While the Coalition is split over Europe, Labour does not look like they are in a much
better position. Ed Miliband told the BBC that he was in favour of the Euro; Ed Balls would presumably tackle anyone to avoid that becoming the party’s policy. Meanwhile Douglas Alexander, Labour’s
brainy Shadow Foreign Secretary, has yet to make a game-changing intervention.
Their predicament is obvious. Should Labour accept the narrative of renegotiation but opt for different areas to opt out of than those favoured by the Tories? Or should they, like William Borroughs, stand astride history and scream “stop”, arguing for a pro-European position? Seemingly caught between the two views, the party’s criticism of the government is like those two old-age pensioners in Woody Allen’s joke. One says: “The food in this place is terrible”. “Yes”, replies the other, “and there is not enough of it…”
The Labour party is today more instinctively multilateralist than the Tories, but the Shadow Cabinet – from the Leader down – has little form when it comes to Europe. Like their Tory counterparts, they are a less internationalist generation: they know fewer of their continental colleagues and came of age trying to solve domestic, not international, challenges. Just compare Douglas Alexander and Denis MacShane, both former Europe ministers.
In addition, nobody knows where Europe will go. If the Euro is saved, it will mean the fundamental re-organisation of the EU. But if the Euro is not saved, it will also mean the fundamental re-organisation of the EU. When nobody can predict what will happen from one day to the next, why take a stance?
But being silently muddled about Europe today makes the Labour party look marginal, uninterested in what everyone is talking about. So what to do? One option is to enlarge the debate. To argue that the Tories are wrong to focus on Britain’s relationship with the EU when any European policy needs to be about the shifts taking part in the world. How will Britain best survive in a Chinese Century – alone or with close partners, albeit in a different form of partnership? The problem is that this sounds a bit 2009 and does not address any of the problems of Britain’s EU relationship.
The other option is to try to reframe the debate from one of “renegotiation” to one of “reforming”, making the case that a reformed Europe will be more able to protect people from the vagaries of globalisation.
This will mean highlighting the areas that Labour wants to keep that the Tories want to junk, eg the Social Chapter, but also linking the EU debate to the Occupy one. The problem is that few people believe the EU is reformable any longer and many of those who sympathise with the tent-pitchers at St Paul’s also think the EU is some kind of capitalist plot.
So the Coalition may be in trouble over EU policy, but it is not as if the Opposition has it all figured out.
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