What does a Tory eurosceptic look like? Loud chalk-stripe, a flash of red braces and the faintest whiff of a lunch-time gander at the Members’ wine list. Right? Wrong.
The economic trauma of the crash of 2008 is demanding that just as Conservative modernisation needs to be rebooted to suit the new Age of Austerity – with a focus on bold economic reformism to tackle welfare traps, worklessness and failing schools instead of the cultural gesturism of early modernisation – so too the crisis demands a rebooted euroscepticism. The Tory Party in Parliament has been transformed by the arrival of the Cameron generation: more entrepreneurial, impatient, ambitious and global in our outlook. In our 30s and 40’s, ‘Thatcher’s children’ have built careers in the world transformed by the reforms of the 80s and the enterprise economics she unleashed to such effect. Today’s Euroscepticism reflects that transformation. Far from the little England xenophobia of UKIP, the new generation of modern Conservative Euro-sceptics are bound by an entrepreneurial frustration at a European project which is too introverted and bureaucratic to win any Global Race.
As a co-chair of today’s Fresh Start Conference for EU Reform – a major gathering in London of over 200 European national and business leaders from across the continent – I know that todays euroscepticism is fundamentally different to that which haunted the leaders of a previous era.
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