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An objective approach to being in Europe
Every survey in the UK shows that Europe does not feature in the Top 10 issues that most concern voters. Issues of rising importance include (and they're on William Hague's checklist):
The environment, energy, drugs and human trafficking
Yet we in Britain often prefer to get in a tangle over Europe than address these issues. Why is this and how can we prevent it?
Europe is both an emotional issue and a practical one.
Our sovereignty, independence, flag, currency, monarch, borders: all these are both important and emotional, part of our British identity. Today's compromises of sovereignty come from our alliance with the USA, our membership of the EU and even more from general globalisation,and the freedoms of travel, trade and employment - more so at anytime since 1914.
Ironically free trade, long a key conservative philosophy, was once considered a dangerously radical left wing policy. In any event it is a British political philosophy descended from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
You could argue that Britain has always compromised about where she gets her independence from - not least by importing monarchs when we needed them from princely families from today's Holland and Germany.
In the same way the ownership and management of our commercial assets has changed: the Mini and the Bentley are both made in Britain but owned by German coompanies. The former especially has gone through a period of great revival - and the days of strikes at British Leyland are ancient history. This nation of shopkeepers is surely pleased.
In practical terms and on a government level what matters is to work hard with chosen allies for the right result on legislation we want and legislation we don't want. In the same way we fought with chosen allies on the battlefields of Europe - whether Eugene of Savoy with Marlborough, Blucher with Wellington, with France and Italy against the Kaiser and (though the US, Canada and the rest of the Empire were much more important) various resistance groups against Hitler.
The EU is complicated, messy, has many agendas we don't share, reflects some European practices and traditions we do not have and do not believe in, and causes deep irritation with legislation that should be devolved down to national if not local government levels. However on all the issues William Hague's has described as today's new political hot potatoes - the environment, energy, drugs and human trafficking - we need European wide co-operation if we are to succeed in solving them.
The other important Conservative dream, of a single market, is gradually becoming a reality - and we are exporting Adam Smith at a time when there is a danger of more global protectionism.
I believe too that today's major benefit of the EU is what its founders thought - bringing peace - but not in the way they thought. Rather than binding Western Europe together to prevent another world war - that is surely unthinkable today - the EU now offers instead the
political goal of joining the EU to the Balkans. Post World War 2 communism, the EU is the new political club to which all aspire. This was in part the inspiration of Margaret Thatcher in her famous Bruges speech: the borders of Europe were not those of West Germany and Austria - but further to the East where the lands freed after the 1st World War were enslaved again under the Soviet Union. She gave them a dream to be part of Europe again, and the EU has brought about its realisation.
It must be the best way for the hope of peace across Europe, because, as Margaret Thatcher noted, democratic nations do not fight one another. Integration into the EU will continue to reduce the chances of civil war or more regional wars - which in turn reduces the likelihood of our soldiers dying to keep the peace in far away countries whose troubles we cannot ignore any more now than we could in the 1930s.
So if a more political Europe brings peace to the new post Cold War Europe, then yes that does matter to us. We've learnt how in the Middle East issues that seem far away can come close very quickly. We need a prosperous, peaceful Southern Europe.
Does that mean that everything is perfect in the EU? Far from it. Am an apologist for Europe? Never! All sorts of things have gone wildly wrong, including:
- a lack of checks and balances in the system
- the excess zeal of the EU bureaucrats and the feebleness of the Parliament to prevent an increasing volume of often unnecessary legislation
- those with an agenda of the Ever Closer Union
- the lack of support for the primciple of subsidiarity, ie pushing legislation to the lowest level possible - national if not local government if not to a particular sector itself
- gold plating European law (ie taking a small law and making it a bigger one here)
These, and many more problems will take a long time to sort out - and we can either by cyncical in our expectations or try and do our bit to help move things along.
Today we're all more European than we used to be: but we don't want to be pushed into adopting European laws that should be dealt with at the national level. When we appoint a Swede or an Italian as the England football team coach it isn't because the EU told us to: it's because there appeared to be no-one better in Britain at the time. More or less the same reason that we invited Fredrick George of Hanover to come and rule us. If the domestic product isn't good enough we buy foreign: whether wine, cars, glass, monarchs or football managers. So we have a Belgian Chairman of BT, an Australian and now an Irish CEO of BA and so on. Britain is the ultimate pragmatist - we choose the best but we do like to decide ourselves : we do not want or need others to decide which king we should import or which laws to pass.
When I left university I swore I would not work in the City of London. It was stuffy and inward looking. Now it's cosmopolitan, and thrives because of that. London is in fact today the undisputed financial, entertainment, cultural and sporting capital of Europe. We Conservatives want to maintain and develop that success, and that means close engagement with Europe - not least to lobby effectively against legislation which might hurt the city and our financial services (and affect Gloucester via Lincoln, Ecclesiastical, Fortis, Brunsdon and others).
So I believe the simple Conservative policy over Europe must be to make this over complicated system work better, pursue the philosophy of 'less is more' on all legislation and particularly on European legislation do less better. (Not a bad slogan for national government too, come to think of it).
And one small way in which we can all contribute is by signing up to the www.oneseat.eu campaign - an online petition to stop having Strasbourg as the one week a month seat of the European Parliament - a ridiculous waste of our money and MEPs' time. The number of those signing up is growing very rapidly and already over a million - this just may be the first example of where a treaty is changed from sheer weight of European feeling gathered on the internet. So join in and make your voice heard now!
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Council