John Stevens: What pro-Europeans of the Right want to hear from the Prime Minister

John Stevens is a former Conservative Member of European Parliament who stood at the last general election as an independent candidate against John Bercow.

Pro-Europeans of the Right hope the Prime Minister will answer four questions in his speech tomorrow.

First, why is he ruling out British euro entry forever? What is so un-Conservative about believing that devaluations offer only capital-destroying fools’ gold; encouraging evading — rather than addressing directly — the causes of uncompetitiveness in the economy? That currency movements constitute an effective tariff and that a single money is a most, if not the most, powerful instrument for forcing an ever deeper single market? Or that the Central Bank should be truly independent? Or that there should be rigid limits set on the levels of government borrowing and accumulated debt? That, in short, the disciplines now being applied in the Eurozone periphery mirror the monetarist renewal pioneered (but not completed) here by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and that there is no serious alternative if the Continental economy is going to sustain wealth creation and welfare provision over the long term.

John Stevens: The Conservative Party cannot be the Conservative Party until it deals with the issue of Europe

John Stevens is a former Conservative Member of European Parliament who stood at the last general election as an independent candidate against John Bercow.

Paul Goodman’s recent commentary of whether the rise of UKIP in the polls is primarily about “Europe” or “Conservatism” (following the interesting research undertaken by James Bethell, whose father was one of the finest Conservative MEPs, a true hero of the Cold War and its aftermath) has encouraged me to question the linkage, or lack of it, between the two.

I fancy most ConHome participants would see no such distinction. A true Conservative government would only be able to have a sound policy on immigration, or on crime and combating anti-social behaviour, or on re-calibrating our economy towards manufacturing exports, to penetrate the rising economies of Asia and elsewhere, or on cutting the deficit to sustainable levels, or on moving from dependence on debt to the entrepreneurial stimulus of equity, or on preserving the Union of England and Scotland, or on restoring proper quality and selection in education, and ensuring the inculcation of traditional ethics and culture, or on creating a rationally and prudently ordered health service, or on reviving a reverence for work and reducing the role of state benefits and allowing for later retirement ages, or on re-connecting people to their elected representatives, or on whatever other matter that might come to mind or heart, IF ONLY we first get out of the European Union.

John Stevens: If we want to increase trade with India we need to get closer to the EU

John Stevens is a former Conservative Member of European Parliament who stood at the last general election as an independent candidate, against John Bercow.

India’s decision to prefer the French Rafale bid to supply their new fighter aircraft over that of the Anglo-German-Italian-Spanish Typhoon consortium must raise serious questions about our aid policy there. It is not just Andrew Mitchell’s clumsy commentary on the linkage between the two both during, and subsequent to, the Prime Minister’s high-profile visit to Delhi last year. Most serious Conservatives have found it incomprehensible that at such times of extreme budget austerity, no cuts have fallen on the Department of Overseas Development. On this I am entirely in agreement with Ruth Lea’s well-argued recent commentary on this site.

Ruth, and others on ConHome, will not, however, I suspect, agree with some of the reasons which seem to lie behind the Indian choice that may be derived from a recent study sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Fondation Robert Schumann on Indian (and Chinese) attitudes to Europe , based on extensive interviews with key opinion formers. This suggested that India’s dominant security concerns are first Pakistan and Islamic expansionism more generally, and second, China, and that her dominant economic concerns are first to be a bridge between the European Union (her largest trading partner) and Asia ex-China (she already has bilateral trade deals with ASEAN and with Korea and Japan) and second, to eventually overtake China and Japan as the West’s principal Asian partner.

Such security objectives require, for the time being, a certain distance from the United States, partly because of the continuing American engagement (however unsatisfactory) with Pakistan and partly because India is keen to avoid appearing to form part of any Kennan-style encirclement of China such as is presaged in Washington’s new Pacific First defence doctrine. This does not mean they do not seek to develop their new Special Relationship with America that emerged when President Bush de facto accepted India’s status as a nuclear weapons state in 2006. In the long run this is the big idea of Indian foreign policy. Only that acquiring French (rather than US or more relatively US-friendly, ie part British) systems is less provocative towards China right now.

John Stevens: Clegg should back an 'In or Out' referendum and finally resolve Britain's EU question

John Stevens is a former Conservative Member of European Parliament who stood at the last general election as an independent candidate, against John Bercow.

My marginal political activity has nevertheless been sufficient for the mainstream experience that one’s friends are invariably a great deal more trouble than one’s enemies. This is one reason I am so glad, occasionally, to be permitted to post on this site. Nothing, however, had quite prepared me for the Deputy Prime Minister’s article on Europe in yesterday’s Observer. In what is, of course, a hotly contested field, he has tested, yet further, the envelope of evasion.

He states:

“So far the debate has been dominated by two extremes. On the one hand there are some who see an opportunity for a more centralised EU, built around a tighter, quasi-federalist core. On the other are those who imagine a chance for the UK to draw away the union. They relish the prospect of a unilateral raid on Brussels’ powers. The irony is that both options require treaty change: Europhiles and Europhobes are asking for the same thing. As always, neither extreme of the argument is right. Both would have the UK give up our place at the European top table, sacrificing the influence essential for our prosperity.”

Despite the tell-tale phrases signifying New Labour-style triangulation, this is astonishingly opaque. Is he saying that now he and his Party have abandoned any ambition for Britain to join the euro, everyone should shut up and accept the status quo? Leaving aside his confusion between federalism and centralisation (which might explain the Liberal Democrats' polling in Scotland), surely he must see that, given what is happening in the eurozone, the only way of being “at the European top table” would be for Britain to be in the Monetary Union? How, for instance, will Britain, as he says, “push with all its might to deepen the Single Market” if we are retaining, indefinitely, our right to impose, in effect, a tariff against our core partners through devaluation? What will we do when the “fast diminishing” “smaller club” of non-euro states leaves us as its only member?

John Stevens: Why we must become patriots for Europe

John Stevens is a former Conservative Member of European Parliament who stood at the last general election as an independent candidate

Tim Montgomerie wrote a very important article in the Times earlier this week. For the first time, a leading Conservative thinker has placed the European debate within the context of “the rise of the East and the decline of the West”. He admits we are now in “an economic swordfight with India and China and other rising nations” over jobs and growth. This is an analysis all serious pro-Europeans would share. Where we differ, of course, is that he sees Europe as the barrier to, whereas we see it as the basis for, addressing this epoch-making challenge.

The details of our dispute are often complex. Tim would, I think, be surprised that people like me agree with many of his criticisms of EU regulations, and of the complacent anti-competitive, decadent and self-serving attitudes of much of the European professional political and bureaucratic class (including its representatives in this country). But the big picture is surely clear. European civilisation is in danger. This civilisation has a range of values, in particular towards the individual, which need to be protected. That is only compatible with our prosperity and our power if we are more united, not less. Not just for the economies of scale, for securing a great, fully integrated internal home market, more than equal to the emerging Asian giants. The Right knows that material performance is ultimately determined not by technical factors alone (as the Left believe) but by self-belief, and this is now only credibly generated in defence of an entity larger than the European nation state, even one of the largest.

Debates about the future of Conservatism are always really debates about the nature of patriotism. Nothing is more difficult than recognising a different, larger, sense of belonging than that which has been hallowed by history. Nothing is also more essential for the survival of all those elements, material and spiritual, which make us truly what we are. So let the debate be joined. I am confident then when all the options are rehearsed - fifty-first state of the US, the Anglosphere, the global super Singapore, whatever - Conservatives will conclude that Europe affords the framework which best allows us to hope that our future can still be better than our past. There is such a thing as European civilisation. It is at risk. We, who are amongst its greatest ornaments, must now become, again, one of its greatest champions.