Two elections on continental Europe yesterday have exposed the deepening self-imposed isolation of the British Conservative government from developments in Europe.

In Poland, the ruling Civic Platform government won  a clear victory, thus becoming the first Polish government ever to win re-election since the end of communism. It marks the coming of age of Polish democracy. Two of the key – and most successful – ministers in the Polish government foreign minister Radek Sikorski and finance minister Jacek Rostowski, are British-educated, know London well and would like the two countries to be close.

But David Cameron’s key east European ally, the ultranationalist clericalist Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the Law and Order party, was heavily defeated just as he was in the presidential election last year. The re-elected Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, and David Cameron have fallen out badly over the latter’s crude political support for the hard right in Poland.  Last autumn Cameron hosted a red-carpet reception for Kaczynski at Downing Street on the eve of the Polish presidential election where Kaczynski was easily defeated by Tusk’s candidate, Bronislaw Komorowski. This was seen as blatant and crude interference in Polish internal political affairs.

Cameron is tied to Kaczynksi in the Conservative party’s alliance with ultranationalist and anti-EU political parties – dubbed by Nick Clegg as ‘nutters, antisemites and homophobes’. Rostowksi and Osborne disagree on EU financing and the future shape of the European union. The Poles are the fourth biggest contributor to the UK rebate. They recall how Mrs Thatcher quadrupled Britain’s contribution to the EU budget between 1984 and 1990 to help poor countries like Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece grow. Now Britain wants to freeze all EU budget support for Poland.

On foreign and defence policy, Warsaw is angry at William Hague’s refusal to support Sikorksi’s ideas on EU defence. Poland offered to provide free accommodation and training terrain for British soldiers when they leave Germany. It will be very costly to relocate these armoured army units in the UK. But Hague and Fox dismissed Sikorski’s offer out of hand.

As a result Poland now looks to Berlin as its main ally in the EU and is forging links with central, east, Baltic and Nordic states in the EU as there is no friendship on offer from Tory London. This is a barely reported failure, if not worse, in Britain’s European policy. Britain is walking small in Europe, including with one of oldest and best partners and allies, Poland, and those critiquing Tory foreign policy errors should highlight the fact.

The Polish sister party of Labour, the SLD in its Polish acronym, did badly with just seven per cent of the vote. The party was the made-over former communist party which declared itself social democratic in the 1990s. In its period of holding the presidency and at time the premiership, the SLD handled  itself reasonably well in government. But its old trade union base has gone and the younger more liberal Poles are in different political formations – if they do politics at all. The turnout in yesterday’s election in Poland was an apathetic 47 per cent. Something similar can been seen in most democratic left parties in the former communist Europe (with the exception of the Czech Republic) and there is now a serious question over the future of social democratic politics in the eastern half of the EU. Further east, in Russia, Ukraine or Georgia it is virtually nonexistent.

The other election on Sunday was in France. There an amazing 2.5 million Socialist party supporters turned out to vote in the party’s primary election to select a presidential candidate. The turn-out and enthusiasm to find someone to take on and oust the long-standing right clique that have dominated French politics this century has had all the echoes of the ‘Yes We Can’ excitement of Barack Obama in 2008. Yesterday’s clear winner, Francois Hollande, is no Obama and he still has to win in the second round next Sunday.  Is supporters sport buttons saying (in English) ‘Maybe He Could’. He has the advantage of not having been a minister and can fashion a new appeal without the obligation of defending past socialist errors. Hollande has described ‘debt as the enemy of the left’, and knows that to beat Sarkozy he has to reach beyond the cheers of easy left rhetoric.

President Sarkozy is a political streetfighter and is soon to be the first president of France to become a father while in the Elysée. Right now the polls show Hollande beating him but there is a long way to go. The French right is badly split between Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party and the ultranationalist, eurosceptic National Front, headed by Marine le Pen, who has sought to reposition her party away from the crudely racist, antisemitic style of her father’s leadership.

Even if Sarkozy does win, there is every chance that the Socialists or a coalition of non-UMP parties could win a majority in the National Assembly as parliamentary elections in France follow on directly from the presidential contest. Labour needs to up its engagement with Europe and quietly sideline those singing tunes from the 1980s about banning Europeans from coming into Britain or joining the chorus of the Mail and Telegraph against the euro. Labour should keep its distance from the Farageiste tendency amongst Tory MPs calling for a referendum and an end to social rights for British workers, and especially women.

Cameron has placed a great deal of UK eggs in the Sarkozy basket. The UK-French defence Treaty and Cameron’s following Sarkozy’s initiatives on the Libya interventions are two main achievements of Tory European policy since May 2010. Both can be justified  but if there is a change of either president or parliament in Paris in a few months’ time post-Sarkozy France will have very little contact or natural friendship with Tory Britain.

Along with the euro crisis, politics are accelerating across the Channel. Britain, thanks to Cameron’s and Hague’s isolationist eurosceptic politics, is at best a passenger on the European train. One need not be blindly europhile or federalist to point out the glaring holes in Tory EU policy. Britain needs a better politics and policy for Europe.       

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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Europe minister

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Photo: Francois Hollande