This week marks David Cameron’s last European Council as Prime Minister before the General Election and let’s hope he avoids one last blunder. It is easy to forget, given the endless Tory arguments on Europe over the past five years, that in opposition David Cameron’s ambition was for the Conservative Party to “stop banging on about Europe”. This summarises Cameron’s position well – he is simply not interested and sees the EU purely as a party management issue. If the issue of Europe is quiet then it’s a good bet that Tory backbenchers will be too.
But this abdication of leadership has caused repeated humiliations for the Prime Minister and allowed the ranks of Tory backbenchers to drive the agenda, leaving their leader looking weak, lacking in ideas and clueless.
Constantly bullied from the back benches, Cameron has time and again stirred from his self-imposed slumber, woken up too late and then mistakenly “taken a stand” before being humiliated. Famously he “vetoed” a new EU treaty in December 2011 but the result was not the triumph he portrayed – the rest of the EU went ahead anyway and concluded the treaty without the UK, leaving a legacy of bitterness in its wake and representing a low point in British diplomacy.
One of Cameron’s first pledges as Conservative leader was to placate Tory eurosceptics by leaving the centrist EPP group in the European Parliament, the group that includes Angela Merkel and several other powerful leaders across the continent. This cost him powerful allies. There is no better example than last year when he tried to veto Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission. He was humiliated as centre-right leaders abandoned him to support Juncker. Had the Tories still been in the EPP, they could have stopped it but the same lack of strategy and engagement came back to haunt him. In the process he has undermined British influence in Europe and jeopardised the UK’s membership of the EU, our largest trading partner.
This loss of influence was once again highlighted when Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande were attempting to broker a peace deal in Minsk over Ukraine. David Cameron was nowhere to be seen. The UK’s lack of influence over key events could not have been more starkly exposed. Why would France and Germany take the UK seriously when all they see from the Prime Minister is that he’s putting British membership at risk? This trumps all other strategic objectives, even the threat of Russia, as shown when Philip Hammond described discussions with Hungary’s pro-Putin leader, Victor Orban, as a “meeting of minds”. In the same week that Merkel and Hollande were negotiating for peace in Ukraine, Hammond’s priority was a visit to Malta discuss the Tory renegotiation agenda.
Liberal Democrats are clear that the UK should be showing leadership in Europe. Only as a committed member of the EU can we build the alliances needed to reform Europe. Only by working together with other European countries can we overcome the scourges of cross-border crime, climate change and economic instability. It’s time for a change, the British people deserve more than Cameron’s weak leadership.
* Tim Farron is Liberal Democrat Spokesperson on Agriculture and MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale.
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11 Comments
Agreed Tim. But as a party, we too need to look at ourselves in the mirror in relation to Europe. It wasn’t that long ago that the Liberal Democrats supported Britain’s membership of the Eurozone. Given what has happened since we rightly don’t do so now. But that means we need to play our part in finding a permanent solution to the crisis, because an implosion, as a result of a Greek default, would seriously affect our economy as well as that of our nearest neighbours. What is your view about how the Eurozone crisis should be resolved and Britain’s role in that?
I’m disheartened by this article. Farron originally had a very popular position on the EU – not too tough – not too weak – but this article sounds like it has been written by an employee of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
I fail to see how sounding like we work for the EU is the best way to maximize influence or create a stable democracy and keep the likes of UKIP out.
Very disappointed. I’m not saying I would be different, but if Farron can be taken in by this then I feel whatever idealism I had left has gone.
The party’s pro-European stance was why I joined in 2002. It is still an important issue to me today. I think we can keep UKIP out by persuading people of the benefits of the European Union, not by all draping ourselves in a slightly lighter shade of purple: that strategy isn’t working for the Tories and it would work even less for us.
Of course, expanding the franchise so that everyone who can currently vote in either European or General elections can vote in both would be helpful in keeping UKIP out too…
Wholeheartedly agree. Cameron is the weakest PM we have had since Callaghan. He has no say whatsoever within Europe, USA considers Abe and Hollande better allies, was defeated in Parliament when he wanted to invade Syria and almost lost a third of British territory. Cameron is weak and has no idea what he wants.
It is not just Cameron’s crass 2005 leadership pledge to leave the EPP which weakened Britain in Europe, and which I opposed, but his lamentable weakness in allowing the two Anglo-Irish Europhobe MEPs – Daniel Hannan and Martin Callanan – to negotiate his friendless new ECR Group. This was the cause of my split from the Tories five years ago this month. To illustrate the danger of this alliance, as Nick Petre tweeted last week https://twitter.com/NickPetre/status/576370127282778113 , the anti-Merkel Alternative fur Deutschland component of the ECR Group joined forces with UKIP and le Pen to oppose EU sanctions against Putin
I tend to share Tim’s view that David Cameron regards the EU largely as a party management issue. This is regrettable because it is often an obstacle to a serious diagnosis of the problems and challenges the EU faces and to the development of a plausible strategy for the UK’s future role in it. Hence the agenda for reform and ‘renegotiation’ looks set to be framed in ludicrously narrow terms, focusing on immigration and free movement to the exclusion of the many other EU policy areas that need attention. This does look like the UKIP tail wagging the Tory dog, even if it chimes with public opinion.
However, Lib Dem schadenfreude on this issue is spectacularly misplaced. I would remind you that support for the euro among Lib Dems was more universal, more unqualified and survived for longer in the face of the mounting evidence of fundamental economic imbalances than in any other mainstream party. The experience of ERM membership was not regarded as in any way offering any salutary lessons. The answer, we were told, was ‘more Europe’ and deeper integration.
Those who in the 1990s made arguments against the single currency which are now the received wisdom, indeed regarded as almost too truistic to need saying, were dismissed by the supporters of this fatally hubristic project as backward-looking, irrelevant, out of touch with the zeitgeist, even xenophobic. The disdain was not matched by substantive answers to, or even engagement with, the objections raised.
The benefits were held to be self-evident. The loss of independent monetary policy, the design flaws in a currency zone that did not have a central Treasury, the fundamental structural differences between the Germanic core and the periphery, the constitutional implications of the dilution of national accountability for economic policy; and, as we later discovered, the fiddling of the ‘convergence criteria’ to allow the project to go full steam ahead – all these were supposedly trivial and hypothetical concerns when set against the benefits of lower transaction costs and a ‘stable’ exchange rate.
Never mind that the (strictly internal) stability of that currency would serve only to mask – indeed to reinforce – the underlying divergence in the economic characteristics of its members, leading to growing imbalances between creditor and debtor nations and culminating in the debt-deflation trap that we see today.
Often, I find, Lib Dems are quick to diagnose ‘fundamentalism’ in those who disagree with them: market fundamentalism, climate change denialism, and so forth. Sometimes they have a point, though often they are throwing punches at imaginary targets. Naturally, they acquit themselves of such an affliction. They regard themselves as having the title deeds to reasoned, moderate opinion.
Yet the slavish devotion to the EU (notwithstanding the lip service paid to the need for reform); the unqualified support for the utopian project of the euro until its internal contradictions could no longer be denied by even the most fervent believers; the ‘top table syndrome’; the willingness to sacrifice the principles of subsidiarity and localism to the cause of being ‘good Europeans’; the resistance to the idea of seeking a direct popular mandate – all these are symptomatic of a tendency to shut off critical faculties and to develop a blind spot where the EU is concerned, to proclaim its virtues as an article of faith and to play down its failings.
As such, they are obstacles to the development of a meaningful agenda for reform just as surely as David Cameron’s narrow party-management focus risks being. This is not a promising strategy for salvaging the UK’s membership of an organisation which, for all its myriad faults, has done plenty of good in the fields of trade and cooperation.
The more starry-eyed of EU supporters might find it educational to read a recent book on the challenges facing the Union and the potential options for the UK by the economist Roger Bootle, The Trouble with Europe. Although the title sounds negative, and Bootle indeed finds much to criticise about the EU in its present form – and from his (broadly Keynesian) perspective the euro in particular is an unmitigated disaster – his hope is that it can be reformed so that it becomes once again an engine of prosperity for the peoples of Europe rather than a misfiring old clunker. His view is that, if that cannot be achieved, the UK should be prepared to leave. He doesn’t think we should declare defeat at this stage, and nor do I: but a range of scenarios needs to be considered and mapped out. (It is notable that UKIP, while advocating EU withdrawal as their flagship policy, seem to have given little thought to the practicalities of the relationships the UK should pursue outside it.) But even if you disagree with Bootle’s conclusions, the analysis is balanced, reasoned and insightful, so it is well worth a read. After all, a lack of curiosity about whether eurosceptics might have some valid arguments was one of the reasons why support for the single currency in the late 1990s was so axiomatic and unquestioning in establishment circles. It would be a pity if a little more intellectual humility were not to be exercised by people who got it so wrong last time around, with consequences that the southern European countries will unfortunately be wrestling with for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the recommendation.
There is much about the European Union that needs reform – in this respect it resembles the United Kingdom- but I would no more say we should leave the EU if reform fails than that we should leave the UK if reform fails there. For one thing, we can always try again.
“Famously he “vetoed” a new EU treaty in December 2011 but the result was not the triumph he portrayed – the rest of the EU went ahead anyway and concluded the treaty without the UK, leaving a legacy of bitterness in its wake and representing a low point in British diplomacy.”
I’ve always thought that a glowing success, for it forced the bailout resolution machinery outside of the architecture of the EU, to become a construct for use by eurozone members. As it should be.
“Had the Tories still been in the EPP, they could have stopped it but the same lack of strategy and engagement came back to haunt him. In the process he has undermined British influence in Europe and jeopardised the UK’s membership of the EU, our largest trading partner.”
Likewise this, for had he still been in the EPP he would be in the absurd position of being a minority interest in an explicitly federalist european party. I remember how he was derided when he formed the ECR; some flakey collection of minority odd-balls that would no doubt collapse into obscurity within months. This side of the euro-election, with ECR now the third largest group ahead of a diminished ALDE group, are those people still laughing? If the principal of coalition to achieve interests was so important, why haven’t the lib-dems joined PES?
“Why would France and Germany take the UK seriously when all they see from the Prime Minister is that he’s putting British membership at risk? This trumps all other strategic objectives”
You’ve put the cart before the horse; British membership is at risk due to popular ill-sentiment towards the EU within the eletorate, which is why a referendum is necessary. Is has become democratic issue, that now needs to be dealt with.
“Liberal Democrats are clear that the UK should be showing leadership in Europe. Only as a committed member of the EU can we build the alliances needed to reform Europe.”
Finally! What are the implications of the words you use above?
Does leadership in europe mean:
Joining monetary union?
Joining fiscal union (necessary for monetary union to work)?
Advocating political union (necessary to legitimise the above)?
Joining Schengen
Joining the ESF
Advocating a common foriegn policy and defence response?
And most importantly:
If you will even admit to any of the above, what are the odds of you saying the same in the manifesto you’ll put to the british people in a few weeks time….? Yeah, I thought not.
But, Jedi, surely the whole thing would have been run so much better had the British been involved from the start 😉
One of the reasons I was attracted to the Liberal Party as a teenager around 1970 was that it was the only party that appeared to have accepted the UK’s new role post war as a post-Imperial post-‘Great Power.’
Liberals realised that the UK had to look to the future in a trading and political relationship with its European neighbours, and not keep harking back to the days when it occupied a third of the globe.
Liberals were right to say we should have been in the EEC when the Treaty or Rome was signed. Liberal Democrats were right to say we should have been in the Euro from the start and been able to help negotiate its structures and mechanics. It would now be very difficult for the UK to join the Euro, and the rules have already been made by others, and the exchange rate is not right. However there will come a time when Euro entry will be back on the political agenda once more, as commentators like Will Hutton have said.
Rumours of the Euro’s death are premature. Too many British commentators have a superiority complex, they thought the Common Market would fail and EFTA would be stronger – it wasn’t. They think the UK could negotiate better trade deals oustide the Eu than it could as a member – dream on!
As to jedi’s comments about whether we should advocate:
Joining monetary union
Joining fiscal union (necessary for monetary union to work)
Advocating political union (necessary to legitimise the above)
Joining Schengen
Joining the ESF
I would say we should, BUT you have to move in stages, and to have political union you have to have political reform too, and the democratic deficit will have to be addressed.
Liberals and Liberal Democrats have never been “slavishly devoted” to the EU, we have always argued for reform, but too many Brits think you get co-operation from “Johnny Foreigner” not by dialogue and discussion, but by shouting loudly in English, and it is this attitude which needs to change.
I haven’t read the Bootle book, I may do so after the election when I’ve got the time, but this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1479261882/?tag=libdemvoice-21 should be read by anyone looking for how a future Europe could work.