INANE NO MORE?:

Why I am no longer a European: It is galling to be driven by logic into the 'no' camp (Max Hastings, December 15, 2003, The Guardian)

Faith in Britain's destiny in Europe has been at the core of my own convictions all my adult life. Yet, suddenly, I find myself hitting the buffers. I can no longer support the government's case for signing up to the European constitution. This week, I join the referendum campaigners. [...]

Signing up to the foreign policy provisions of the European constitution is a mockery. In defence, the field about which I am best informed, Europe shows a boundless appetite for creating common structures and bureaucracies, yet lacks the slightest willingness to provide forces to give them substance. Optimists, most of them in Downing Street, suggest that if the bureaucracies are formed, the substance will follow. There are no grounds to believe this.

Unlike the Eurosceptics, I feel no principled fear about losing national sovereignty, which has become an almost meaningless concept. If, over half a century or so, it becomes plain that Europe's institutions - above all, its parliament - have evolved to a point at which they can take the strain, well and good.

Yet today, it is not remotely credible that the European parliament can provide a democratic check upon the doings of the European executive, or that it is progressing towards doing so. Between 1979 and 1999, voting in European elections fell from 63% to 49%, despite compulsory participation in three countries. Against such a background, how can any society sensibly continue a march to closer integration, endorsing the accretion of new powers to Brussels? [...]

For me, the last straw was the publication last week of Gisela Stuart's Fabian pamphlet, about her experience as the Labour party's representative at the European convention. "Not once," she wrote in a seminal passage of her brave and deeply impressive piece, "in the 16 months I spent on the convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding union."

These are damning words. This weekend's EU summit was frustrated by a mere tactical dispute about voting weights. Yet more and more of us feel, like Stuart, that emotional faith in the concept of Europe can no longer blind us to the rational objections to the European constitution.

Europe conducts its affairs in an increasingly fantastic spirit that would be admired by Lewis Carroll, but which becomes frightening when transferred from Wonderland to the political destinies of hundreds of millions of people. Some of us swallowed reservations about the Maastricht treaty because we accepted the assurances of British ministers,that its integrationist provisions would never be enacted.

Today, when those optimistic Tory "wets" have been proved so wrong, it is far harder to accept the European constitution merely by cherishing hopes that it will collapse under the weight of its own follies, together with wilful breaches by the usual suspects, led by France and Italy.

It is always painful to switch political course. It is especially so in the case of Europe, because it puts us in some rotten political company. Yet it no longer seems possible to support the European constitution - as Blair still seems willing to do - merely as an act of faith in a "tidying-up process".

Hard to imagine you could be any less gracious in admitting your foes were right for fifty years. (Margaret Thatcher, for instance, seems completely vindicated.) The mention of Maastricht though calls to mind a poem by Geoffrey Hill:

DARK-LAND

Wherein Wesley stood
up from his father's grave,
summoned familiar dust
for strange salvation:

whereto England rous'd,
ignorant, her inane
Midas-like hunger: smoke
engrossed, cloud-encumbered,

a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.

Let enough more join Mr. Hastings in repenting, even so sullenly, and perhaps England's freedom won't end up entailed after all.

MORE:
Less than half show support for EU (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 09/12/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Britain was by far the most negative state, with positive feelings tumbling to 28 per cent, but even the French were below half for the first time after months of battles with Brussels over tax cuts and illegal aid to ailing firms. [...]

Gisela Stuart, a Labour MP and Britain's sole voice on the 13-strong drafting "Praesidium", raised the pressure on Downing Street to stand firm on Britain's "red lines".

She said it was under no moral obligation to accept a text "riddled with imperfections" and rigged by "a self-selected group of the European political elite".

In a blistering pamphlet for the Fabian Society, German-born Mrs Stuart exposed the pretence that the wordy text is needed to tidy up the treaties or pave the way for EU expansion, saying "the real reason for the constitution - and its main impact - is the political deepening of the union".

She added: "Not once in the 16 months I spent on the convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want.

"The debates focused solely on where we could do more at EU level. Any representative who took issue with the fundamental goal of deeper integration was sidelined."

She said the secretive body chaired by Valery Giscard d'Estaing slipped through radical changes that had never been agreed, insisting on French documents to create confusion.

When the sole East European member dared to raise a dissenting voice he was told his vote "didn't count".

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2003 08:09 AM