Britannia Radio

Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the EU is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free. He is the winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism.

It's t he BBC here. We'd ike you to say something

angry, stupid preferably racist about the

new government.

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: May 15th, 2010

Alright, that’s not precisely how they put it, but they’re not always terribly good at hiding their motives. Several times in the past 72 hours I’ve had variants of the following conversation:

Beeb Researcher: Hello, is that Mr Hanahan? We’d love you to come on our programme to talk about the coalition. Can I just ask you now how you feel about Nick Clegg being in government?

Me: Well, he’s wrong about most things, but he’s essentially a decent type, who…

BR: Alright, about the policies then?

DH: I’m not 100 per cent behind them, and neither is anyone else: that’s the essence of a coalition deal. But I’m glad that we’ve finally got a government that’s starting to tackle the deficit.

BR: But you must be disappointed to see the direction that David Cameron is following?

DH: It’s no secret that we disagree about the EU. On the other hand, as far as the domestic agenda goes, a lot of it was taken from The Plan. Open primaries, recall votes, localism, spending cuts, school choice, fewer MPs, a Great Repeal Bill: which bit of my own agenda am I supposed to be rebelling against?

BR (bored now): Alright, well let me just have a word with my editor and I’ll come back to you…

Needless to say, the call doesn’t come. It doesn’t fit the story that has been pre-scripted, namely ‘Tory leader under pressure from foam-flecked Eurosceptics’.

You see, when Leftie journalists say: ‘David Cameron is under pressure from his Eurosceptics’, they’re not talking about the cancelled referendum. They’re not even talking about Europe more widely. What they’re really saying is: ‘Look: these scary Right-wing bigots have been let out of their box.’

Don’t take it from me. Listen to Sholto Byrnes, the Lib Dem-supporting assistant editor of the New Statesman:

[Labour] are salivating at the opportunity to paint the Tories as divided once again on Europe, with“hardline” — code for near-lunatic extremist — right-wingers cast as pantomime villains. “Behind you, Dave!” they call, less to warn him than to make the public aware of the grotesques with whom he chooses to associate. And there it is, that old calumny that to be Eurosceptic is to be right-wing, not just in a free-market sort of way, but in a hang ’em, flog ’em and — whisper it behind closed doors — a “wogs begin at Calais” sort of way. Cameron can’t be trusted, is the message, not when he is in hock to these mad Eurosceptics, a label which is now used to imply opposition to virtually every piece of progressive legislation from Catholic emancipation onwards.

We can only wonder at the Gramscian genius of those who have carried out this semantic inversion. To want to preserve your parliamentary democracy is extreme; to want to give more power to unelected functionaries is moderate. To consult the people is swivel-eyed; to connive at their disfranchisement is level-headed. To keep your promise of a referendum is obsessive; to break it is sensible. To have kept the pound was xenophobic whereas to have subjected Britain to the chaos now overtaking the euro-zone would have been… oh, you get my point.

This argument is too big, too important, to be reduced to an intra-party row. We are talking about whether Britain should be a self-governing democracy, not about whether Boodle’s job should have gone to Coodle rather than Doodle, or whether Foodle is secretly more Europhile than Hoodle.

What we need, in fact, is a popular movement to push for more referendums, starting with one on EU membership. Watch this space.

Tags: Conservatives, David Cameron, EU referendum, Eurosceptics, Nick Clegg