’t a big share of GDP so why place so mush emphasis on it? Well, we all still need to eat, don’t we? The supposition that the rest of the world will always provide us with oil and food and whatever in the future while we will provide them with, well Britain’s main export is bullshit, of course, er whatever, is to me doubtful.
The CAP may be rubbish, but one can hardy say it’s a complete disaster when we just take for granted that food is there – something which people at other times and in other places couldn’t and don’t.
It is useful in order to think through these things to have both sides of the argument.
Matthew,
I agree that we should worry far more about food security. It strikes me that there is an uncomfortable parallel here with the way some banks – Northern Rock and HBOS in particular – came to rely on (imported) wholesale funding. It worked just fine until suddenly it stopped!
For that reason a ‘Food Security Policy’ is one I would like to see as a EU priority. However, as far as I am aware the CAP really doesn’t cover this – I don’t think that there are any strategic stocks of food. I think we have just been lucky that the post-war era has been one of rapidly advancing agricultural technology, benign climatic conditions and no disruptive events like a really big volcanic eruption.
CAP sort of covers it, I’m not an expert on how CAP works so I couldn’t say whether it does a reasonable job of it, but that was the original idea. The point is, however, to get people to think. No doubt if there was someting properly designed to deal with food security people would say “Hah hah hah, what a lot this costs, rotten EU taking all our money for this, nasty socialist planning rot”.
But then it could all go away. This is another problem with free market economics – it can result in elaborate inter dependencies being built, and sudden changes cause them to collapse, and we’ve lost the ability to be able to put back in place what we had but we threw away because we thought “someone else can always provide us with this”.
It is a bit like evolution – it works very well, things seem to fit into their place as if designed. But a change in balance can suddenly render a species extinct if it has evolved to become dependent on something else and that something else goes. Like the free market, it wasn’t planned, so there’s no-one there thinking of contingencies if things go wrong.
Matthew, the function of the CAP has always been the same since its inception. To subsidise inefficient French Farmers – a job it does brilliantly!
An excellent article.
“I suspect (but cannot prove) that we take a hit in ALL elections because of this lack of coherence and that many talented individuals have left or never joined the Party because of our Europhile stance.”
This is very easy to prove if you do a bit of canvassing. If you are a membership secretary and phone up a list of lapsed members you will find the EU is the number one reason for the lapse.
Many people find it hard to understand why a party that is generally against centralisation and telling people what to do, and believes in democracy whether or not what the people say chimes with out own view, throws all these principles out the window when it comes to the EU.
What Jon says is very much our experience. We have estimated that our stance on Europe reduces our membership by 40%.
Jon/Martin
Thanks for the feedback on membership. I am in a group that manages to hang onto membership only by crossing all fingers and toes that we see some change on the EU.
If you add back Martin’s missing 40% that gives a clear majority against the Europhile stance of the leadership. Additionally one also has to wonder how many Lib Dems are Europhiles because they just follow the leadership? Quite a few I think.
Even if that 40% is a gross over-estimate it remains the case that if actual AND potential members are included there must be a large majority of Euroreformers in the liberal camp of UK politics.
Which all raises another question. Are the powers that be in Lib Dem circles going to continue their ostrich strategy or are they going to do somethings about it?