The former British Labour Treasury Minister Liam Byrne clearly wasn’t joking when he left his successor a note saying, “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money.” The Labour Government literally spent the bank, ignoring civil servants’ advice time and again as they indulged in one of Britain’s largest and most irresponsible spending sprees. There are fewer better examples of Lady Thatcher’s maxim that even Socialists run out of other people’s money eventually, than Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the British economy over the past 13 years.
And the British electorate knew it, on May 6 when Gordon Brown’s Government polled two million less votes than the Tories and suffered their worst loss of seats than at any general election since 1931. Similar to Labour’s rout of the Tories in 1997—after the pain and humiliation of being bounced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)—the British people knew dodgy economics when they saw them. Even the generous recovery the Conservatives managed after 1992, up until their defeat in 1997, couldn’t assuage the public’s anger over the failed European experiment which nearly bankrupted Britain.
The new coalition government in Britain has wisely decided that for the term of this parliament, it will not seek membership of the single European currency (the disastrous successor to the previously disastrous ERM). Even the staunchest of pro-EU Liberal Democrats has accepted that for the next five years, the Euro is a dud currency as far as Britain is concerned. For the Tories, they have pledged never to sign up to the Euro, having had their fingers burnt once already.
It is not just that the Greek debacle has tarnished the Euro in PR terms; the British people are deeply wedded to the notion of parliamentary sovereignty. If they don’t like what the government is doing, then they will not hesitate to vote them out at the next election, and frequently in great numbers. For centuries, democracies have been served by one absolute and defining principle—that the electorate is the ultimate arbiter over what its’ sovereign executive does (or does not) do. But who in the European Union (EU) can the British people vote out? Sure, a few members of the European Parliament, but the EU is uniquely placed in Europe for its own defining principle: you have to be unelected to propose legislation in Europe. By its very nature, the EU is an affront to the democratic bond between the voter and his representative.
The introduction of the single European currency in 1999 was meant to be the crowning glory of a United States of Europe. Both Nick Clegg and Kenneth Clarke—ironically both ministers in the new British Government—warned that Britain would decline if it didn’t join this grand experiment. But London didn’t join, and being outside the Eurozone means that Britain now has valuable tools at its disposal to weather this economic crisis, not least of all the ability to set its own interest rates. Like the rest of Europe, Britain will have to make swingeing cuts too, to its bloated public services and to the nation’s welfare benefits and social services. None of this will be easy after 13 years of Labour essentially telling the country that money does in fact grow on trees.
But these cuts should be for the British Government to decide and the British public to adjudicate at the next election. It is morally and politically abhorrent that the EU is seeking to appropriate this power by the backdoor.
Having used every excuse under the sun to explain away the Euro’s demise, the EU is now claiming that had it have had the power to look over Athens’ annual budget, the whole Greek crisis could have been avoided. Ergo, the EU should now have the power to send its unelected and unaccountable statisticians into national capitals to pore over the proposed budget of all EU member states, not just those in the flailing Euro.
The theory goes that in the absence of a single economic government, a single currency is a profoundly bad idea. But even with a central economic government, the Euro will still fail. The Eurozone is a suboptimal currency area without the labor mobility or the political unity to underwrite the massive federal fund transfers that are clearly needed to make the Euro viable. Quite why sixteen countries of Europe couldn’t see this, is not clear. But what is clear, however, is that even the kingmaker himself Tony Blair—even at the height of his 179-seat majority in Parliament—could not railroad the British public into the disastrous experiment that is coming apart before Europe’s very eyes.
As if the idea weren’t comical enough that the rest of Europe didn’t know the Greeks had been misrepresenting their books for years, the proposed number-crunchers set to march down Whitehall to pre-approve the Chancellor’s budget are none other than the bureaucrats of Eurostat: the EU agency which has been mired in corruption scandal after corruption scandal.
The new British Government has pledged that no more powers will be transferred from the UK to Brussels during the course of its lifetime. If Prime Minister David Cameron ever had cause to fight for British independence and self-determination, then this is it. He has the mandate and moral authority to tell Brussels that enough is enough: Britain didn’t sign up to the Euro and shouldn’t be expected to accept the consequences of its folly, nor the authoritarianism of an unelected body over the sovereign right of the British people. This has to be a red-line for the Cameron Government.
