Tim Montgomerie has an eminently sensible piece today on British policy towards a projected new treaty, following on from one from ‘Melanchthon’ yesterday. In essence, both argue that the difficulties in the Eurozone provide an opportunity for British diplomats.
I fully agree. One of the more astonishing positions of British diplomacy that has developed alongside the principle of opt-outs and go-ahead groups is an unfathomable generosity of spirit towards those pushing for further measures of union.
This altruism most certainly is not shared by our partners. Take just one example, that of fisheries. The CFP essentially came into being as a mechanism for the pre-1973 Atlantic EEC states to gain access to the rich fishing grounds of accession countries, rather than as an original 1950s Treaty of Rome concept of good governance. Come later accession negotiations with new members, Spain threatened to block the big wave of Eastern enlargement unless it got accelerated access to the Irish Box; while France and Spain separately and quite seriously threatened to derail the Austrian round of accessions unless they got a privileged position in Norway’s territorial waters.
The point is that these countries put self-interest ahead of communal interest. They put their fishing constituencies ahead of any sense of the communautaire.
If the Eurozone countries are now in a pickle, and need British acquiescence to change the terms of the party, then London has a precedent. Bring back national control of the UK’s fisheries and scrap the CFP as our price for agreeing. Most of the Eurozone countries won’t care as they don’t fish in the North Sea. Ecologists will love it, as it ends tens of thousands of tonnes of fish being dumped dead back into the sea every year in the greatest ecological scandal of our time. The financial and social arguments are indisputable and have been explored and explained in depth. It even used to the Conservative Party policy for a while, thanks to several excellent fisheries spokesmen in the Commons and to some remarkable work undertaken by Owen Paterson – who is now eminently positioned on behalf of Ulster’s fishermen to revisit the subject and take the project further. Many of the Lib Dems, with their South Western, Scottish and Orkneys ports, have constituencies that would directly benefit and fishing communities that over time would regenerate.
With QMV increasingly as the norm, this is a rare chance to push EU integration into an ebb tide. But if it’s not taken, we establish a truth that withdrawal from the EU is the only alternative possible to ever-closer union.
