When, roughly 60 years ago, Aneurin Bevan described the Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’, Tory supporters all over the country formed a Vermin Club in proud response. Now it is time to form a Graffiti Club. On the Today programme on Monday, the day of the referendum vote in Parliament, William Hague foolishly compared his own party’s MPs voting for a referendum on the European Union to people who scribble graffiti on the wall. His comparison encapsulated why the government lost the argument. It disclosed an underlying contempt for anyone who actually minds about being ruled by the European Union, and a belief that this is not a subject on which the public’s opinion, or even that of backbenchers, should be sought. The Graffiti Club would be formed to mobilise the opposite position. If this doesn’t happen within the Tory party, it will be led from outside it. Already, backers are talking of starting the Referendum party all over again.
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The original Writing on the Wall (see Daniel chapter 5) said: ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.’ This is an accurate verdict on the Conservative leadership, though for ‘Medes and Persians’, read ‘Liberal Democrats and European Union’. I had previously tended to discount the standard criticisms of David Cameron and George Osborne for being arrogant as class-based chippiness, but I’m afraid that in this case they have been fully justified. The opinion of most of one’s party on a great issue may sometimes have to be argued with, but it should never be slapped down. The tactics failed. The leadership was determined not to offer any words of comfort to the sceptics, but to show them who was boss. After so many rebelled all the same, poor Michael Gove, the strongest sceptic among the Cameron loyalists, was sent out into the studios to offer words of comfort to the sceptics…
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So power has shifted. It now accrues to those within the government who were bounced by the leadership. The revolt was bad enough for Mr Cameron, but if it had included Iain Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson, the most Eurosceptic members of the Cabinet, it would have been pretty well uncontainable. Neither was consulted about the tactics for the vote and both were miserably unhappy about it. But both were good boys. They did not resign and they avoided making trouble in the press over the weekend. Now they have surely won the right to insist on concrete proposals from Mr Cameron about exactly which powers Britain should try to reclaim from the EU and to demand a timetable for action. Otherwise, the government will be run by Nick Clegg’s extraordinary doctrine that it would be wrong to seek national advantage at a time of EU crisis — and the longer-running coalition in British politics, usually known as the Conservative party, will fracture.
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Inquiries by the Labour MP Gisela Stuart have revealed the little-known fact that members of the British armed forces can be awarded EU service medals. So far as one knows, the EU has not yet fought any wars (apart from those against national independence, Greek living standards, the City of London etc, etc), but it has struck four European Medals — ‘yellow and blue and Swedish-looking’, she tells me. Three are for different monitoring missions in the former Yugoslavia and one for ‘European Security Forces’ in the Congo. To be approved by the Ministry of Defence and the Committee on the Grant of Honours, Decorations and Medals, proposals for such medals ‘should demonstrate that those on the operation have endured a period of risk and rigour’, says the minister concerned. Can every European taxpayer now have one?
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It is an odd feature of universal instant communication that it is hard to get news of foreign countries in a form which one actually wants. In the current euro-crisis, I want to know what is really going on in Germany, since it is Germany that will decide everything. There are many good reports, often in business pages, of what is happening at EU summits and of what bank analysts and economists make of it all. But there is extraordinarily little actually from Germany — its politicians, its regions, its people. Of course there are endless German websites, but for the non-German speaker, the most powerful country in Europe is reported scarcely more deeply than Madagascar.
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One problem, perhaps, is the lack of language. If you can fly in and out quickly and buy an interpreter, or if many of the key people speak English anyway, there will be fewer people in journalism, diplomacy or intelligence who have studied another culture and learnt another tongue fully. Despite its famed Arabism, the Foreign Office still seems to have remarkably few Arabic speakers. One’s overwhelming feeling as one watches the results of the Arab Spring is that hardly any Westerners know anything about the new politics we are dealing with.
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In his memoirs, Tony Blair made a couple of recantations. He should never have introduced the Freedom of Information Act, he said, or banned hunting. Now Robert Hardman, in his excellent new biography of the Queen (Our Queen, Hutchinson) has extracted a third mea culpa. Mr Blair tells him that he regrets Labour’s policy, in 1997, of refusing to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia. The Tories had made a great mistake, according to Douglas Hurd, of not making sure that Labour high-ups, while in opposition, were invited aboard. Mr Blair says: ‘After we’d agreed to get rid of it, I actually went on it and I remember, as I stepped on, thinking: “That was such a mistake to have done that.”’ As Hardman goes on to point out, Mr Blair’s Millennium Dome ended up costing 12 times more than Britannia’s replacement and lasted, in its promoting-Britain capacity, for only a year. Why can’t a grateful nation donate a new yacht for Diamond Jubilee year?
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