ONLY THE PEOPLE ARE CONSERVATIVE (via Thomas Corcoran):

The lunatic mainstream had better start worrying fast (Mark Steyn, 15/06/2004, Daily Telegraph)

[A]lready Britain's lunatic mainstream is lapsing back into its customary condescension on this issue. If your views on Europe don't fall between the broad parameters from, oh, Neil Kinnock to Chris Patten, you must be barking mad and we need pay you no further heed. The political class has refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. Are you still here?

This is unworthy of a democracy, and more to the point deeply unhealthy. One reason why the Eutopian dream has fizzled across the Continent is because the entire political class took it for granted no right-thinking person could possibly disagree with them, so they never felt they had to bother arguing the case and, now they have to, they can't remember what the arguments were. Those who subscribe to inevitablist theories of historical progress often make that mistake: the lazy Aussie republicans did in 1999, for example.

Almost every Europhile argument is weaker now than it was a quarter-century ago, when the EU - or whatever it was called back then - had a stronger economy, healthier demographics, and the devastating implications of the Continent's social costs were not yet plain. Yet pro-Europeans remain wedded to their ancient arguments: for a good decade and a half Edward Heath in his tetchier moments has airily waved the interviewer's question aside and said all these things were decided in the 1970s and we need to get on with it. Otherwise, Britain will be "isolated in the world" and unable to survive unless it allows its relatively buoyant economy to be yoked in perpetuity to the FrancoGerman statist gerontocracy.

That's why Labour's decline to its pre-Great War vote share is as telling as the hit the Tories took. Neither of Britain's two main parties reflects the real division on the critical issue of the day. In a less diseased political culture, we'd have one party that argues honestly for a highly centralised European superstate - that's the only one on offer - and one party that wants to keep a flat in Spain, sell Scotch eggs and saveloys to supermarkets in Slovenia, saunter along the beach at St Tropez flaunting its wedding tackle to adoring frauleins, and doesn't see why any of these economic and cultural ties require a European public prosecutor or foreign minister.

Sadly, Margaret Thatcher seems to have been the last populist.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 15, 2004 1:40 PM