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- The Observer,
- Sunday June 1, 2003
Of course, we were lied to (the wisdom goes today) because Ted told us that Europe was just an economic union, whereas in reality it was a political project. But we lied, too. The favourite No poster of 1975 was a Magritte-style suited figure in a bowler with no face, standing under the legend: 'Meet your next master: the Brussels bureaucrat.' And the Noes have been at it ever since.
It is always the end of Britain as we know it. Everything since 1975 has been, save the single market (but the new No-men who took over from Enoch and me - the Murdochs, Blacks and Dacres - would have forgiven Maggie anything). Maastricht (under John Major) was the end of Britain; Amsterdam (under Tony Blair) was; so was Nice (remember Nice?).
And, sure enough, the current Convention on the New Europe is, too. They all raised fundamental issues of sovereignty; they all threatened our independence as a nation-state and even as a culture. And somehow we're still here, still much the same people we were, walking the dog and watching gardening programmes.
This obsessiveness and its accompanying mendacity and exaggeration has become the chief musical accompaniment to any discussion about Europe. Between them, the Mail , Telegraph and Sun have become a strange kind of social force, seeking to exercise power through sheer weight of newsprint and hyperbole (something similar has happened over asylum-seekers). The Sun 's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, is interviewed on the BBC as though he were the leader of a major political party.
And now we have the campaign for a referendum on the Convention. The Daily Mail says it is opening 6,000 polling stations to allow the British people to vote on whether there should be a vote. You can cast your ballot (or ballots) by text message. Or a picture of your bum, phoned through to the mobile of a Daily Mail reporter or columnist, will also count as a vote in favour of a referendum. Because it is self-selecting, this entire propaganda exercise is of considerably less statistical significance than an opinion poll, so they're doing one of those as well.
It is easy to see why the Eurobore papers want a referendum. They think, as most zealots do, that the people share their obsessions. But the mainstream politicians who now call for a referendum do so for entirely opportunistic reasons. We have no idea where the Conservatives stand on a Yes or No vote for the Convention itself, so their strategy is obviously to get Blair to refuse a referendum and then to moan about his lack of democratic credentials. Should he suddenly agree to a vote, they'd be completely buggered.
Which is one reason why some pro-Europeans are just as opportunistically tempted. The Lib Dems don't think that this is a good issue for a referendum per se , but are now arguing that it could be turned into a poll on whether membership of the EU is a fine thing. Some intellectuals and progressive journalists agree. Stymied and frustrated by the decision (to be announced in just over a week) that we won't have a referendum on the euro, they want to fill the vacuum with a vote on something else. At the very least, it will force us to confront the issue of Europe.
This logic is seductive and I love referendums myself; 1975 dealt with the question of membership of the EEC in a way that no general election could have. Having lost, I didn't have to think about Europe for two decades, which was a relief. But the 1975 referendum was wonderfully clear. 'DO YOU WANT THE UK TO REMAIN IN THE EEC?' was the question on the ballot paper and 64 per cent turned out to vote.
Since then, however, voters have increasingly shown a reluctance to put in an appearance when demanded; 50.1 per cent voted in the referendum on the Welsh Assembly, a monkey was elected mayor of Hartlepool on a 28 per cent poll and the last Euro-elections in 1999 saw a turn-out of 24 per cent.
There are subjects that lend themselves to referendums. The euro, fox-hunting, hanging, nudism, the monar chy and so on (although in Australia, a majority in favour of a republic somehow translated into a vote against removing the Queen as head of state, simply because no one could agree on what should take her place).
And there are subjects that don't, and if I ever saw one that didn't, it's the Convention. Here is a line-by-line negotiation, most of it on existing EU law and procedure. The Convention does such things as merging Chris Patten's and Javier Solano's jobs, jobs we probably didn't know existed.
So let's say there was a referendum. The No campaigners would be arguing that they could reject the Convention, which would itself mean the end of Britain, and stay in the EU. The Yes campaigners would argue that the Convention as such was unimportant, but that a No vote would mean leaving the EU. The public would be told by one side that the Convention somehow extended EU legal powers significantly and by the other that it didn't. They would then have to judge between these claims with reference to the details of the Convention.
The broadcast media would be bored out of their skulls inside two days and would spend the whole campaign in pubs discovering that voters were apathetic or with pundits speculating about the future of Mr Blair. The electorate would become extremely pissed off with having had this inflicted upon them.
In the end, after a tetchy and messy few weeks, we would get a 34 per cent turn-out and a No vote. Then, like the Danes in 1992 and 1993 over Maastricht and the Irish more recently over enlargement, we'd have to vote again until we got it right, this time with most Tories now recommending a Yes vote and trying to think up good reasons why things had now changed. And there is, of course, the chance that we never do get it right.
It is hardly surprising that Mr Blair has ruled out such a silly and unnecessary scenario. Unnecessary because Peter Hain in his original pre-retraction interview was right in principle, if not in detail. When we voted in 2001, we had the choice of largely pro-Europe Labour, which we knew to be the kind of party that would sign up to something like the Convention; the largely anti-Europe Conservative Party which might oppose it; the very pro-Europe Lib Dems who would want to go a little further; and very anti-Europeans (assorted loons of Left and Right), who'd pull us out tomorrow.
Silly, partly because the only people who really want this referendum on this subject are a few unelected magnates and their editorial creatures. And that truth will not change no matter how many Mail readers are persuaded to text their votes.
But it's also silly in a more existential way, in the sense that this whole question of sovereignty is yesterday's issue, and I was bored with it yesterday. The Iraq war, and the likely accession to the EU of states such as Poland, has thrown up a far more fundamental series of problems for us to debate.
Is Europe to be a rival pole to America or part of an alliance? What is Europe's role in the world in the twenty-first century? That stuff matters.
