Leadership, please

10 December 2011

Is a time of economic crisis an opportunity for fundamental reform, or a time to muddle through while waiting for calmer waters in which to effect lasting political and economic change? When he came to power last year, David Cameron argued for reform. He laid out plans so radical that Vince Cable complained they were ‘Maoist’. There would never be a better time to shake things up, he reasoned; if it were left until crises had passed, the momentum for change would be lost.

Now, Cameron’s zeal has vanished. A crisis, it transpires, is no time to be radical. It would be rude, almost selfish to use the summit negotiations as an opportunity to improve Britain’s relationship with the EU. So he is prepared to approve the creation of what Owen Paterson, Northern Ireland Secretary, calls a ‘new country’ — a eurozone four times our size, able to outvote us on crucial matters such as the regulation of the City of London (to the delight of the French). Europe is changing before our eyes — yet the Prime Minister believes he ought not to give anything more than ‘assurances’.

The Prime Minister’s naivity would be touching if so much were not at stake. By the time the euro crisis has passed, the German and French leaders, whoever they then are, will be in no mood to listen to polite requests for power to be repatriated from Brussels to Westminster. Why should they? They will by then have recast the EU in a form which satisfies them; they will have no interest in further discussions or granting concessions to a British prime minister who is flapping around on the outside of their grand project.

David Cameron campaigned on a promise to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU, in particular to ‘bring back key powers over legal rights, criminal justice and social and employment legislation to the UK’. He also spoke, at length, about restoring trust in politics. These are worthy aims, and this crisis provides a perfect opportunity to deliver them.

British Europhiles have long scorned the concept of a ‘two-speed Europe’, but that is, by default, what is likely to emerge from the mess. We will have a first tier bound by fiscal as well as monetary union, smaller than the current eurozone, and a second tier which will be increasingly divorced from the Franco-German power axis. Ideally, the second tier should impose minimal regulations, and resemble the free trade area we signed up to in 1975.

David Cameron is losing an opportunity to assert himself as leader of a wider European alliance. It could be an appealing place: promoting the free movement of goods, people and capital, but with each country retaining sovereignty and the power to set its taxes, prepare its budgets and retain a veto over rules which will be harmful to its national interest.

The Prime Minister is in a position of great strength, if he would only realise it. He is in the position that John Major was in the early 1990s, having lost a disastrous gamble to enter the Exchange Rate Mechanism (another bad idea which this magazine was alone in opposing). Then, it was all too easy to portray Britain as isolated in Europe. Now, there are already ten EU nations outside the eurozone who will play no part in any fiscal union. It is a constituency begging for direction — if only David Cameron would seize his opportunity.

The unfree press

The Leveson inquiry is not the only place where journalism is on trial. Addressing the Chinese National Media Association this week, Hu Zhanfan, head of China State TV, warned assembled hacks: ‘Journalists who think they are independent rather than propaganda workers are making a fundamental mistake about identity.’ They are, he said, ‘mouthpieces of the state’.

Press freedom in Britain is at risk not from Lord Leveson, who has handled his inquiry so far with fair-mindedness and an understanding of the perils of regulation, but from public opinion. It seems inevitable that the inquiry will conclude with demands for the government to create an ‘independent’ statutory regulator to replace the Press Complaints Commission.

But, as is clear from the existing tangle of quangos, there is no such thing as a genuinely independent statutory regulator. Somebody, after all, has to appoint the regulator. We all know what happened when Gordon Brown created his ‘independent’ Bank of England. It quickly filled with government placemen who proceeded to flood the economy with cheap money to fund Labour’s disastrous expansion of public spending.

The reality of an independent press regulator would be a government parachuting one of its own cronies into the job. But how to convince a sceptical public, who see the issue as largely one of celebrities being pursued by long lenses, that government regulation of the press is a grave step for democracy? Perhaps, following his pep talk to China’s hacks, Mr Zhanfan should be persuaded to give evidence before the Leveson inquiry; and asked the question which has been put to every witness: ‘From your experience do you have any ideas of how press regulation could be improved in this country?’

Minnie Ovens

December 15th, 2011 12:58pm Report this comment

David Cameron was trapped into vetoing the proposed treaty due to the outright malevolence shown by Sarkozy in not moving from his position on a Tobin type tax.
Strange really, it's the first time he has shown any committment at all, especially upon conservative principles.
Must have terrified him and I have no doubt he will scurry back to being a wimp.
The Spectator editorial is correct but don't you feel a bit of Deja Vu?
Isn't this the mid seventies and the EEC all over again?

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