Have you seen this? Polly Toynbee has a piece in the Guardian today, entitled ‘Cameron will play the anti-EU card all right, but he'd never quit the union’ – an article worth reading.
If Cameron can face that the European Union needs to be radically transformed into a European free trade zone (and not taken toward a European government) then he is probably right to not quit the Union. But, he will need to pursue a path of renegotiation to bring about any transformation.
Holding off on Toynbee’s remarks on Cash and Heathcoat-Amory, I may have to agree with the conclusion: that the Party line on the Lisbon Treaty may represent “a highly significant shift in Tory party history”, even if I am thinking along different lines from Toynbee.
Yet, I wonder – based on something Bill Cash said recently in his essay in The European Journal that “although much has yet to be achieved, it is only by persistent and determined vigilance at every twist and turn of the European integration process that pressure has successfully moved the Conservative Party policy in the right direction” – whether I am to understand that it is the Conservative Party or our experience of Europe that has changed. Have the Party remained steadfast eurosceptics or have they become cunning opportunists? Or both? Surely this is what concludes (and will prove) whether the approaching Lisbon debate represents “a highly significant shift in Tory party history”.
Recent Comments