It's rare that I find something I agree with in the Guardian, and when I do it generally it isn't something written by someone the paper employs. But one must not let the best be the enemy of the good. The following leapt out of a report on 20th May by Ian Traynor on the forthcoming European elections:
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
