partypolitieke byeenkomste Brittanje se kabbeling oor Europa

Kommentaar deur Denis MacShane

As the dust settles on the party political conferences of the two main British parties – Conservatives and Labour – what indicators are there on future Europe policy?

Britain and the EU is now a major issue for the Conservatives. The party was thrown of balance by the decision of two of its MPs to join UKIP and force by-elections in the Thames coastal towns of Clacton and Rochester. The defection of one of the best and brightest of the 2010 intake of Tory MPs, Mark Reckless, who seemed a perfect Tory candidate – Oxford, investment banking, a lawyer, and a fluent debating style – was a shock.

The other Tory MP who went to UKIP, Douglas Carswell, was already seen as an eccentric maverick who once said British membership of the EU was ‘like being shackled to a corpse’. Reckless while no less Eurosceptic represented the typical up and coming Tory MP carefully groomed for the Commons during the years of Cameron’s leadership of the party.

In another blow for Cameron one of the Conservatives’ biggest donors announced he was switching his financial support to Ukip. The Tories are not short of cash but need to spend serious money between now and May 2015 so any defection by a 6-figure donor hurts.

That set the scene for a Conservative Party conference which every day saw more and more open hostility to the EU.

- David Cameron said he was 1,000 times more interested in the union with Scotland than the union with Europe.

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-Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said there had to be “concrete and irreversible” concessions made by the other 27 EU member states in order to get a future Conservative government to support continuing membership in Cameron’s proposed In-Out Brexit referendum in 2017.

- London Mayor, Boris Johnson, said it was time to scrap free movement of people, one of the four core freedoms of EU membership. ‘We want sensible control of the numbers of people coming in. I think you would agree that it is the right and duty of every state to have some idea of how many people want to settle in its boundaries.’

-  Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said the Conservative manifesto would contain proposals to block the European Court of Human Right from imposing judgements on British courts. This, de facto, would mean Britain repudiating the European Convention on Human Rights and leaving the Council of Europe.

- The senior Tory MP and former cabinet minister, John Redwood, said British business leaders who support the EU would face sanctions and should keep their mouth shut on the UK’s future membership of the EU. His remarks were not challenged by any Conservative minister.

In short the Conservatives at their conference appeared more and more obsessed with Europe and despite the injunction not to ‘bang on about Europe’ that is what they did.

Labour, by contrast, had a much quieter conference on Europe. The Labour shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, did call for what she called ‘fair’ immigration though she never defined what she meant by ‘fair.’ She said there should be longer transition periods before opening up the UK labour market to new member states. But since the Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker has said there will be no new enlargement of the EU for at least the next five years the question of fresh waves of incomers from the EU does not arise for the immediate future.

Labour might have invited as key note figures new figures from the European centre-left like the new prime ministers of Italy or Sweden. Instead the party opted for a Mayor of New York.

What was interesting for the Labour conference was the dog that did not bark. There were no calls by major or heavyweight figures for Labour to copy Cameron and offer an In-Out plebiscite thus neutralising the Tory pledge to hold one if re-elected to power.

As this general election campaign gets under way and after the two by-elections in October show how strong the Ukip surge is there may be fresh pressure on Ed Miliband to do a U-turn and offer a referendum. However, there is growing business concern about the country being plunged into two years or more of destabilising uncertainty if the only British story until 2017 is the prospects for Brexit and at least Labour (and so far the Liberal Democrats) offer a clear choice in rejecting the Tory-Ukip clamour for a Brexit plebiscite.

What neither conference addressed was the future direction of travel for the EU as a whole, including Britain. No attention was paid to the incoming Juncker Commission or the priorities it should adopt to get Europe moving again.

As so often in the past the British party political debate on Europe was solipsistic and about political positioning within the context the national party political debate and inner-party politics. Other than vague calls for ‘reform’ usually undefined, neither party offered vision or policy on Europe that shows enthusiasm or engagement.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Europe minister.

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