Melanchthon’s blood has been boiling in recent posts on CentreRight. He has a right to be outspoken. Now is the moment in politics for great reformers.
An opportunity exists to settle the splinter-ridden EU framework in which Britain sits. Attempting to evade the issue, by rubber stamping an economic government for the Eurozone, would be a missed opportunity of the scale of the European Convention, albeit one this time in which this time we could only rescue ourselves alone.
I shan’t revisit the arguments here. Instead, let me raise another question for the Liberal Democrat leadership, since the media are currently emphasising its role in the Government’s presumed lethargy.
If no powers need to be returned to national control, if no major reforms should be forced as the price for a British signature, then that surely assumes that Cowley Street is happy with the current balance of power.
How will that play with the fishermen of the Orkneys or St Ives, when they are told the Government dropped the unexpected last chance they had of saving their industry from the Common Fisheries Policy?
How will that play with the smallholders of Berwick and Mid Dorset, when they are told that CAP reform is off the table, while cement factories and railway companies will still be receiving their farm subsidies?
Or the housewife in Gordon or Solihull, who continues pay higher food bills while contributing towards the £1 billion of British support for continental agriculture?
Or businessmen and workers spitting tacks at the latest directive or regulation, pushed through under QMV, in any Lib Dem seat across the land.
Once you drop the ideology underlying European integration, it becomes an issue of pounds and pence, burdens and red tape, jobs and recession. I may be wrong, but I’m not entirely convinced that all Lib Dem backbenchers will prove to be quite so willing to abandon their constituents and follow the Deputy Prime Minister into the tactical and moral low ground.
