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The EU and the euro: it was always going to come to this
On careful examination, it is clear that the latest of these interminable bids to save the euro reveals only that those supposedly in charge have not the slightest idea what to do.
We now have a president of the Commission, a president of the European Council, a president of the Eurogroup, a president of the Eurogroup Working Group and a president of the European Central Bank.
They talk about conjuring up billions and trillions of euros, though it is far from clear to whom or by whom they should be given. No country could possibly be allowed to leave the beloved euro – although, unless some do, it cannot survive. Meanwhile, the Greeks riot, the Germans seethe at seeing what their government is up to, and Mr Sarkozy tells Mr Cameron to keep out of something that is not his business, as our European government takes another lurch towards the “ever closer union” that has always been its supreme aim.
Some years back, when Richard North and I were putting together the most comprehensive history of the “European project” yet published, we came to realise that, ever since it was set on its way in 1950, it had only ever had one agenda in all it had done – step by step, over decades, to replace the nation states of Europe with a new supranational form of government. Its cleverest trick was to leave all the outward forms and institutions of nations in place, while hollowing out their powers from within, so that for a long time people would not see what was happening.
We also concluded, when we published The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? in 2005, that two things would ultimately bring about the disintegration of the “project”. The first was the most reckless of all the moves it devised to weld the member states together: imposing on them a single currency without any of the preconditions to make it workable, above all a single economic government with the power to tax and to transfer vast resources from richer countries to poorer.
The project’s other fatal flaw was what even its supporters came to call its “democratic deficit”. The more powerful the new system became, the more it alienated those in whose name it was erected, as they came to see how the direction of their lives had been handed to a remote and mysterious government over which they had no control.
Some of that resentment showed in last Monday’s referendum debate.
It was striking to see how the vast majority of the 50 MPs who spoke expressed profound “Eurosceptic” concerns. Yet when the vote came, it was all the other way, as the political class, led by Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, trooped through the lobby to deny the British people any say in what is happening. (Though the third choice on offer, that we should be allowed to vote for our Government to “renegotiate” the terms of our membership, is as hopeless a cause as the other two, “in” or “out”.)
We are not going to pull out, which would anyway be extraordinarily difficult now, because the way Britain is governed has become so inextricably enmeshed with “Europe”.
Anyone who thinks we can “renegotiate” has no understanding of what this project is about, or its most sacred principle – that powers, once handed over, can never be given back. So we must stay in, dragged along by a process over which we have no control.
The one clear lesson of recent events, and the total insolubility of the crisis engulfing the euro, is that the project is slowly heading for very messy and prolonged disintegration. Everyone involved, it seems, is trapped, and the only way Britain will leave the EU is when it falls apart, around us and everyone else.
Which is what it has, finally, begun to do.
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