Politics
Who dares tell the story about what Europe has done for us?
Published 13 September 2007
It's official: Britain can keep its pounds and ounces. Coming to our television screens, Michael Palin tells us how exotic, how very different, those eastern Europeans are. Those who thought "the man from Brussels" would turn us all into straight-banana-eating Eurotrons, doing our collective morning exercises to Beethoven's Ninth, have never been so wrong.
Britain's army of Eurosceptics, however, is not the kind to allow the facts to get in the way of hysteria. The Eurosceptics portray each institutional change as an existential threat. Now that a constitutional treaty has emerged from the ashes, they have whipped themselves into new paroxysms of fury. What do we want: a referendum? When do we want it? Now. The noise will grow more intense in the lead-up to an intergovernmental conference next month at which negotiators from the 27 EU member states will finalise the agreement.
The document, written in quintessential Brussels style, makes for turgid reading. Its aim is to streamline the EU's various institutions following its enlargement into the former communist bloc (one of the UK's keenest Euro-objectives). The first treaty, agreed in 2004, died less than a year later, not under the weight of British obduracy, but after its rejection in two other countries. The French objected to it because they saw it as a neoliberal economic conspiracy; the Dutch, as some of the biggest net contributors to the EU, became wary of the costs. These "No" votes got Tony Blair off the hook after he was forced into a U-turn by the media and by some in his cabinet and accepted a referendum that he was almost certain to lose.
Much to the discomfort of Blair, and of Gordon Brown, it was the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who revived the constitution this year. The draft document, agreed amid much haggling in June, gives no nation everything it wants. Much of it is similar to its precursor; some of it is different. It is shorn of its more romantic notions about flags and anthems, while the Charter of Fundamental Rights is no longer centre stage. Its most important proposals are to create an EU president, a more powerful single person in charge of foreign affairs, to slim down the Commission, and to remove national vetoes in several areas. Even though the British have been granted the "red lines" they always clamour for, the Europhobes still see this treaty as an act of treachery.
What should Brown do? Unlike Blair, the new Prime Minister does not see Europe as a barometer of the success or failure of his government. Given half a chance, he would not be starting from here, and would rather the constitution and other European problems simply disappeared. Brown calculates that the issue may be subsumed by more urgent events, and that those who proclaim the importance of the constitution can be dismissed as "noises off". He knows that, for the moment, David Cameron - having learned the lessons of William Hague's disastrous general election campaign of 2001 - does not want to turn Europe into a make-or-break issue.
If, however, the pressure from the right-wing media that Labour governments always fear becomes unbearable, it is likely that Brown, like Blair, will accede to a plebiscite. Knowing that it would require an enormous investment of political capital to win it, Brown might be tempted to adopt a lukewarm position, to put distance between himself and any defeat. If he did that, he would be damaged anyway.
There is a better, more courageous way, as the pro-European Labour MP Keith Vaz has pointed out and as the trade unions are demanding: hold your head up high and try to win this battle once and for all. Ask the voters to decouple truth from myth, to identify specific decisions by Brussels that have damaged their lives. Like cleaner beaches? A tougher approach on climate change? Better working conditions? Or attempts at a more coherent foreign policy that would have avoided the war in Iraq? Remind voters that the real threat to national diversity and independence comes not from Eurocrats, but from globalisation.
There is a good, practical, unromantic story to be told about our ties with the EU. Brown should dare to tell it.
Of peppermint foot cream and Pinot Noir
In one of the last interviews Anita Roddick gave, and when she knew for certain she would leave unfinished some of the innovative, socially ambitious projects that characterised her life, she reprimanded the journalist who had asked sympathetically about her illness: "Please don't write my obituary! I don't want to be defined by being the founder of the Body Shop, and I don't want to be defined as a woman suffering from Hepatitis C. There's more to my life than that."
Many reading the tributes that her death has prompted will be surprised to learn just how much more. At the NS, we knew her as a champion of human rights. Sweatshop labour, minority rights, torture and maltreatment of prisoners in Louisiana and China, the homeless and oppressed and abused women were just a few of the causes she wrote about (see http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/anita_roddick).
Roddick, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age, decided two years ago to get rid of half her fortune. She divested herself of her money as effortlessly as she had accumulated it."The worst thing is greed," she said. "I don't know why people who are extraordinarily wealthy are not more generous." She wanted only enough to do what she found important.
And the things she found important were wonderfully various, generous and hedonistic. "I'd far prefer a glass of Pinot Noir to a jar of anti-ageing cream," she memorably said. We'll drink to that.
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