Moore Balls Recycled

pete quentin, 22 May 2007

The weekend papers had a number of contributions focused on the EU and the increasingly resurgent issue of its proposed Constitution. Charles Moore spent his Saturday wrestling with the trials of recycling (in his Telegraph article at least), as imagined up by both the architects of the new Landfill Directive and those of that soon-to-be-recycled Constitution. He did a thorough job of detailing the various means by which it will further strip sovereignty from member states without even consulting their electorates. The article can be found here.
A day later it was the turn of Ed Balls, writing in the Sunday Times, to do his own piece on recycling – denouncing the ‘outdated and sterile’ arguments of ‘anti-Europeans’. While he may have called for a ‘reframing of the British debate’, it seems he was less keen on reframing than on grasping an opportunity to repaint the EU-sceptics as misguidedly, and dangerously, nationalist.

Such calls from ministers for a ‘sensible’ position on Europe are normally little more than crude attempts to discredit and belittle those who dare to criticise the government’s stance on British EU membership and a typical ploy to deflect from the sceptical argument. For starters the term ‘anti-European’ is willfully deceptive, suggesting a xenophobic position very different from that of the reasonable, EU-sceptical majority. A recently received sticker from Roger Helmer MEP sums up the distinction well, if a little forcefully, reading “Love Europe. Hate the EU!” (all somewhat ironically funded from… you guessed it, EU coffers).
In addition to reusing this old trick Balls goes on to ignore the existence of any sceptical / reformist middle ground on the EU and lumps together all those who choose to question the current direction of the Union as being its extreme opponents, apparently all believing that ‘the very definition of Britishness lies in rejecting anything put forward by the EU’. This intentionally disregards a majority of the electorate (51% according to the recent Global Vision poll) who justifiably feel Britain’s interests are best served, not by withdrawing from the EU, but in maintaining a looser relationship with it.
While Balls made a good show of calling for British national interests to come first and the danger of being ‘afraid to say no’, he did so with the sole intent of claiming that EU middle ground. As stated in this blog last week, the Brown administration looks set to present itself to the electorate as an EU lion tamer, standing firm against any threats of federalist encroachment. However the reality will be the continued pursuit of soft Constitutional concessions in the hope of avoiding a referendum at home.
Balls sets up this position skillfully but with an apparent lack of foresight for what he may find himself defending in the near future, going so far as to claim ‘we do not need a constitutional treaty that fundamentally changes the relationship between member states and the EU… Join us in pressing for more intergovernmental cooperation and reform of Europe’s budget and institutions rather than further centralisation and European state-building’.
Let’s hope Moore gets the hang of this recycling business by June because this is a quotation he may want to ‘recycle’, while the rest of us are busy being force fed that reheated carcass of a Constitution.