Britain has never been defined by its place on the map. Our nation’s reach and interests have always been global, not merely continental. Not so long ago, a quarter of humanity was united under our empire. Today, in empire’s place, stands the Commonwealth. This weekend, the Queen convenes the meeting of its various heads of government: a convention of friends, allies and trading partners. Unlikely as it may seem, the Commonwealth has become the model of a modern and global alliance.
The European Union, by contrast, looks more and more dated. It now appears less like a trading union than a self-help group for debt addicts. The never-ending summits are not about saving Greece, but about saving the French, Spanish and Dutch banks that foolishly loaned the Greek government €130 billion. The eurozone leaders are searching for a political solution to a simple problem: Greece is bust, and the loans won’t be repaid. This can’t be resolved by ‘political will’. The nightmare scenario is that the European Central Bank will end up printing enough money to feed to the banks, thereby unleashing inflation and forcing European savers to pay by stealth.
Twenty years ago, it might have been argued that the EU was the future, while Britain’s model of making its own alliances was the past. At that time, we heard that the eurozone would become ‘the most competitive economy in the world by 2010’ and other such claims. Now we know better. The Stability and Growth Pact was perhaps the most egregious misnomer in modern times. The British public look on with shock, not schadenfreude. Our own economic growth is evaporating, yet we are asked to accept an ever-expanding heap of job-destroying regulations from Brussels for which we pay £9 billion a year. How is that in our national interest?
It was a grave error for David Cameron to treat this week’s vote in the House of Commons as if it were a repeat of the 1993 Maastricht rebellion. The European debate is changing all the time, yet the Prime Minister seems to be advised by aides who are still — in their heads — fighting the old Tory Wars. When they hear about a Eurosceptic rebellion, they reach for their imaginary bayonet and look to skewer John Redwood. But today their enemy is most of the new intake of young Tory MPs and about half of the British public. Monday’s rebellion was an avoidable disaster. It showed just how out of touch some of Cameron’s advisers have become.
On Europe, as on many other issues, Westminster does not understand Britain. This is not a parliamentary battle against ‘30 or 40 shits’, as the Prime Minister’s aides contemptuously describe certain members of the Tory benches. This is about bridging the large gulf between what the political class believe and what the public want. As James Forsyth says on page 12, the Prime Minister needs new advisers — people who can direct him towards the common ground of public opinion, not the middle ground of Westminster.
Support for Britain’s EU membership is draining all the time. Poll after poll shows that demand for a referendum is growing. This is nothing to do with a Little Englander tendency: Britain remains an outward-looking nation, eager to trade more with parts of the world where the economy is growing. It may seem odd, but the Commonwealth conference in Australia represents the future. The fraught summits in Brussels represent the past. The Prime Minister regards himself as a moderniser, and times are changing fast. He should by now have no doubts about the way his party and his country wish to go.
Fatal misconception
At some point this weekend, if the United Nations is to be believed, the world population will reach seven billion. Almost as many words will be written on the perils of a booming population, on how humans are overburdening the planet and how — if current trends continue — the world will end up looking like Hamley’s on Christmas Eve.
In fact, as man grows richer, he tends to breed less. Look closely at the UN data and it shows that, in several prosperous countries, fertility is already below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies. Extrapolate the UN’s medium-case estimates and you find that the world population will peak (at ten billion) by the end of this century. Then the decline starts, with the world’s supply of Americans running out in December 2400, and the last Frenchman keeling over in January 2501. The Irish, incidentally, will go the way of the dodo long before any of us.
It’s not something the neo-Malthusians readily admit, but those same UN figures suggest that Homo sapiens may end up spending less time on this earth than the triceratops. The moral of the story is simple: you can conjure up almost any disaster scenario if you push statistics far enough into the future. But doomsayers forget that mankind has a genius for adaptation and survival. The more people we have, the more likely we are to resolve seemingly insurmountable population problems. That’s why the arrival of the world’s seven billionth human should be, like the birth of any child, a cause for celebration.
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