There seems to have been some confusion over my last post, presumably because lots of you didn't bother to click on the hyperlinks I provided. (Tricky, isn't it, this internet thingy?) So I'll spell it out. On Monday, a good day to bury news, Cameron announced that Britain would be prepared to support a new Treaty, strengthening the powers of the EU to oversee and control the Eurozone, provided that the measures would not apply to Britain.
This was the new Treaty that I've been banging on about for some time, saying we should support it and use it as an opportunity to renegotiate - after all, renegotiating would mean a new Treaty, so that's precisely what we've wanted. OK. So Cameron has moved on from saying he'd veto such a Treaty (rather silly posturing, but he'd only just started his new job and we all do a few embarrassing things early on) to saying he's in favour of having one. Well, since there absolutely had to be one for the euro to have any chance of surviving, we'll grant that as progress.
But some of the noises off appear to suggest that the Coalition has foresworn seeking to repatriate powers in the negotiations over this new Treaty. As I've said repeatedly before, that is unacceptable, and is surely not something that many Conservative MPs or the Conservative Party in the country as a whole would consider acceptable if they understood what is happening. This is our chance - our once-in-a-generation chance - to repatriate powers from the EU. If Cameron and Hague don't set about doing that now, there won't be another chance in the political lifetimes of most Conservative MPs. If Cameron and Hague don't renegotiate now, they don't want to renegotiate. I fear that the consequence will be that the UK will leave the EU in the not-too-distant future. If we want to stay in, we have to renegotiate. If we want to renegotiate, we have to renegotiate now.
Look at yourselves in the mirror, all you Conservative MPs that pontificated about Lisbon and about how Blair had misled the public by pretending to be Eurosceptic in opposition and then caving in all the negotiations in office and about how terrible it is that three quarters of all our laws are set in Brussels and about how the drift towards a Single European State threatened a thousand years of English constitutional history and many other such things throughout your political lifetimes. Was it all just talk? Was it something you felt you had to say in order to be regarded as "sound"? Do you think it's not really all that important, when all's said and done? (Were the efforts of Eurosceptics in the 1990s to keep us out of the euro "not all that important"?)
Or did you mean it? And if you meant it, what are you going to do about it now that the appointed hour has come?
