PETER HITCHENS BLOG
5th November 2009 12:53 PM
Zombie time again. Solomon Binding rises from the grave
I walked over to Queen Anne's Gate on Wednesday afternoon in plenty of time to secure a front-row seat at David Cameron's pitiful U-turn speech on the EU referendum. (I found myself sitting next to William Hague, and gruffly exchanged the time of day with him. It's a long time since we've spoken despite my once having been alleged to be his 'guru').
Two things were pitiful about the speech: one, its content; two its generally low-key, excuse-making reception by all but a few media outlets. When the Prime Minister behaves like this, he is said to have 'bottled', 'u-turned' and broken his promises. Well, why not? It's true. But if you use such language about a politician, then you must use it against all politicians who behave in this way, not just against the one you oppose.
Mr Cameron is in many ways the 'heir to Blair' that he said he would be, and I was amused to find that he is also copying his exemplar in his treatment of me at press conferences. Even though he acknowledged me with a three-star Etonian manly glance and nod, and even though there was no huge hurry nor contest to ask questions, he paid me the immense compliment of not taking a question from me. Mr Blair used to do the same, even if mine was the only hand up in the whole vast room. My fellow journalists, amused by the performance, often used to let this happen deliberately. As a result, reporters from immensely obscure foreign media outlets learned that they could question the Labour leader if they put their hands up at the same time as me. The Beekeeper's Gazette could have got a question if they had turned up. When, after many weeks, Mr Blair eventually relented (which led to a scene, in which I was told to sit down and stop being 'bad') I had almost forgotten what I had wanted to ask. I had begun to tell people that I didn't want to ask a question at all, that holding my hand up for long periods was a Tantric Yoga technique for suppressing nausea.
What would I have asked the Tory leader? I can still remember that. It was this: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how much more is a promise of “never again” worth than a “cast-iron pledge?” ‘ I passed on this question afterwards to some broadcast journalists in the hope that they might find a use for it.
Factual questions were no use at all, as Mr Cameron's presentation was an insult to the intelligence (his and ours). Nobody who understood the British constitution or the workings of the EU could have been fooled for a moment by his proposed measures. No Parliament can bind its successors. The EU does not need any further treaties to increase its powers, as it is now a legal sovereign body (thanks to Lisbon) which can proceed according to its own wishes and no longer needs its members' agreement to enforce the ever-closer union. This is at the heart of the Treaty of Rome and is its driving, undoubted, openly-stated purpose, recognised in every EU country but ours. The whole point of Lisbon was that it took us into this new era, with the EU given its own 'legal personality', and the treaty made 'self-amending'. The EU can now have a foreign minister, a president and a diplomatic service because it is an embryonic state, which will in time grow into a fully-developed state, in which we will be a province. It will be gradual and incremental, and more obvious abroad to begin with. But it will end in national extinction. Watch, for example, as British embassies in small capitals begin to disappear, and are replaced by ‘European’ missions. Then the day will come when the British embassy in Washington DC (since it is the grandest mission of all the EU states, and the best positioned) becomes the EU Embassy, and it will be obvious to all that we are no more.
To promise referendums on future treaties now (and, in response to queries, the Latin plural is certainly referenda, but 'referendum' is now treated as an English word and most newspaper style books prescribe 'referendums' as the correct plural) is to promise to slam the stable door long after the horse has bolted. As to David Cameron's statements about British law being supreme over EU law, where has he been? Alpha Centauri? I cannot believe he does not know better. In which case, why is he mouthing this piffle, and why is he not being generally taken to task for it?
And anything apparently safe from EU encroachment (as Mrs Thatcher repeatedly discovered at the hands of Jacques Delors) can easily be made unsafe during the deal-making which is essential to the EU's government.
What's more, it has been quite obvious to me that the pledge of a referendum was unsustainable, that Lisbon was going to be ratified long before the Tories were in a position to call their promised referendum. Yet the pledge, which Mr Cameron now claims was conditional, was nothing of the kind. It was explicit. It was unconditional:’If I become prime minister, a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU Treaty that emerges from these negotiations.’
Loyalist Tories couldn't answer the glaring question ‘What happens if the treaty is ratified first?’ Did Mr Cameron really not grasp what he had said? This is surely stretching credulity to snapping point. This was a pledge made to be broken and frankly, anyone who was (wilfully) fooled by it deserves everything he now gets. (Anyone who knows anything about cast iron knows that it is a rather brittle substance, which may have been in Mr Cameron's mind when he wrote his promise.) The Conservative leader ought to be on a rack of mockery and interrogation at the moment. The sketch-writers should be laughing at his twitchy, fake-sombre evasions and his pose as the defender of British sovereignty, flanked by a portrait of Churchill. But they're not. That would be to risk discussing actual politics, and we can't have that.
Yet even as recently as the Tory conference in Manchester quite senior (and well-educated) Tory persons were still insisting that there was no problem. They hid behind Poland and the Czech Republic, then still hesitating over ratification. This was a pose that might have fooled a bog-standard lobby correspondent but which certainly didn't bamboozle me, a former (and still occasional) foreign reporter familiar with Central Europe. I wrote at length from Prague back in February about the bravery of Vaclav Klaus, when most Tories had never heard of him and couldn't have pronounced his name. I said then that we couldn't expect him to save us. We had to do that ourselves. Which we do. So where are the famous Tory 'Eurosceptics’ now? A bit of vague moaning and mild campaigning for a referendum (which will get nowhere) won't make any difference. They must realise now that David Cameron's Tory Party is a pro-EU body, and that there is no mechanism for changing that. If they remain in it, and work for its victory at the next election, they will be de facto supporters of EU aggrandisement, helping to sustain in existence a party which has in the whole post-war era aided the expansion and consolidation of the EU, and the extinction of British national independence. Why don't they leave it? What possible excuse do they have for continuing to pretend that David Cameron is an opponent, in deeds, of the EU Superstate he opposes with his lips?
The whole thing reminded me of the wretched Harold Wilson back in the late 1960s, after he had been utterly defeated by the Trades Union Congress over his plans to curb strikes with legal powers. After capitulating to the then superior power of the unions, he spoke of a 'Solemn and Binding' agreement with the TUC, under which they would allegedly behave themselves in future. Of course, he knew they wouldn't. So did they. The whole thing was a transparent fiction, designed to cover up a dishonourable and complete defeat of Her Majesty's Government, just as Mr Cameron's 'never again' pledge is a fiction designed to cover up the total failure of his party to fight for what it claims to believe in.
The great Alan Watkins there and then invented a fictional character called 'Solomon Binding' , who would be mockingly mentioned every time the unions called, or failed to prevent, some disastrous economy-wrecking stoppage. I think dear old Solomon Binding, who I thought dead and buried during the Norman Tebbit age, has clambered out of his grave and staggered, crusted with earth and worms, to stand zombie-like at David Cameron's shoulder, mouthing the immortal words 'Solemn and Binding' and, from time to time 'Never again' or even 'Cast iron pledge.'
Please stop trying to get me to endorse UKIP
Dominic Stapleton has kindly looked out my long-ago response to repeated attempts to get me to endorse UKIP. I would ask UKIP supporters to read it carefully.
‘UKIP is, like all small parties, prey to faction fights and backstabbing. People who are interested in power, but have none, tend to take it out on each other because the stakes are so small. I wonder if all my pro-UKIP correspondents realised that their party was about to run into the problems it hit at the weekend, with complaints of money going missing.
Well, I was not surprised. This sort of thing happens to such groups and the question must arise "Who told the papers?"
I also wasn't surprised by the silly, doomed flirtation with Kilroy, or by the twerp who went on about women (even 34-year-olds, I suspect) cleaning behind the fridge.
The whole outfit is not just amateur, and on shallow foundations. It has a blazer-and-cravat feel to it which limits its appeal to the same sort of areas where the Tory Party still stumbles about in its prolonged death throes, the Southern English middle classes. But the movement I hope for, which with luck will chuck New Labour into the sea, will have a far wider appeal than that. If it doesn't, it won't be able to do the job.
So, while I rejoice at every Tory vote and pound that defects to UKIP, because my objective is the downfall of the Tories, I don't feel either the need or the desire to praise UKIP itself. And the more I get pestered and badgered to do so, by people who seem to have decided not to understand my position, the more critical and dismissive of UKIP I shall be.’
Now, here's a point I obviously need to make even more explicitly. Aside from my belief that miniature model-village 'parties' such as UKIP are playthings, without political importance, there is another reason why I won't endorse it. This ought to be obvious, but I've steered away from saying it before because of the ever-present risk of being accidentally misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted. Well, too bad, here goes.
Any columnist who endorses a party becomes immediately responsible for everything that party does afterwards. It would be hung round my neck like a very dead albatross. Imagine it (I can, even if you cannot): ‘Your friends in UKIP say....’ or ‘Your favourite party UKIP has just...’ Why would I want this? It would simply narrow my range and tie me to a thing I couldn't influence, let alone control. Who knows what daft decisions, alliances, rows, splits, idiotic statements and even scandals may lie in store for UKIP, judging by its tumultuous short history? As I make clear again and again, I am more than happy for UKIP to damage the Tories, to take votes and money from them. I am, in fact, delighted by any success that UKIP achieves at the expense of the Tories (a delight I cannot feel with the BNP, because of its toxic, bigoted nature and the fear I have for Britain in case it, or anything like it, ever became truly popular).
This is because UKIP, despite being a fantasy and a Dad's Army organisation, helps the great work of destroying the useless, miserable confidence trick that is the Conservative and Unionist Party. But if I am begged or urged or badgered to endorse UKIP, I am compelled to be rude about it, as above, to explain yet again why I won't endorse it. Every time I get this request, I will once again need to say why I won't support it. I don't want to do so. But I must, for my own sake. It's so simple. If UKIP supporters had the sense God gave them (which I begin to doubt), they'd just leave me alone. I wouldn't have written half so many rude things about their party if they had left me alone. And I have better things to do.
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