It is to his credit that nuance is a word inimical to Lord Tebbitt. The unashamedly
independent voice of the past has written a cutting piece about the coalition, the Lib Dems
and the Oldham East by-election. He says:
‘A Lib Dem win would tilt the Coalition even farther Left and away from Conservative policies.’
Many Tory ministers joke that they thought themselves right wing until meeting their Liberal colleague. This is a radical government that many on the right can cheer. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms are intended to make work pay and break the cycle of dependency; Michael Gove’s education reforms are market orientated; Grant Shapps’ housing reform is based on the draconian but realistic precept that a house is not for life; Eric Pickles has local government by the short and curlies; spending cuts are forcing the state to withdraw from private life. In terms of the political language of the previous century, this is, incontrovertibly, a right-wing government.
What Tebbitt actually means is that the government is not sufficiently eurosceptic – he writes a lengthy eulogy for the doomed UKIP candidate, with whom he has ‘an instinctive sympathy’. The charge of euro-inertia is harder to allay, but the coalition is not wholly to blame. Cameron’s inability to arrest the rambling EU budget debate is symptomatic of the delicate political and economic situation in Brussels. In a brilliant piece for the Guardian, David Rennie, the Economist’s former Charlemagne correspondent, argued that, with the euro decrepit and the single market supine, Europe’s French and German paymasters are becoming more assertive and more stringent. As George Osborne’s latest tepid continental adventure suggests, Britain is on the periphery of the Merkel/Sarkozy show. On the other hand, were we a member of the single currency…
As for sovereignty, I doubt that the vaunted British Bill of Rights would have made a penny’s difference to the current situation: as it would still be trumped by the European Convention on Human Rights. For example, could the British Bill of Rights have denied prisoners the right to vote after the ECHR had made its judgement to the contrary? No, so this makes the Bill of Rights little more than unrealised vanity project.
To give the coalition its due, it has tackled European competences where possible – David Lidington’s Europe Bill would introduce a water-tight referendum lock on future EU treaties (assuming that it isn’t voted down). I doubt whether the Lady herself could have done much better in the circumstances.
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