Dr Lee Rotherham: The scale of the national debt. Or: how to rebuild Salisbury Cathedral from silver bullion

Dr Lee Rotherham is author of A Fate Worse Than Debt: A Beginner’s Guide to Britain’s National Debt from Boadicea to Cameron

In the coming days we will see where the Spending Review is taking us. You never know: it might even draw a few precise statistics from Labour on what extra sums they’d commit to borrowing.

I’m perpetually astonished by just how blazé Opposition politicians are about the state of public finances and just how bad the deficit actually is. Ed Balls’s comments denying the seriousness of Labour’s addiction to tax and credit, and with it any personal responsibility for where we are today, burn any credibility he might have as a potential Chancellor. It also suggests Normanton’s board gamers suffer a high attrition rate from dehydration. Monopoly games must go on for weeks with all the quantitative easing that’s endorsed by the banker. 

But since it’s difficult to put those abstract billions into context, here’s a ten pointer of what the deficit and debt means when translated.

Dr Lee Rotherham: So Ministers want to review how the EU works? Right, then - let's give them a helping hand...

Dr Lee Rotherham is an author, historian and political campaigner, who has served as a TA reservist on three overseas deployments.  He is on the Approved EU Candidates List.

A recent poll offers some intriguing statistics on where the public may currently stand on the UK’s relationship with the EU. Open Europe, which commissioned the study, interpreted it as backing a policy of renegotiation over an immediate exit.

Looking at the polling data in the annex, it seems to me that the results are more nuanced. It does suggest the mood leans more towards backing the “significant return of powers to Westminster” over outright withdrawal. But notably, though, around two thirds of those questioned either wanted straight out, or a major shift in the terms of the deal (without exploring in treaty parlance if that amounts to the same); only one in four either appear happy as things stand or want more basting in the EU sauce.

But then, quite remarkably and rather less flagged up as a detail, the responses also show that six in ten of those questioned also believe it unlikely that the UK will get the changes it wants. So it appears to indicate a pessimistic majority might be prepared to give it a go and see what happens, but stoically expect that after being reasonable, gentlemanly and very British about it all we’ll have to quit anyhow. The destination along either route would then be identical; a new deal and a positive end result whose rationale is set out for instance in this paper by David Campbell-Bannerman.

Bounded by such a backdrop, here today is where the Government’s review of the balance of EU competences is so critical. Given the importance of the initiative it’s quite remarkable that more credit hasn’t been given for what amounts to a potentially revolutionary Whitehall study.

Dr Lee Rotherham: Why we should pull out of the EU Defence Agency

Dr Lee Rotherham is an author, historian and political campaigner, who has served as a TA reservist on three overseas deployments.  He is on the Approved EU Candidates List.

Many years ago in my university days, I taught English at a French school. One day, one of my friends popped round dressed as a French marine, the consequence not of a fancy dress party but of having just received his conscription call up. He proudly talked us through the various aspects of his uniform. “And this,” he surprisingly concluded, drawing our attention to some piece of bright cord, “is to remind us that we lost the Battle of Trafalgar.”

Dr Lee Rotherham: We must appoint a good EU Commissioner, for a change

Dr Lee Rotherham is author of The EU in a Nutshell and A Fate Worst Than Debt. He is on the Conservatives’ Approved European Candidates List.

Today is Europe Day, the time of year when we reflect on how wonderful European integration is.

Well, sort of. Today is one Europe Day, the EU’s. The Council of Europe first held its Europe Day on 5 May in 1964. Twenty years on and the Brussels institutions pretty much gazumped the concept, commemorating Schuman’s far more integrationist approach. The EU crucially also has a far more imposing PR budget to sell it. Let us know in the comments below if you spot the Commission spending your money on anything particularly naughty this year, like lighting the London Eye yellow and blue.

So let’s turn our thoughts to the European Union.

Baroness Ashton has been an exemplary Commissioner, and rather a good one. She has successfully expanded her empire, the EU’s diplomatic corps or EEAS, beyond the size of her counterparts in almost all EU national capitals; expanded its budget despite an era of supposed austerity; avoided getting Brussels embroiled in a land war in central Asia; not annoyed any major rising power by saying anything too noticeable on human rights; and issued an incessant flow of commendably banal press releases outmatched only by Herman Van Rompuy at his best. Solid Eurocrat fare.

It all of course depends on your perspective. If you are not an employee of the European Commission, but are however a native of the country which sent her out there, you might understandably take a rather more negative view of the former CND Treasurer and NHS quangonaut and what she’s done during her superannuated tenure. But what is a European Commissioner for?

Dr Lee Rotherham: If we put our national debt into context, there's even more reason to fear it

Dr Lee Rotherham is author of A Fate Worse Than Debt: A History of Britain’s National Debt from Boadicea to Cameron, out now in bookshops.

We live, so pundits say, in an Elizabethan Age. We can tell this because we have very few colonial possessions, tax tobacco, argue with the Pope over the New World, and occasionally (accidentally) land naval forces on the beaches of southern Spain.

A more cutting comparison comes with our debt. Elizabeth more than once found her policies constrained by limited finances, but ingeniously on one occasion seized money being sent by bankers to the Spanish Netherlands and took the loans on herself. The Spanish never got the money; their troops rioted; the Netherlands exploded into revolt and the Dutch ended up independent, all for the sake of a canny bit of remortgaging.

We should learn from our past, from our mistakes and our successes. But it seems that we have misunderstood what debt has meant to Britain, what it’s been used for, and what its effects have been – from triggering rebellions that butchered tens of thousands of Romans, to seeping into revolutions that executed a king; from underpinning a century of devastation in mediaeval France, to financing the fatal rivalries of the Bourbon and Georgian thrones.

Dr Lee Rotherham: Some questions for the new "Centre for British Influence Through Europe"

Dr Lee Rotherham is author of The EU in a Nutshell (Harriman House, 2012).

This evening, if long-touted media diaries still hold, the CBIE is formally launching its campaign. There’s a lot in a name so we had better get this right. It’s obviously not the Canadian Bureau for International Education. It’s also not a branch of the CBI, though supporters might want to infer that. It’s the Centre for British Influence Through Europe.

Not, mark you, the Centre for British Influence in Europe. The fact that some of this new group’s own backers can’t get this right perhaps offers a protozoically-early glimpse of deep divergences within its set. There is a world of difference between arguing that it’s in the UK’s national interest to use “Europe” – by which they mean the EU – as a force multiplier if you can somehow achieve it without cost (this is a very Gaullist approach if now hopelessly dépassé), and separately campaigning to be so ‘in Europe’ that you are tugging at the Brussels agenda but at the cost of being willingly manacled to a federal union.

In the interest of clarity, since the campaign leaders are going to be on a podium, I wonder if they might usefully seize the opportunity to clear up a few points? For starters, what about their backers? I’m personally not fussed about private individuals choosing to spend their money as they like, but I am interested in taxpayer transparency. CBIE claims it will avoid funding from EU institutions. But what about its partners? There is a possibility of proxy financing here.  Will CBIE indicate which of its backers and associates are themselves funded by the EU, which in turn means funded by the British taxpayer?

Dr Lee Rotherham: 12 principles to guide David Cameron tomorrow

By Dr Lee Rotherham.

Downing Street press officers will no doubt be marketing Friday’s discourse as the “biggest speech since Bruges”. When David Cameron steps up to the podium, one trusts the media managers will have conscientiously swept the room of metaphor, covering up signs above doorways saying ‘Exit’.

Will a stray EU flag be allowed to linger symbolically in the room? On the off-chance that those twelve stars are visible from the podium, here are twelve suggested principles to help guide responses to some of the sticky questions from journalists afterwards.

i) Amid all this talk of Eurorealism, be genuinely Eurorealistic. The country is overwhelmingly critical of European integration and doesn’t support it. If it were otherwise we would have had a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. By standing up tomorrow, you are simply fulfilling your democratic mandate and obligations. But, realistically, there is no chance of changing the EU as a corporate entity into what we want. That battle was fought and lost during the Convention on the Future of Europe, thanks in part to Labour indifference and with Lib Dem connivance. We are where we are because of them. We cannot fix the EU; we can only fix it as it applies to us.

Lee Rotherham: In Rotherham, Denis MacShane’s poisoned legacy is bigger than just expenses

By Dr Lee Rotherham.

Several years ago, I had the immense privilege of being selected as the Conservative general election candidate for Rotherham. The seat, of course, was held at the time by Denis MacShane, notorious for his EU logoed socks if not yet for already running a “think tank” next to his lawnmower.

Dr MacShane (his PhD was in international economics if not accountancy) had a peculiar reaction to my selection. Indeed, it was staggeringly brazen. Of all things, he criticised the association for delays in the selection process, claiming directly to the local press that the absence of a Conservative candidate had left the BNP with a free ride.

It was a calculated remark as poisoned as it was absurd. The election results indeed confirmed the existence of a significant BNP vote in the area. But what canvassing quickly proved, however, was that the greater part of this support came from traditional Labour voters. Why? Because the local Labour party took them for granted. I found estates that hadn’t seen a Labour canvasser in decades. These tended to be predominantly white working class areas.

People explained they felt that Blair’s government nationally simply wasn’t interested in their concerns, in coming up a coherent immigration policy or even explaining what the policy was. Nobody wanted to listen to this locally either. So now as voters they intended to send a message. They weren’t going to vote for me as I personally had closed down all the coal mines, despite being around fourteen at the time. That left using the BNP vote as a post-it message to Labour.

Dr Lee Rotherham: The discoveries I made while writing my new EU book baffled even me - and I'm an experienced Eurosceptic hand

Dr Lee Rotherham is a research fellow at the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Support for the European Union has long become a matter of political faith. Amongst Europe’s leaders, to dispute its role is practically a heresy; to challenge its powers, a trigger for anathema.

Perhaps now may be the time for an injection of secularism into the debate.

It is of course ludicrously self-evident that - European idealism apart - different countries joined the EEC, the EC or the EU for different reasons. The driving motives were those of national concern and self-interest, even if some of the drafters had a bigger ultimate vision. Countries joined because of national preoccupations born of their time. Yet astonishingly, commentators and decision-makers seem to have forgotten this fundamental.

Germany’s reasons for joining the early EEC were driven by its economic and political situation in the early post-war period, and with the exception of tariff concerns are utterly different from, say, Denmark’s priorities in the early 1970s (bacon, Britain quitting EFTA) or Latvia’s more recently (a Russian neighbour, a Russian ethnic minority, and a market in need of reorienting towards the West). Equally obviously, these priorities may change with time, as threats recede and opportunities emerge.

Dr Lee Rotherham: The TaxPayers' Alliance sets out how to repatriate powers from Brussels

When is a treaty change not a treaty change? When everyone in the negotiating room thinks they can get away with it.

Today’s EU Council will come up with a deal to "fix" the Eurozone, at least over the short term. Everyone there will know that this needs to be done within the framework of the existing treaties in order to avoid triggering painful referenda – the prospect of having just the one in Greece was bad enough. At most, the wheeler-dealers will invent a protocol to "clarify" where the Eurozone countries stand, and then hope the ECJ will back it up and incorporate the principle more firmly into the acquis.

In the meantime, the existing EU structures will step up. The Eurozone has for some years now had its own President bolted onto the Council of Ministers. A commitment from October’s Council meeting, to review its role at the end of the current President’s mandate, means that this is set to be further beefed up, by ultimately merging it with the new (strangely Zoolander-styled) President of the Eurogroup Working Group.

There’s also the option of rearranging Commission portfolios, given the considerable slack arising from every country having its own Commissioner despite the number of real jobs around for them (currently, one is in charge of ordering the IT). This process has already quietly begun, with discreet amendments to the Commission’s rules of procedures suggesting early moves to accommodate more robust Commission interference.

Lee Rotherham: David Cameron should call for a review into our current terms of EU membership

By Dr Lee Rotherham.

In one corner stands a body of MPs who represent a large swathe of the country, very likely even a clear majority, who want an informed debate and referendum on an issue that has remained controversial across two generations.

In the other corner rests a Prime Minister who rejects a referendum on EU membership, because he is not a radical by nature, because his coalition partners would bolt if he offered it, and because the default amongst Whitehall advisers has long been to pass blame onto successor governments.

It is an irresistible force and an unmoveable object. But there may just be a practical solution. The Government could in time be forced into a referendum anyway if Eurozone shudders lead to a new treaty, thanks to its own legislation. But until that happens, why not make the following statement - it’s not even a compromise requiring anyone to back down:

"We the Government recognise that the EU is an important issue of our day; that decisions at Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and elsewhere within its structures have a direct impact across a large swathe of our lives; and that it is healthy to have a debate on what the United Kingdom’s position should be in, or alongside, that system. To furnish that debate, what is therefore needed is an immediate, balanced, fair and ranging analysis of the pros and cons of Britain’s current terms of EU membership. This is what the Government is now going to set up."

Lee Rotherham: No need for Clegg's Samson solution to Lords reform

It was, of course, inevitable that the Lib Dem leadership would swiftly grab at any flotsam from AV. House of Lords’ reform – and I use the term as loosely as talk of electoral "reform", since it is not automatically for the better – now looks like being part of the new agenda. Mr Clegg is now reportedly running his finger along the edges of a garden shed of possible tools, the intention possibly being to mow rather than trim the ermined ranks.

Allow me to save the Government some time. If it has to be so, and only if it has to be, the system can already be changed overnight – and without massive constitutional upheaval.

Lee Rotherham: AV would not end tactical voting

By Lee Rotherham

Christopher Hall’s article on Thursday set out a useful and detailed insight into the Liberal Party’s historic views of AV. In particular, it exposed how that party has for over a century  seen it as a distraction from the real debate between the current system and PR – a tradition that is still honourably maintained by some.

Listening to an academic seminar yesterday, I was struck by another historic misconception, relating to the lessons learned not from Cowley Street’s past, but from elsewhere.

Both sides in the debate have argued about the relative complexity of AV. No have argued that it is a complicated system, which in turn threatens a need for counting machines, a suggestion incidentally endorsed in the Times letters pages by the man who used to run the London ballot. Yes have counterclaimed that it is “as easy as 1-2-3”, focusing on the process of the vote itself rather than the broader mechanics.

But the complexity issue goes much wider.

Lee Rotherham: Controversies From Brussels and Closer to Home

Lee Rotherham is author of Controversies: From Brussels and Closer to Home, which has just been published by the EU Referendum Campaign.

Libraries are a dangerous place. I don’t mean that a mis-step can lead to your being pinned under a bookcase for five hours and brained by a bust of Socrates; simply that it’s easy to get distracted from your intended task by a trail of fascinating archives.

It is possible to make a merit of such enjoyable diversions, which explains a short volume that’s now been published through the EU Referendum Campaign. It’s a series of essays looking at some of the more controversial issues surrounding our relationship with Brussels – hence the title, Controversies.

Hopefully there’s something in there for everyone. I delve into the under-explored Georgetown archives of ACUE, the US campaign pushing for a United Europe that was packed full of spooks (retired, serving and yet to be recruited). There’s a review of Churchill’s real views on European integration, including what appears to be a previously lost Churchill speech on the subject. Mirroring the great man, we also look at Ted Heath to ask whether he deserves the bad press he’s received over accession and deception.

Lee Rotherham: Fishing - Don’t get mad, get bad

by Lee Rotherham

Today’s piece from the Fisheries minister was welcome, insofar as it went. But as that wasn’t far at all, you might as well be praising a Porsche for having a splendidly shiny handbrake.

Everyone now has come to long agree that the CFP is a complete disaster. MPs who stood up for fishing constituencies in the face of massive political pressure (especially Sir Richard Body, who bravely resigned the whip in protest at policy) have since been completely vindicated. There have even been detailed attempts to cost it as far as the UK is concerned that give us some solid figures to wave under the nose of the Treasury.

Everybody knows the policy is rubbish. So why bother talk?