Very good piece from Dan Hannan in yesterday’s The Daily Telegraph. The gist of it being that politicians admit to Eurosceptical tendencies only once they have left office (and therefore, by extension, when it is too late to do anything about it.) This will have been prompted by both Nigel Lawson and Michael Portillo’s recent (we suppose) Damascene conversions, which have entertained us all greatly.
Dan puts this down to what Milton Friedman called ‘the tyranny of the status-quo’, and of course it is true about many more things than simply our membership of the European Union. But it is probably correct that such issues, seen from a distance, appear more stark and simple than they do when you are wrestling with a government department, and when the battle lines over the issue become more politically important than the issue itself. This was certainly true of the debates about Europe within the Conservative Party back in the early to mid 1990s; the issue was frequently lost amongst the bastardings being flung back and forth.
He’s very good, Hannan, by the way, isn’t he? I know this isn’t a hugely original observation.
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