A palpable sense of disintegration pervades the British Conservative Party as it contemplates the expected scale of Thursday's local election losses. Premonitions of being routed in the general election to come have prompted a substantial minority of right wing MPs to declare that they will run on a ticket, explicitly opposed to Britain joining a European monetary union. More and more of them are tearful of being targeted by Sir James Goldsmith's referendum party. They have been egged on by a right wing press, both tabloid and broadsheet, that has become markedly more hostile to the EU in recent weeks and months. The question of a party split on these questions after an election defeat is coming more and more into the open.
It has taken the BSE beef crisis to crystallise the increasingly nationalistic tone in the ruling party. The coincidence yesterday of Dr Helmut Kohl's visit to London and Britain's attempt to persuade other EU agricultural ministers that its minimalist plans to control the disease should be linked to a lifting of the ban con British beef exports was instructive and illuminating. Dr Kohl is habitually portrayed by these papers as the archetypal proponent of an EU superstate, despite his strenuous denials that this would be an appropriate model in terms of European interests or identity.
German and British interests and identities are assumed to be increasingly at variance, in a polarisation that calls up alarming ghosts of European conflicts earlier this century. On this occasion Britain is isolated, however as Conservative Europhiles are belatedly realising, it is losing potential allies because of the very tone of its debate and response to negotiations about integration. Business and other pressure groups are concerned that British interests and identities are being distorted to fit an ideological mould. That the German government and German consumers are most concerned about the human health issues involved in the BSE crisis, and therefore most resistant to Britain's plans to deal with it, stokes up such sentiments. The optimum approach to removing the health risk posed by BSE in Britain, by culling all affected herds, is in fact the one that has been used in this State.
It looks as if a realignment of British politics, perhaps a radical one, is foreshadowed by these events. This may take rather a long time to work itself out. A triumphant Labour Party could become rapidly prey to some of the same disintegrative forces as now affect the Conservatives once it assumed office. Labour would be faced with the task of implementing an ambitious programme of constitutional and institutional change in Britain, in addition to its other commitments, but faced by a Conservative Party in opposition which would have a constant political motive to disrupt European integration as well as to block domestic change. Coalition politics and electoral reform might help enormously to consolidate a new style of British government, which would be more at home in the EU. But they would be highly contentious and contested, with winners and losers in both main parties. It would be a mistake to expect a rapid resolution of these questions under a Labour government if the Conservative premonitions prove correct.