The time for complacency is over

Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that Labour will campaign in the coming referendum for our continued membership of the European Union, whatever the outcome of David Cameron’s ‘renegotiation’, was a welcome shift from the equivocations of the days that preceded it. Labour’s pro-Europeans are expected to stand and cheer. We shall see. Corbyn, who if nothing else defines his integrity by his consistency, has campaigned against the EU all his political life. I would like to believe he had undergone a Damascene conversion, but maybe the pressure of threatened resignation from a combination of Alan Johnson and Pat McFadden was just too much for him.

However, Corbyn’s announcement gives the pro-Europeans breathing space to get their act together – both in terms of setting up a distinct Labour ‘In’ campaign and strengthening the necessary but nascent cross-party campaign. For months the pro-Europeans have been far too complacent.

We joke about the rival ‘No’ campaigns. The rift between the former United Kingdom Independence party donor Arron Banks, with his KnowEU campaign, and Nigel Farage’s Say No to Europe may look amusing. However, we should be alarmed by the well-funded mobilisation of so-called ‘Eurosceptic’ (in reality hardline anti-European) opinion under the ‘Business for Britain’ banner and its associated ‘Conservatives for Britain’.

This is a well-resourced campaign with the declared support of over 30 Conservative members of parliament and the widescale backing of small- and medium-sized business-owners and hedge funds in the City. They claim to be a majority of business opinion when survey after survey has shown them to be unrepresentative of business and City opinion as a whole, even among small firms. They are a rich, vocal, and obsessive minority and they will win the backing of most of our Eurosceptic (foreign‑owned) press.

These people in reality want ‘Out’, but they claim to be backers of Cameron’s efforts to negotiate a fundamental change in Britain’s relationship with the EU. However, they have set terms for this renegotiation that they know cannot be achieved, certainly in the timetable that the Conservative manifesto laid down. Take four examples of their hypocrisy.

First, the antis demand full-scale treaty change, but every observer of EU affairs knows that this is not a realistic possibility until after 2017 when there may be moves for greater political integration within the eurozone. At present, though, there is no consensus among our partners for what needs to change and therefore no possibility of defining how a Britain outside the euro would relate to whatever change may be in prospect.

Second, the antis want a drastic cut in the EU budget. But the EU budget was set for seven years in 2012 with Britain fully signing up to it at the time: we are not yet halfway through that period.

Third, the antis set as a condition of success repatriation of all EU social and employment laws. Cameron has already acknowledged that is not going to happen, and how could it? Why should our partners allow Britain free access to their markets, if British firms are able to compete on the basis that British workers no longer enjoy minimum social and employment rights: the antis advocate ‘social dumping’ on an industrial scale.

Fourth, they want a right for the House of Commons to veto EU laws. Yet the pooling of sovereignty in specific areas is the essence of what being a member of the EU means. If every member state had that right to block decisions it did not like, there would be no EU.

In the run-up to the general election the opinion polls suggested the ‘Ins’ were heading for a comfortable victory. But the general election taught us how much attention to pay to polls! More recent polls have shown a drastic narrowing of that earlier lead to a ‘neck-and-neck’ outcome.

What explains this narrowing is the recurrence of ‘bad news’ from elsewhere in Europe. The British media highlighted the supposedly brutal mishandling of Greece, though Corbyn supporters would do well to note the outcome. Left populism was shown to have as few implementable answers to the intellectual hegemony of austerity as mainstream European social democracy. Syriza split, but the majority ultimately accepted that staying in the euro was far better than the imagined freedoms of Grexit.

Even worse, the continuing refugee crisis has inflamed populist fears in Britain of being swamped by developments on mainland Europe. The emotional pulling power of anti-Europeanism is perfectly captured by the construction of that disgraceful Hungarian razor-wire fence.

The ‘Ins’ have a real fight on our hands on a central issue of social democratic principle. We must get our act together now.

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Roger Liddle is co-chair of Policy Network

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Photo: wwworks