David Cameron has been a Conservative long enough to know defeat when he sees it. After years of bribing, cajoling and bullying, the European Union has won. It will soon have the powers it asked for when drawing up its constitution five years ago. It has ignored the ‘no’ votes in France and the Netherlands, renamed the Lisbon Treaty, couched it in language so technocratic that even lawyers cannot bring themselves to read it. Its weapon has been utter brazenness that has staggered even Europhiles like David Miliband. It is not ashamed, in the least, by its abject lack of democratic legitimacy.
So to hold a British referendum on a Treaty that has been passed, as some Tories still advocate, would be the height of petulance and futility. To have a referendum on a negotiating position would be just as pointless: the EU has demonstrated time and time again that it cares not a jot about the votes of the little people. It is a project of the elites, by the elites. They will respond to money, and power. If Mr Cameron wants to achieve anything in Europe, he must credibly threaten to deprive them of one or the other.
The package he laid out this week will scare precisely no one in Brussels. He has promised a ‘never again’ guarantee that Britain will — like Ireland — have a referendum on any other major shift of powers to the EU, such as the adoption of a single currency. But the whole point of Lisbon is that it is a self-amending treaty: it will allow the EU to take on more powers without such referenda.
Mr Cameron’s proposed Sovereignty Act — declaring the primacy of English law over the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg — will also be meaningless unless it includes the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. At present, the Tories’ proposed Bill of Rights is a disingenuous decoy because it would be explicitly junior to Strasbourg (which this week ordered Italian schoolchildren not to wear crucifixes in class). If the Tories were serious about repatriating justice, they would declare the Bill of Rights the law of the land.
What the new Tory package amounts to is a promise to ask the EU very nicely if it will consider handing back a few powers over employment and justice. The answer will be ‘no’ — so Mr Cameron will not ask too loudly. Saying that he might hold a referendum over ‘a wider package of guarantees’ will carry no weight. The threat that would really terrify Brussels is a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU at all.
The ‘in or out’ question is seen as an extreme position in Westminster, which shows just how out of touch our political class has become. Brussels’s own polling shows that less than a third of the British public consider our membership of the EU to be ‘a good thing’ — and this was last year when our net contribution to the EU was just £3.1 billion. Next year it will be £7.8 billion (due to the budget deal the would-be President Blair negotiated) and serious questions will be asked as to whether all these regulations are worth the money we pay for them.
The only way Mr Cameron will extract any concessions from Brussels is to threaten to stand aside and let the British public decide if they like what they see. Especially if, emboldened by the Lisbon Treaty, the EU will throw its new powers around in a way that destroys jobs and centralises control.
The new EU machine does not care about Mr Cameron’s requests. But it will care about losing a world power and its most gullible paymaster. If he is elected prime minister, he will come to realise that the threat of an ‘in or out’ referendum is the only stick worth wielding in Brussels. And it is powerful precisely because the democracy-dodging elite have a horrible feeling they know what the answer might be.
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