[eurofacts (Vol 10 No 20/21) - 29th July 2005]

As the reverberations of the “No” votes on the Constitution in France and Holland slowly die down, it is becoming apparent that a seismic shift in opinion is taking place on how the EU managed to get to where it is now, where it might go in future and the role which Britain might or might not play in the future as a Member State.

For far too long, most people in the UK have assumed that there was nothing much that could be done about our terms of membership of the EU. They might not like our large net contributions to the budget, the Common Agricultural Policy, the decimation of our fisheries and the flood of unnecessary regulations from Brussels. The more thoughtful might be increasingly concerned about the erosion of democratic control over the way we are governed, the undermining of our longstanding legal system and the erosion of our national sovereignty. Radical changes to any of these apparently immovable facts of life, nevertheless, seemed, to most people, to be off the practical agenda.

Now cracks in this façade are beginning to appear in earnest. Many of those who only a few weeks ago expected that the Constitution would almost certainly be adopted, and who were therefore only to willing fulsomely to extol its supposed virtues, are only too happy to rubbish it now that it has been rejected in two major referendums. The mood is changing. The social and economic model which the EU exemplifies has clearly forfeited the trust of major swathes of its electorate. The prospect of radical change is now substantially greater than it was.

This presents the Eurosceptic movement with an unparalleled opportunity. We have very largely won the battle on the euro. The Constitution is dead, although there is still a vital rearguard action to be fought against piecemeal implementation of some parts of it. A policy vacuum has been created, which we need to fill. The question is whether we can muster the facts and the arguments to persuade the electorate and then Parliament that there is a much better future for Britain if we can disentangle ourselves from the EU political class’s obsessions.

This is why all concerned with playing a part in this battle of ideas ought to read Alarming Drum. The Eurosceptic movement has always been good at marshalling facts and arguments to support its case, based on careful research and accurate quantitative analysis. Alarming Drum breaks new ground by adopting this approach on an even more thorough and extensive basis than most of the other contributions which have been made.

It tackles the record of the European Union and Britain’s involvement in the EU from every angle. It traces its origins, noting the extent to which its objectives were always shrouded from exposure to ordinary people. It calls in question whether the creation of a United States of Europe ever made any sense, bearing in mind the impossibility of replacing the nation state as the building block for all successful polities. It chronicles the reasons why the proposed Constitution took the form it did and, although Alarming Drum was published before the French and Dutch referendum results, it conveys only too accurately the reasons why it got rejected.

Nor does Alarming Drum just concentrate on the past. It also looks ahead to explain with painful clarity why the future of the EU is all too likely to exemplify the same relative decline as we have seen over the last quarter of a century. Its institutional structure and the policies its leaders pursue are simply not orientated to dealing with the challenges that globalisation and the rise of the Pacific Rim nations mean that it needs to confront. The demographics of much of the EU, combined with inappropriate economic policies, particularly the Single Currency, present an alarming prospect of stagnant living standards, continuing unemployment and lack of social solidarity.

Perceptions of this sort are not new. What is outstanding about Alarming Drum is the thoroughness of its analytical approach and the statistical detail with which all these trends are tackled. This book is a mine of facts and data which are likely to be used by everyone writing or speaking about the EU for a long time to come.

The reality, of course, is that if there is going to be a radical change of policy towards the EU in Britain, this is only going to happen if there is a majority in Parliament in favour of voting for it. This state of affairs, in turn, is only going to materialise if enough people are persuaded of the case for a change of heart to enable the force of electoral opinion to make this happen. Persuasion, however, is generally a slow and iterative process. It requires the steady accumulation of sufficient arguments and facts to cause political tectonic plates to shift. In the end, it is the power of clearly expressed and convincing ideas which will carry the day. We are all indebted to Peter Morgan for his new book which makes an important contribution to this process.

John Mills is Secretary of the Labour