Events | 2009.11.10
The Tories' phoney war on Brussels is just posturing | Seumas Milne
Cameron claims to be defending national sovereignty. But when it comes to the City or the US, he\'s happy to ditch it
So now we know what a " cast iron guarantee " from David Cameron is worth. The Tory leader\'s abandonment of his pledge to hold a referendum on "any EU treaty" that emerged from the Lisbon negotiations will surely come to bear out William Hague\'s private warning that Europe is his "ticking time bomb". He can\'t even resort to the government\'s fig-leaf defence that its own referendum promise was only for the Lisbon treaty\'s first incarnation as a European constitution.
Whenever Europeans have been given a chance to vote on this entrenchment of unaccountable power and corporate privilege, they have rejected it – or, in the case of Ireland, been made to carry on voting until they get the answer right. Once again, in a tradition stretching back decades, the European elites have swatted away the public and imposed their own favoured order. If it hadn\'t been for their backroom haggling, there was until the last few days the grotesque prospect of the co-architect of the Iraq catastrophe being foisted on Europe as its unelected president.
Now Lisbon has been ratified, Cameron today sought to wipe the memory of his ditched guarantee with a new promise of a prolonged struggle to wrest back the liberties of true-born Englishmen, repatriate social, employment and justice powers from Brussels, and legislate to require a referendum in Britain on any future constitutional change cooked up in Europe.
But this is largely posturing. No further constitutional change is on the agenda. Britain already has an effective opt-out from the migration and justice part of the Lisbon treaty. And the prospect of a Tory government doing battle over one bit of the European Union that is actually popular in Britain must make even the hardest-bitten nationalist think twice. Would Cameron really go to war over the four weeks\' holiday, equal rights for part-time workers and parental leave delivered by Brussels to buy acquiescence to the single market?
Perhaps it\'s no surprise that Conservative leaders have felt it necessary to try to buy off their Eurosceptic party by abandoning the main European centre-right grouping for an alliance with the rightwing fringe, and are now struggling to defend their links with the Polish politician Michal Kaminski , an admirer of General Pinochet with a well-documented fascist and antisemitic history, and the Latvian Freedom and Fatherland party , which campaigns for military pensions for Waffen-SS veterans.
But for all their huffing and puffing, there are all kinds of interference from Brussels which the Tories don\'t have any problems with at all. You don\'t, for example, hear Conservative politicians denouncing the Lisbon treaty for effectively turning the liberalisation and privatisation of public services — transport and energy are the new targets — into a constitutional goal. As even more enthusiastic supporters than New Labour of the neoliberal ideology that underpins such legislation, you wouldn\'t expect anything else.
Nor has George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, complained about this week\'s very public intervention of Neelie Kroes , the unelected European competition commissioner, in the British banking system. Nicknamed Steely Neelie, the Dutch free-marketeer ordered the sale of hundreds of branches and highly profitable insurance businesses in exchange for the agreement of Brussels to the second, monster bailout of the part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group.
Under EU state aid rules, which go back to the original Treaty of Rome and limit government support for public enterprise, Neelie also signed off the plan to split state-owned Northern Rock and sell off the profitable bits as soon as possible. But far from criticising such naked interference by the despised Brussels bureaucrats, Osborne hailed the EU\'s role and boasted that breaking up the banks to increase competition had been his idea in the first place.
In reality, the forced sell-offs are unlikely to inject much meaningful competition into Britain\'s highly concentrated banking sector, though they should provide some rich pickings for companies like Santander and Virgin. Once again, however, the government is pouring billions of pounds into banks it substantially owns, but refuses to take control of and run in the public interest.
As a result of last year\'s crash, ministers had the opportunity to create a core of publicly owned banks to reshape finance in Britain and channel credit into rebuilding a more diversified and productive economy. Instead, they are treating the public stakes in the banks they bought at far above their value like some sort of equity or hedge fund investment, and engaging in ever more complex and expensive manoeuvres to avoid full nationalisation. RBS, now 84% owned by the government , is to all intents and purposes being run in the interests of the 16% of its private shareholders.
Alistair Darling constantly repeats the mantra "the government does not want to be in the business of running banks". Given that his colleague Lord Myners described RBS in private ownership as "probably the worst managed bank this country has ever seen", Darling ought to be under more pressure to explain why. At a time when state-owned banks should be a motor of recovery, expanding credit to beat the recession, bank lending is actually contracting sharply and holding back growth.
But what can Cameron and Osborne meaningfully say about the government\'s decision to sacrifice jobs to protect City interests except agree with it? What response can they offer to the £39bn pumped into zombie banks except blame New Labour\'s enthusiasm for 1980s-style deregulation, which they share? The same goes for the liberalisation dogma embodied in the Lisbon treaty and its predecessors.
The truth is that dogma is, if anything, clung to even more tightly in London than in Brussels, and its grip has to be broken in both. Criticism of the European Union has for too long been dominated by a phoney chauvinistic Euroscepticism that ignores the real interests that have driven its development. Cameron\'s posturing yesterday about "referendum locks" and a bill to prevent the transfer of further powers to the EU does nothing to challenge that. Like New Labour, the Tories positively embrace loss of democratic or national sovereignty when it comes to corporate, or US, power.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rne-european-union-sovereignty
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