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Leading article

De quoi avez-vous peur, Gordon?

Wednesday, 17th October 2007

Tony Blair promised a referendum on the EU constitution to defeat 'Eurosceptic myths'. Is Gordon Brown afraid of such a contest?

Again, it is worth recalling precisely what he said in 2004: ‘It is all nonsense myth designed to distance people’s understanding of what Europe is truly about and loosen this country’s belief in its place in Europe. It has been an unrelenting, but, I have to accept, at least partly successful campaign to persuade Britain that Europe is a conspiracy aimed at us.... It is right to confront this campaign head on.... Parliament should debate [the Treaty] in detail and decide upon it. Then, let the people have the final say.’ In the end, of course, the French and Dutch saw to it that the Treaty was abandoned, and the promised British referendum cancelled.

Scroll forward to October 2007, and we find that history is being rewritten. In an interview with the Today programme on Tuesday, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, gave a quite different account of the original Constitutional Treaty. Contrary to Mr Blair’s claims in 2004, Mr Miliband said that ‘the constitution that was signed in 2004 got rid of all previous existing EU treaties and created a new, refounding document of the European Union’. In contrast, he continued, the 2007 Reform Treaty ‘does not do that, it leaves in place the existing structure and puts forward some institutional reforms’. Hence, according to the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues, no referendum is now needed.

It should be obvious that the criteria by which this government judges the need for a referendum have changed dramatically — but without any explicit admission of that change. For Mr Blair, it was the need to defeat Eurosceptic lies once and for all. But now, it seems, those alleged lies are neither here nor there. It is the character of the new Reform Treaty that counts. In 2004, the government claimed that the original Constitutional Treaty did not make fundamental changes to our relationship with Europe. Now, Mr Miliband says that the original Treaty did, after all, represent a fundamental change — but that the successor agreement does not. Which set of criteria for calling referenda should we trust?

And it is trust that is at the heart of this controversy. The European Scrutiny Committee of MPs disgraced itself on Tuesday when its chairman, Michael Connarty, implicitly compared Mr Miliband’s negotiating tactics to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. This angry exchange inevitably but regrettably eclipsed the rest of the committee’s two-hour hearing.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.