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We cracked open a celebratory cup of cocoa in the Mitchell household at the French referendum result. That`s the nearest I`ve got to being en fete since I was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on Bingley Grammar’s School exchange with Auxerre some time back in the fourth republic.
It was anticipated. All the polls said Non would win. Even Parliament’s resident expert on all things French, German, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Polish or Latvian, Denis MacShane, brushed away a tear as he told me it would be Non.
But “You can never trust the French” as Sir John French said to me in August 1914. Dunkirk, Dien Bein Phu, and General De Gaulle’s “No” to Harold Macmillan have more than confirmed that. So I didn’t believe it until the fat president sang.
Now I’m delighted. Whatever Peter Mandelson and Giscard D`Estaing now say the Constitution is effectively dead, though it will be the longest state funeral ever as the smelly body is hawked round Europe for another few months. Yet it must be allowed to remain dead. Only if they learn to write something that`s not the prescription of the European elite, but begins like the American one, “We the People” and says as Britain does “Thus far and no further” should they try another.
All politicians proclaim themselves as democrats following the wishes of the people. Yet today`s better informed people don’t always want to go where the politicians want them to: like invading small countries or going a Constitution too far in Europe.
In the old days a deferential people was conditioned to believe that ministers were born to rule and they were born to obey. So they`d follow, grumblingly perhaps, but usually do as they were told. Now that they don`t, politicians have only two methods to get their way. They lie or, as we call it, spin to pretend that black is white, Europe a big help, and its Constitution marvellous. If that doesn’t work they ignore the people in the same way as the left wanted to appeal to a different electorate. The Commission didn’t want referenda on its addlepated nincompoopery so when stuck with it they want states who vote against to vote again. That works fine with small states like Denmark and Ireland. It won`t with France. The French are too big to bully, too smart to fool. So if Tony wastes his six months as President trying to raise the dead and get the hearse back on track he`ll live his last days in office under a pall.
Last week Charles Clarke gave a packed meeting of the Campaign Group his full defence of the ID Cards Bill. Yet I came away feeling that, impressive as he was, his heart isn`t in it.
Blunkett likes to bully people to virtue. Clarke is more cautious and knows that the more insane claims for ID Cards are daft.
Probably Tony is forcing him to do it but Charles is too smart to believe in it. So he’s trying to find a problem for the solution he`s stuck with. The latest is identity theft. No one seems to know what this is. So if you wake up one morning and find your identity missing don’t call the undertaker. Ring Charles Clarke at the Home Office.
There’s one simple reason why the French voted no, why the German SPD is on the point of being thrown out and why no one except the Spanish and the Irish, the lands of the waving palms full of Euro money, is happy with the EU. It’s the economy stupid.
Yet they can`t do anything about it. Interest rates and the euro are both too high, so exports are suffering and investment is falling. But no one can interfere with the Central Bank. So the agony will go on.
That forces them to try to restore competitiveness by the kind of spending, tax cuts, union bashing and monetarist policies Mrs Thatcher is so much praised for bringing us.
They should note that those policies didn’t work here. It was only when the pound came down after the first bout that the economy recovered under Lawson, and only when it came down heavily again after John Major’s ERM deflation, that Britain began to pick up. No one see this in Europe. If they did they couldn’t do anything about it. So Tony is urging them to policies which make a bad situation worse.
Last week in Parliament was rather like those Chinese generals who baptised their troops with hose pipes as new members rushed to make maiden speeches. Mostly dull, a few awful, they made the case for us to have a Congressional record so speeches can be printed without being inflicted on the House. |
