LONDON LETTER:The UK is embarking on yet another convulsion about its place in the EU, writes MARK HENNESSY
IN THE lobby of the Royal Overseas League off St James’s Street in central London this week, a man sat selling British Legion poppies, a portrait of the Queen hung on the wall, while elderly men in well-cut suits gathered for dinner.
Such places are not the usual breeding grounds for revolution, but one would do well to look twice now that the UK has embarked on yet another of its seemingly endless convulsions about its place in the EU.
Inside in the Princess Alexandra Hall, the Bruges Group held a public meeting before a decent-sized crowd about the threat, as it sees it, posed to the City of London by Brussels’s latest plans to regulate hedge fund and interbank lending.
The group, sceptical towards the EU, was founded after a speech by Margaret Thatcher in the city of the same name 21 years ago, when she held out for a vision of a union of European states.
The group is today a shrine to her political legacy. A black-and-white portrait of her hung from the podium. Her name was mentioned in respectful tones that honoured her and managed also to disparage those who have come after her.
During its lifetime, the Bruges Group has railed against EU integration and had its strongest influence during the failed campaign to block the passage of the Maastricht treaty through the House of Commons in the early 1990s.
Defeat after defeat has been suffered since.
“[We have] won the intellectual arguments, each and every single one, but we have been completely unsuccessful in changing government policy; we’ve thoroughly failed to influence public policy,” said Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.
The air of impotent fury was palpable in economist Prof Tim Congdon, who warned that tens of thousands of highly paid London jobs will vanish if London loses the ability to decide rules for the City.
“Increasingly, the rules are being set by Brussels and Frankfurt, by people who don’t like us, and I mean that they don’t like us,” said Congdon, who was one of the chancellor of the exchequer’s outside advisers from 1992 to 1997.
“What is the future for the nation which pioneered the industrial revolution: to try to be the gaffers or the mill-hands of a new economy? I suggest that we should try to be the gaffers.
“If the UK is to be the nation deserving of our past, it needs to specialise in those areas where we have the brains and the intelligence. Let the rest of the world work with their hands. We want to do things with our brains,” he told the audience.
Now, the battle in the UK is focusing on the Lisbon Treaty and Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s pledge that he will do something – though no one is yet sure exactly what – if the treaty is ratified by all 27 states.
Since the late 1980s, the Tories have torn themselves apart at times over the EU, but Thatcher and John Major negotiated the Single European Act, Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties during their time in Number 10 Downing Street.
Unlike his predecessors, Cameron does have one advantage in that he is not leading a party that is divided on Europe in the way that it was in the past, when Eurosceptics vied with Europhiles.
Today, the internal conflicts, such as they are, are between Eurosceptics and those who are even more jaundiced in their attitudes towards the EU and its works and pomps. It’s between Eurosceptics and Europhobes, as the New Statesman put it.
While helpful from the point of view of internal unity, this dynamic would create problems for Cameron as prime minister, who would be busy enough dealing with economic woes, rather than volunteering for a five-year battle with fellow EU states.
Here, the issue of Tony Blair as president of the European Council – or “president of Europe”, as the Tories insist on calling it – adds a dangerous toxicity into the mix.
If he is nominated, and it is still an if, the pressure on Cameron from within his own ranks to hold a referendum on Lisbon – a treaty already ratified by the UK – will intensify.
Indeed, he is under pressure to go much further and seek to row back on changes made in the succession of treaties that have littered the tables of EU negotiators for almost 20 years.
“We should have a referendum, but not just on Lisbon, because that would only bring us back to the situation of today if it was defeated.
“Rather, we should have one to take back powers that were given away in Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice.
“I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a referendum. All the body language that I can detect from my leaders is that they want one,” said the ferociously articulate Hannan.
Faced with such belief, Cameron, if he does get elected, risks poisoning his time at the helm before it even begins if he fails to act to satisfy such demands. Equally, he will poison it with the rest of the EU if he does.