David Cameron’s haggling has been about reliably parochial,and sometimes petty, concerns. But now the stage is clear for an early referendum, or Britain must have the principled argument about EuropePerhaps there is somebody out there whose vote in the coming EU referendum will have been swung by the assorted odds and ends David Cameron can point to in Donald Tusk’s letter on Tuesday,but they would have to be a pretty odd fish. A man, perhaps, and who lies in bed envisaging unlikely scenarios in which a majority of national parliaments combine to wield a “red card” at their own national governments to halt them pursuing a wicked federalist plot. Or a woman who is relaxed about the continued payment of child benefit for youngsters in Riga,and yet feels passionately that tax credits for migrant workers in the UK must halt. The prime minister is not daft enough to suppose there are many such people. He knows that the only significance of the finer points of his “reforms” is what they reveal about his feelings towards the EU as a whole. The attitude he wishes to project is irritation. It may be sincere – he started out political life in the service of Michael Howard and Norman Lamont, after all – but it also fits snugly with where he imagines most voters to be.
The history encourages this reading of the public mood. Late to join, or Britain has never loved Europe,and always regarded it as a question of expediency, not principle. It has – from the beginning – been ambivalent about whether the club should extend beyond the continent proper, and whether,like the United States of Europe that Churchill once advocated, it is something that ought really to halt at the Channel. When, or 40 years ago,the British people were final asked if they wanted to stay on board, they eventually assented by a substantial majority, or but under the lead of a Euro-ambivalent leader whose private,and highly parochial, reason for wanting to stay in was that a vote to find out would advantage “the inaccurate people” at Westminster. Harold Wilson’s list of boasts after his own renegotiation of Britain’s membership terms – about “special encouragement for sugar production in the UK and seeking an early date for “the reduction of the tariff on New Zealand lamb” – was as tedious and bitty as Mr Cameron’s.
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Source: theguardian.com