You have to hand it to our politicians: they’ve raised dissembling to such a dizzying height that any normal person would get nauseous vertigo.
Today our Chancellor will deliver a virtuoso performance to do any conjurer proud. He’ll pretend to stand in judgment of the EU while lying prostrate at its feet.
(Knowing what he’ll say doesn’t make me clairvoyant. It’s just that in the good, if rather recent, tradition of our politics, the text of the speech has been leaked. Our ‘leaders’ have to know in advance which of their heart-felt, immutable principles they must change to make them more palatable to more voters.)
If you haven’t been following British politics closely, I congratulate you. But such laudable detachment means you must be brought up to date on the context of the speech. After all, in modern political oratory it’s the context, not the text, that matters.
In this instance the Tories are heading for yet another chasmic rift over Europe. Much of the parliamentary party detests the EU, and even some cabinet members make decidedly anti noises.
Under normal circumstances a bit of internecine jousting could be absorbed, but next year’s election makes the circumstances far from normal. It’s already predicted that the presence of an anti-EU UKIP will cost the Tories 50 parliamentary seats. Another internal squabble could easily double that number – with the inevitable result of Dave and George retiring to the dinner-speech circuit.
As such a calamity has to be averted at all costs, D&G must play both ends against the middle.
On the one hand they have to mollify some of their own voters and most of Labour’s and LibDems’ by screaming love for the EU. On the other hand they must reassure potential UKIP voters that they hate the EU. This of course runs the risk of D&G coming across as the unprincipled spivs they actually are – and speech circuit, here we come.
Aware of the dangers, Dave has been indulging in footwork to put a tap dancer to shame. Don’t worry, he has been saying. Elect me and George again, and we’ll hold a referendum on Europe. Of course if you don’t, no dice. It’s up to you.
Meanwhile, don’t listen to those UKIP Little Englanders. We – you! – don’t want to leave the EU. If we do, Nigel Farage will be the only Brit left with a job. The rest of us, those who aren’t doing the speech circuit, will be queuing up at soup kitchens.
What we want isn’t to leave the EU but to reform it. We want all those federasts to abandon their principles as readily as we abandoned ours years ago, when we were still pissing it up at the Bullingdon.
We want them to grant us enough autonomy to please those UKIP nutters. We want them to let us pass some of our own laws – not many, but some. Perhaps they could also find it in their heart not to destroy every European economy with miles of red tape wound up around the idiotic single currency. And in an especially kind mood they could also let us keep a few – very, very few – Romanian pickpockets out.
In other words, D&G want, or rather pretend to want, the leopard not just to change its spots but to stop being a leopard. They feign confidence that an organisation set up with the explicit purpose of concentrating all power in the hands of utterly corrupt ex-Trotskyists will suddenly embrace moral goodness.
Oh they do know this isn’t going to happen. They’re just begging the EU to play along long enough and with sufficient verisimilitude for D&G to win in 2015. After that, let all hell break loose, see if they care. Thus in every speech D&G deliver on the subject they only sound like critics. In fact they’re supplicants.
This brings us back to George’s speech today. He’ll start by laying some numbers on the listeners. The EU, he’ll say, accounts for seven percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its economy, but – are you ready for this? – a whopping half of its welfare spending.
“We can’t go on like this,” George will say, meaning that if we do go on like this, as he knows we will, UKIP’s case will become strong enough to put D&G on the speech circuit.
Every fourth person in the EU is out of work, George will continue, and why is that? Because of its “failure to reform and renegotiate”, that is to pretend to reform while pretending to renegotiate with enough conviction for D&G to stay in that Downing Street terrace for a little longer.
“Over the last six years, the European economy has stalled,” George will thunder. “Over the next 15 years Europe’s share of global output is forecast to halve. Make no mistake, our continent is falling behind.”
A highly credible prognosis, I’d say. And one that’s guaranteed to be fulfilled, for the EU is no more about competitive economies than the USSR was. It’s about political domination, just like the USSR.
If some countries within the EU can rely on their own resources to keep their economic heads above the general morass, fine. If not, that’s fine too – as long as the EU’s raison d’être isn’t threatened.
The only sensible solution for Britain would be to get out immediately, without the benefit of plebiscite, leaving the EU to its own vices and devices.
Rather than munching on that old chestnut about ‘reforming and renegotiating’, that’s what George should be saying today, and if our electorate has been sufficiently corrupted to recoil in horror, then so be it.
Don’t call for the men in white coats. I know how insane it sounds, this suggestion that our politicians should stand on principle. Or indeed have one.
My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.