Cross-Purposes: The Long Road to Brexit

National Review Online, June 28, 2016

The Red Lion, Whitehall, London, March 2016 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Last week, Britons voted themselves out of the European Union, but the seeds of Brexit were planted decades ago.

‘Nothing,” wrote the Duke of Wellington, “except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” The vote for Brexit was a necessary victory. And that it was necessary is a tragedy.

Its origins lay in the fact that many Britons never fully grasped the nature of the European project into which they had been enrolled. They saw it as a trading bloc with extra benefits (and, yes, some annoying costs and meddling regulation). It was a misunderstanding encouraged by those who took the United Kingdom into the “Common Market,” a misunderstanding that left a legacy that bedeviled Britain’s domestic politics and soured the country’s relationship with its European partners.   

The entities that evolved into the European Union were inspired by two world wars within a single generation, and they were about a great deal more than trade. Their most important founding fathers (men like Jean Monnet) believed that the nation-state could not be trusted to keep the peace. What was needed was a post-national federation, not exactly the superstate of sometimes fevered euroskeptic imaginations, but something softer, subtler, and, arguably, more insidious. People liked the nation-states they already had; the post-national would have to be built by the post-democratic. As Monnet anticipated, this was a process that would have to be patient, and, often, oblique (“by zig and by zag”), and that’s how it’s turned out. Piece by piece, swaths of domestic policy-making have been transferred to “Brussels,” safely beyond national democratic control.

Monnet recognized that voters in the six founding members (France, West Germany, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and Italy) of what eventually became the EU, countries that had known military defeat and occupation, would be reluctant to jettison their nation-states. What then would be the case with Great Britain, a kingdom comfortable, even too comfortable, with its past?

Well, according to one poll, the most important reason given by 49 percent of those who voted last week to quit the EU was that “decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.” That thinking shades, I suspect, into the second-most popular (33 percent) first choice (leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”) and the third (13 percent): Sticking with Brussels would mean being left with no choice “about how the EU expanded its membership or its powers.” The top reasons why Remainers wanted to stay in the EU were primarily economic. Only 9 percent cited “a strong attachment to the EU and its shared history, culture and traditions.” After more than 40 years in the Brussels club, national still trumped post-national.

Some of those who led the U.K. into what were then the European Communities in 1973 understood their true nature. Others convinced themselves that talk of “ever closer union” was grandiloquent continental verbiage, nothing more. The refusal of the English, wrote George Orwell, “to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.”  

Despite the best efforts of more erudite opponents of membership, the debate over whether Britain should join and (after the question was put in a 1975 referendum) then stay in the “Common Market” largely revolved, as that misnomer suggests, around trade and the economy, leaving far too much that needed saying unsaid, an omission with consequences. In the 2013 speech in which he agreed to hold his fateful referendum, David Cameron noted how many Britons were asking “why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” The problem, of course, was that they had, in reality, voted for something that was very much more than that. Forty years later, the memory of what they thought they had voted for still haunted Britain’s political landscape.

People felt, claimed Cameron, “that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to.” It would have been fair to add (although he didn’t) that British politicians had done their bit to set — or at least go along with — that course. For example, Margaret Thatcher helped push the union toward a greater acceptance of economic liberalism. This led to the EU’s Single Market, a major achievement, but it came with a catch, the Single European Act, a new EU treaty that diluted the veto power of individual member states. Mrs. Thatcher believed that the sacrifice of another slice of sovereignty was worth it. Yet again, economic promise trumped political price. The pace of integration duly picked up: No need to zig or to zag on this occasion.

By the time of her famous speech in Bruges in 1988, the lady was beginning to turn. Brussels was using its expanded powers to pursue an interventionist (and integrationist) agenda that Thatcher did not appreciate. Even so, to reread that speech is to notice that, like so many of her countrymen, she still didn’t get it: “The [European] Community,” she said, was not “an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept.” On the contrary, it was, and it always had been — and there was nothing “abstract” about the “intellectual concept” that underpinned it. “Ever closer union” meant what it said.

The Bruges speech (essentially) set in motion the conflict that toppled first Thatcher and, indirectly, her successor, John Major. Trivialized by the media and opposition as an internal squabble, the “Tory Wars” were the result of a serious attempt by some Conservatives to come to grips with where the European project was going. They were at their bloodiest in the aftermath of Major’s signature of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Maastricht turned the European Communities into the European Union and paved the way for the introduction of a single currency. Major negotiated an exemption from any obligation on Britain to sign up for what would become the euro, at least. But he didn’t use his veto power to try to force through a deal that might have carved out a niche for the U.K. that was more realistically aligned to the aspirations of its people. It was a missed opportunity.

Instead the ratchet of ever closer union had turned again — and a Tory government had helped out. Frustrated by all this, a small euroskeptic group reinvented itself as the United Kingdom Independence Party. One of UKIP’s founders was a Thatcherite commodities’ broker named Farage. Few noticed and fewer cared.

Making matters more difficult for Major, a modernizing Labour party had embraced the EU both as handy post-democratic bulwark against Tory reform and as a branding device: New Labour not Old, united (unlike certain parties) and forward-looking (unlike certain parties). But what Labour had not done — at least to any significant degree — was buy into the integrationist dream. Its interest in the EU was as a cudgel to batter the Tories.

To be sure, Tony Blair was a genuine europhile (he would have taken Britain into the single currency if he could), so it’s perversely appropriate that he accidentally prepared the ground for Brexit, starting with the decision to give the right to work to migrants from the bloc of formerly Communist countries that joined the EU in 2004. Most EU member-states insisted on a transition period. Blair’s Britain did not. The initial estimate was that there would be a net 5–13,000 new arrivals a year. That’s not how it worked out. The cumulative net total is (conservatively) thought to have exceeded 400,000 people between 2004 and 2012, just part of a huge influx of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU and beyond. This played poorly with the U.K.’s working class, and Brussels took the rap. That was partly (I suspect) because — in an era of political correctness — Brits were wary about criticizing immigration from further afield, and partly because the EU’s freedom-of-movement rules meant that EU migrants could only infrequently be turned away. Their numbers were not only large, but, effectively, uncontrollable.

#share#Immigration was the topic that transformed UKIP from (more or a less) a single-issue euroskeptic party to a far more potent force and propelled it into Labour’s old heartlands, territory where it had hitherto rarely been seen. German chancellor Angela Merkel only fueled the fire, whether bungling the migrant crisis last autumn or refusing to cut Cameron some slack on the EU’s immigration rules during his disastrous “renegotiation” earlier this year. The chickens came home to roost on Thursday: Seventy percent of Britain’s skilled working class supported Brexit.

And it was Merkel who pushed through the Lisbon Treaty as a substitute for the EU constitution that had been rejected by referendums in France and Holland, a brutal reminder that the cause of European integration trumped democracy. Britons had also been promised a referendum on that constitution, but the constitution had been killed off before they could vote. When it was (for all practical purposes) revived in the form of the Lisbon Treaty, Blair’s referendum promise was not. To repeat the message: Ever closer union meant ever less democracy. Walking away from a referendum was also a wasted opportunity: It would have been a relatively (compared with what was to come) low-stakes chance for the U.K. (which could have vetoed the treaty) to consider what it wanted from the EU. Oh well. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, signed the treaty, seemingly unconcerned that it reduced Britain’s shrinking ability to block additional integration, a fact that forced more euroskeptics into the “out” camp.

Meanwhile, opposition leader David Cameron had reined in Tory grumbling about the EU. A modernized party had to stop “banging on about Europe,” he said. Divided parties lose. Voters were bored with the issue. Euroskepticism gave a bad impression: It was retrograde, nostalgia tainted with poison. To be sure there was UKIP, but they were “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly,” Cameron said — cranks who were not to be taken seriously. As a political tactic, Cameron’s approach made some sense, at least in the short-term (he became prime minister in 2010), but it alienated euroskeptics still further. And there were more of them than in the past, their number boosted by the crisis in the euro zone, a crisis accompanied by the insistence that the only solution was more Europe, not less. It was a demand made all the more alarming by the British eurofundamentalists who claimed that there could still come a time when the U.K. might adopt the single currency. Britain had its safeguards against that, but would they survive the election of a europhile government?

In 2012 Jacques Delors, one of the European Union’s most distinguished senior statesmen, appeared to accept that Britain and its partners would never agree on what the EU should be. He floated the suggestion that “if the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis.” He could imagine, he said, “a form such as a European economic area or a free-trade agreement,” and as Conservative MEP Dan Hannan recalled last week, it was not the only such deal being touted. Finally, Brussels was signaling its willingness to try to solve its “British problem” in a constructive and innovative way.

Cameron should have jumped at the opportunity — a get-out-of-jail-free card if ever there was one — but this surprisingly unimaginative politician still believed he could play the game by the old rules, throwing a few scraps to the euroskeptic rabble at home, while continuing with business as usual in Brussels. He even neglected the chance to wring a few concessions out of Britain’s EU partners in exchange for agreeing to a change in the Lisbon Treaty prompted by the euro-zone crisis.

He was wrong to be so complacent. Euroskeptic attitudes were hardening in Britain and with UKIP on the rise, euroskeptics had somewhere to turn. Indeed, it was to head off the UKIP threat to the Tory vote that Cameron committed to the referendum he had never wanted — a referendum he could quite possibly have junked in the event of a renewed coalition government with the eurofundamentalist Liberal Democrats after the 2015 election. But remarkably, the Conservatives won an outright majority. The referendum couldn’t be dodged.

\Then Cameron blew his last best chance. The threat of a pending in/out referendum ought to have given him the leverage to cut a better EU deal for Britain. After all, he presided over the union’s second-largest economy and the U.K. made the third-largest contribution to the EU budget. But his much-vaunted “renegotiation” failed to secure any significant changes. Perhaps, thinking like almost everyone else (including me) that the Brexiteers had no chance of winning, Cameron didn’t press the EU hard enough. Perhaps the EU’s leadership, confident that they too had little to risk, felt that they could get away with tossing no more than a few crumbs London’s way. Or, perhaps, realizing that the Brits would always stand in the way of ever closer union, they no longer cared.

Whatever the reason, Cameron was left with a renegotiation that proved the EU would concede no more to Britain. The rest is history.

Fear Is The Key

The Weekly Standard, February 19, 2016

Voters in the United Kingdom will be choosing — in a referendum to be held by the end of next year, and perhaps as early as June — whether or not to stay in the European Union. Barack Obama wants the U.K. to stay put and is reportedly planning "a big, public reach-out" to persuade Brits to stick with the EU.

It's not the first time the American president has weighed in on this most British (or European) of questions, but the timing was telling. It came immediately after EU "president" (it's complicated, but that designation will have to do) Donald Tusk unveiled the draft settlement intended to bring David Cameron's attempt to "renegotiate" Britain's position in the EU to a satisfactory conclusion. What was unveiled was underwhelming; the derision with which it was greeted was anything but. It's not hard to guess why Obama believes that Cameron could use a helping hand.

Britain's prime minister cannot be entirely surprised that it has come to this. An unimaginative politician without much feel for what truly matters, Cameron has never wanted Britain to exit ("Brexit," as such a departure is unattractively known) the European Union. He agreed to the planned referendum reluctantly and only as a device to head off the Euroskeptic challenge to his Conservative party ahead of the 2015 general election.

Cameron's idea was, when reelected, to recommend that Britain remain in the EU on the basis of a new deal negotiated with its European partners: a deal he must have realized would not— could not — amount to very much. The EU rests on a set of fundamental principles. These include "ever closer union" (the ratchet that provides that integration must forever move forward), the "four freedoms" (the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people within the union), and the primacy of EU law. Abandoning or even diluting any of those principles, even for just one country, would risk unraveling the whole European project: It was never going to happen.

Cameron's problem was that many of the objections that the British have to the EU flow from those very same principles. "Ever closer union" means what it says: U.K. sovereignty is continuously being eroded, with its democracy going the same way. Britain's laws and its courts are subordinated to those of the European Union. And, most sensitively of all, Brits fear they have lost control of their borders: EU immigration into the U.K. is currently running at a net 180,000 per year, an issue made all the more toxic by the migrant crisis on the Continent.

All the prime minister could do was try to use his renegotiation to change the subject, focusing attention on sideshows, some significant and some not. Thus the proposed agreement would, among other less than glorious "victories," chip away at some "in-work" welfare benefits enjoyed by EU migrants, give the feeblest of boosts to the role of national parliaments, and win the U.K. a degree of protection from eurozone bullying. But, overall, the result is a sad, scaled-back little ragbag of half-measures and trivia that still has yet (as I write) to be finalized. Despite some flummery (it will be filed with the U.N.!), the eventual settlement may well, legally, be nothing more than an agreement to agree, which is to say very little indeed.

Cameron began his efforts to sell this crock on an upbeat note. It would pave the way for a "substantial change" in Britain's relationship with Brussels. (Well, no.) "Hand on heart," he had "delivered" on the "commitments" made in the Conservative manifesto. (Nope, not hardly.) The deal was so good that, if Britain were not already a member of the EU, he would have advised joining on these terms. (Words fail me.)

The reviews were savage. The press coverage that followed the disclosure of the deal's details was some of the worst that Cameron has ever known. And the grumbling in Conservative ranks didn't take long to get going. To one Tory MP, Cameron had been reduced to "polishing poo." Nor was the discontent confined to dissidents in Westminster (at least 20 percent of his parliamentary party at the latest count). Most Conservative activists are Euroskeptics; so too about half of Tory voters. Polls show a swing of support towards Brexit.

A nervous Cameron has turned (again) to "Project Fear" (the name comes from a strategy used successfully and rather more legitimately in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence), spinning scare stories to frighten Brits away from the Brexit door. This plays on the understandable anxiety that many British voters have about life outside the EU.

Late last year I was discussing, with a leading Brexit advocate, the chances voters would choose to leave the EU. In his view, the country divided roughly into thirds: One-third would opt for Brexit come what may; one-third would always prefer to stay in the EU; the rest are somewhere in the middle and could go either way.

This last group, obviously, will decide the outcome, and its members are likely to be susceptible to bleak warnings of the catastrophes that divorce from Brussels could set in motion. They may not be enthusiastic about the EU, but they will not want to risk too much to escape it. Cameron's grim (and quickly discredited) prediction that, in the event of Brexit, migrant camps in Calais could be relocated to the U.K. was one example of Project Fear at work. There have been plenty of others in recent months (Mass unemployment! No more cheap flights abroad! Goldman Sachs to move an office!) — so many and so absurd that they have given birth to an Internet meme depicting fire-breathing dragons, giant waves, and other horrors that will follow in Brexit's wake.

Uncertainty is one of fear's most effective enablers. Euroskeptics need to paint a clearer picture of what sort of arrangements Britain might have with the EU after a divorce. But the Leave camp is badly divided, not least over what the country's options could include. One alternative would be to sign up for the European Economic Area and "do a Norway." This would give the U.K. access to the EU's single market, and there would be little in the way of immediate, visible change, something wavering voters in the middle may find reassuring. For other Brexiteers, that's too modest: Britain, the fifth-largest economy in the world, ought, they argue, to be able to cut a better bargain. But what if its jilted European partners, angry and worried about the precedent being set, balk at agreeing to anything, Norwegian-style or otherwise, that makes leaving the EU look too easy? At this point, it's impossible to say: awkwardly for the Out crowd there are only so many questions that can be answered in advance.

The final version of the deal between Cameron and the rest of the EU has— as we go to press — yet to be settled. From what's already known, we can be sure that what's in it will not change the minds of the solidly Euroskeptical. But what of the wobbly center? The deal may contain enough to convince some of those who lean Brussels's way, and might even win over some of the genuinely undecided. But what those calling for Brexit should really fear is not Cameron's deal, but fear itself. And most of them aren't taking that threat seriously enough. Yes, the polls may have shown some encouraging signs of movement in Brexit's direction, but their overall message suggests that the dismal status quo will prevail.

These are politically volatile times, but, as things stand now, the best guess is that the British will vote against taking what is all too easily caricatured as a dangerous leap into the dark.

‘Polishing Poo’: Cameron’s Dirty Deal with the EU

National Review Online, February 10, 2016

To pull a rabbit out of a hat, there has to be a hat. In a speech in January 2013, British prime minister David Cameron promised to negotiate a fundamental reworking of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. There would then be a referendum to decide whether Brits wanted to quit the union or stick with it to enjoy the “new settlement” Cameron had secured. There was bold, delusional, or dishonest (take your pick, I’ll go for dishonest) talk of strengthening the EU’s “democratic legitimacy,” of opting out of the forced march toward “ever closer union,” of power “flowing back” to the member states, of an increased role for national parliaments. Euroskeptics scoffed. They were right to. There was no hat. The EU is what it is, and what it is not is some sort of super-free-trade zone: If Cameron got what he wanted, it would no longer be the EU. The rest of the EU was never going to go along with that.

And, now, three years later, the EU’s “president,” Donald Tusk, is brandishing a draft deal that makes that all too clear. Mr. Cameron doesn’t seem too fussed. Many Britons have identified Tusk’s settlement for the malevolent nothing that it is, but their prime minister is insisting that the rabbit that they don’t see is in fact there. He is, he explains, on the edge of winning a splendid new deal for Britain.

It’s customary at times like this to drag out tired old analogies with poor Neville Chamberlain, so notoriously swindled by a wily foreigner at Munich, but that comparison doesn’t work here. No one has swindled Cameron, but if he sells this deal, he will have swindled his country.

In that speech three years ago, Cameron noted how many Britons were asking, “Why can’t we just have what we voted to join — a common market?” Well, that was what they were told they were joining. But what the U.K. actually signed up for was very different — and infinitely less benign.

Yes, “common market” was indeed what Brits used to call that mysterious structure run out of Brussels, but that was a label that concealed more than it explained. In joining what were then more accurately known as the European Communities, Britain had committed itself not only to a trade pact, but also to ever closer union. And that was a project that had been grinding on for a long time. The institutional machinery was already in place to ensure that the integration process — and with it the continuous and irreversible transfer of powers away from national democracies — only moved forward.

And that has continued. The pace may not have been certain, but the direction always was. The changes that David Cameron talked about in 2013 (and before then) were not mere technicalities. They were aimed at the essence of what the European Union, the intended graveyard of the nation-state, was supposed to be. The fact that Cameron wanted quite a few of these changes to be for the benefit of all the EU’s members made things worse still. They were not only a challenge to Brussels but to the euro-fundamentalist political class across a wide swathe of the EU. To repeat myself: The idea that Cameron would secure the unanimous agreement of Britain’s European “partners” to this (because that’s what would, under EU rules, be required) was nonsense.

Cameron, no fool, must have known this, but he was playing a different game. The referendum had essentially been forced on him by the threat to the Tories posed by UKIP’s euroskeptic insurgency. The “renegotiation” would buy valuable time to safely (fingers crossed!) see him through the 2015 election. If it turned out to be a dud, well, he would sort out the problem then.

And a dud is what it has turned out to be

One Tory MP described the proposed deal as “a slap in the face for Britain.” More like a punch, I’d say, made more vicious by the contempt for the electorate with which it was landed: “Hand on heart,” boasted Cameron, “I have delivered the commitments made in my manifesto.” Hand on heart . . . 

Meanwhile, he did his best to stifle dissent within a Conservative party in which many were startled by Cameron’s interpretation of what they had naïvely believed was their manifesto, too.

Speaking in the House of Commons, another Conservative MP, Steve Baker, commented that the deal looked and smelt “funny.” “It might be superficially shiny on the outside, but poke it and it’s soft in the middle.” He asked the prime minister whether he would admit to having “been reduced to polishing poo?”

Cameron wouldn’t, but, dung or not, his renegotiation was always going to be a dud. Bit by bit, he had dropped or diluted his demands. The grand constitutional rearrangements were shelved and the EU’s job-destroying social legislation was left untouched. The tough talk of regaining at least some meaningful veto rights over immigration into the U.K. from elsewhere in the EU dwindled (mostly) into snarling about welfare benefits, a telling retreat. The surge of EU migrants into the U.K. (currently running at a net 180,000 people per year) has done much to fuel British euroskepticism, but Cameron was compelled to accept that he could only nibble at its edges. The free movement of people within the EU is one of the union’s fundamental principles: It wasn’t something that was going to be bartered away.

Cameron ended up asking for little. He will receive less. Thus, so far as benefits are concerned, his proposed scaling back of “in-work” benefits for EU migrants has itself been scaled back. Even that only kicks in if Britain applies an “emergency brake” in the event of undue pressure on public services or the welfare system. And who decides whether the conditions for applying that emergency brake have been met? The EU Commission. Ah.

To be fair, the Commission has said that those conditions are met in Britain — for now.

Wait, there’s more.

The definition of those EU citizens that the U.K. can turn away on the grounds that they represent a “present” threat to public policy or security will be broadened. That’s a welcome change, but it does nothing to address the way European human-rights legislation — all too often stretched beyond reasonable interpretation — can stand in the way of the deportation of equally undesirable non-EUcitizens. Cameron once undertook to tackle this, too. (No matter that doing anything about it was — for reasons too complicated to go into here — a legal impossibility as long as Britain remained within the EU.) He gave up on that as well.

Meanwhile, the introduction of a “red card” system that would, under certain circumstances, allow national parliaments to block EU legislation is one of the few “constitutional” reforms to survive, but it would require the support of another 14 national parliaments before it could be played. The chances of that ever happening are, to say the least, remote.

Another area of British concern has been that the nine EU countries — including the U.K. — not in the euro zone might be ganged up upon by the 19 who are. So, if enough of the nine (it’s not indicated how many) get together, they will be allowed to give their “reasoned objection” to measures designed to integrate the euro zone further. How kind! These objections will then be “discuss[ed]” with a view to finding a “satisfactory solution.” And if that can’t be found, well, silence.

More helpfully, it’s confirmed that Britain will not have to contribute to future euro-zone bailouts, and there will be some protections for Britain’s financial sector from euro-zone regulators. There will also be a prohibition against discrimination against individuals and entities based on the fact that the member-state where they are established has not adopted the single currency, something that will, again, please the City.

Then there’s “ever closer union,” that lethal ratchet. Cameron has been handed a few words, of limited legal consequence, to the effect that the U.K. “is not committed to further political integration into the European Union,” whatever that might mean. But nothing direct is said about the European Court and its habit of interpreting EU law in a way that takes “ever closer union” as a guiding principle. This matters: In the event of a conflict between European law and the law of any member state (including Britain’s), European law prevails. As long as the EU is the EU, that, too, is not going to change.

Is the deal even binding? At the moment it’s only a draft. There will be more bargaining to come, but this proposal, or something close to it, will probably be agreed to by all the EU’s leaders, conceivably as early as next week. Once that’s happened, it can (arguably) be reversed only by a unanimous vote. Once filed with the United Nations, it is (arguably) also binding under international law.

Arguably: With the EU the devil is always in the details, and the law in this area is decidedly murky. The deal will commit the EU’s leadership to amend the EU’s secondary legislation to reflect what has been agreed, a procedure that will give the EU’s (reliably euro-fundamentalist) parliament an opportunity to weigh in. And if it declines to sign off on the deal, what then? After all, the British will have already voted.

Tusk also accepts that the EU treaties may “possibly” need amending at some (unspecified) point to reflect “a few elements” in the proposed deal. Forget that “possibly.” The word is “certainly,” and the amendments may have to cover more than a “few” elements. Amending the treaty is a lengthy, rarely straightforward business, requiring the agreement of all 28 member-states. If that’s not forthcoming — if a parliament votes it down, say, or a referendum gets in the way — what then? It’s by no means clear that Tusk’s agreement to agree would have the legal force that he and Cameron claim. Again, this would take place after (maybe years after) the British referendum, which may take place as early as June.

So, what’s a Brit to think? Well, even on the most favorable construction, the deal does next to nothing to restore Britain’s control over its borders, next to nothing to return any powers to its parliament, next to nothing to extricate Britain from the jaws of “ever closer union,” and nothing at all to restore supremacy to its courts. Adding insult to injury, what’s been thrown the country’s way are, for the most part, not even scraps but promises of scraps, promises that may well not be binding.

Apart from that, it’s a great deal. Hand on heart.

Cameron Cornered

The Weekly Standard, June 23, 2014

A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.

Britain’s Euroskeptic U.K. Independence party (UKIP) is a poorly run protean mess, unhealthily dependent on the wit, zest, and charisma of its leader, Nigel Farage. And yet in the spirit of Farage (who has survived a plane crash, cancer, and being hit by a VW Beetle), UKIP keeps confounding those who so eagerly draft and redraft its obituary.

The run-up to the election to the European parliament in May was not the party’s most glorious stretch. Sustained battering by mainstream media and mainstream parties—much of it galvanized by UKIP’s heretical emphasis on immigration control—took a toll, and was reinforced by campaign missteps (Google “steel band,” “Croydon,” and “UKIP” for one notably ludicrous instance), including a pre-election radio interview of Farage that went so badly that his spin doctor tried—on air—to bring it to a close.

Less than a week after that interview, Britons went to the ballot box, voting both in the EU poll and, in some regions, local elections too. Results for the latter were counted first. UKIP took 16.5 percent of the popular vote, down from the remarkable 23 percent the party had scored the preceding year, but a reasonable tally considering that these elections were held in less UKIP-friendly territory than in 2013.

The election for the European parliament, however, involved the whole country, and UKIP topped the poll with 27.5 percent, well up from the 16.5 percent it secured in the 2009 EU vote. UKIP may have been assisted by a low turnout (34 percent), but it nonetheless became the first party other than Labour or Conservative to win a national election in over a century. Labour had to make do with regaining (and more) the ground it had lost in 2009 (a Labour government had been presiding over Britain’s slice of the financial crisis), boosting its score from 15.7 percent to 25.4 percent. The Conservatives slumped from first to third place with 23.9 percent. Their coalition partners, the hopelessly Europhile Liberal Democrats, saw their vote cut by roughly half and their team of EU parliament members reduced from 11 to 1, a richly deserved fate marred only by its incompleteness.

But a few days later UKIP ran into a reminder that one barrier remains unbroken. On June 5, it failed yet again to win a seat in the House of Commons. On paper, the constituency—Newark, a pleasant Conservative-voting market town unlikely to be confused with its namesake in New Jersey—looked promising. UKIP had done well there in local elections in 2013 and had headed the poll in that part of Britain in the EU vote. Helping still further, Newark’s (robustly right-wing) Tory MP had just resigned following a lobbying scandal that fit neatly into the UKIP narrative of establishment misrule. Typically, UKIP did not make the most of its opportunity. Perhaps tellingly, Farage opted not to run. Instead the party chose as its candidate a (robustly right-wing) septuagenarian member of the European parliament all too easy to caricature as UKIP at its most primitive.

The result was far from disgraceful: UKIP took over a quarter of the vote, up from the 3 percent or so its candidate managed in 2010. This was despite a concentrated Tory blitz (party workers, activists, and MPs by the hundred were shipped into Newark) that a hollowed-out Conservative party could not hope to reproduce on the national scale that a general election would require. Nevertheless UKIP’s second place (the Tory candidate romped home) meant that the party still had no MPs, a failing frequently cited as a mark of UKIP’s fundamental lack of seriousness. This was only underlined by the convivial Farage’s decision to spend the day before the Newark vote at a tourism conference in Malta. And, yes, he was photographed there in the early hours with a blonde who was not Mrs. Farage. There was a respectable explanation, but .  .  .

Bellowing at Brussels and, for that matter, 10 Downing Street is an unsurprising response to both EU overreach and the metropolitan liberalism of David Cameron’s government. There are numerous infuriated traditionally Conservative supporters who are prepared to “lend” a vote to UKIP in European and, increasingly, local elections, but will balk at doing anything that risks helping “Red Ed” Miliband’s unsettlingly left-wing Labour party into government.

As they fully understand, voting for UKIP could easily do just that. Under Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, a protest vote can prove expensive. There’s good evidence to suggest that UKIP ballots (around 3 percent of the total) cost the Tories an absolute majority in the 2010 general election. With UKIP now attracting growing numbers of former Labour voters, the math is trickier than it was, but a higher UKIP percentage would undoubtedly do even greater damage to the Conservatives in 2015.

Making the choice sharper still, David Cameron has committed to an in/out referendum on Britain’s EU membership if he is reelected. Euroskeptics ought to remain, well, skeptical about this, not least because Cameron (a politician too unimaginative to contemplate a breach with Brussels) will try to gull Brits into the pro-EU camp with largely meaningless “concessions” allegedly wrung from the U.K.’s European partners. And he will probably succeed, meaning that Britain’s long European nightmare will continue. On the other hand, Cameron’s referendum would represent a chance, however remote, of a withdrawal, which is better than what Brussels-friendly Labour has on offer: nothing.

And right-of-center voters have another reason to be wary of voting for UKIP next year. “Europe” has evolved as an encapsulation of the broader discontent that many Tories (or former Tories) feel for Cameron’s mushy brand of conservatism, a discontent brilliantly exploited by Farage, playing Mrs. Thatcher’s finest tunes and meaning it. That has taken him a long way. The UKIP leader’s conundrum now is somewhat similar, ironically, to that faced by Cameron a little under a decade ago. Modern Britain is no longer the country that voted (often grudgingly) for the Iron Lady. Cameron tried to deal with that change by dragging the Conservative party to the center, calculating that the Tory right had nowhere else to go. Had it not been for Nigel Farage he might have gotten away with it.

The not unrelated difficulty for Farage is that he has harvested about as much of the right as he can, and thanks to the brutal math of first-past-the-post, that will not be enough to deliver the MPs to make the breakthrough he needs. So UKIP’s leader has attempted to widen his support by reaching out to what he has described as “patriotic old Labour” (put less diplomatically, the white working class), using immigration (Britain has received huge numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in the EU, immigrants that under EU law it is powerless to turn away) as the bridge to get there.

This has been a success, but it has involved downplaying UKIP’s earlier free market vim. The evolution of “red UKIP” is less of a problem for the party’s Conservative refugees than some of UKIP’s intellectual cheerleaders might imagine: Standing up for socialized medicine and generous state pensions plays pretty well with an older, often far from affluent crowd. But throw in some other leftish sub-currents, add the harsher edge to the party’s immigration rhetoric, and subtract some Thatcherite grace notes (talk of a flat tax has, for example, disappeared), and it becomes easy to suspect that a good number (especially on the upscale side of the social divide) of UKIP’s once-Conservative or libertarian-inclined voters will return to the Tory fold, particularly with Ed dread to push them there.

But neither this, nor the unappealing Miliband’s failure to click with the wider British electorate, nor the U.K.’s improving economic performance is likely to save Cameron. Britain’s embarrassingly outdated constituency boundaries favor Labour, which only has to win some 35 percent of the national vote to prevail. With the Liberal Democrats floundering, that modest target ought to be one Labour can hit despite recent stumbles in the opinion polls. UKIP meanwhile can expect to win few (if any) actual MPs once the general election comes round, but the party’s share of the poll will not sink back to that 3 percent grabbed by UKIP in 2010: UKIP—and the loyalty it can expect—is now entrenched too deep for that. And it is still the Conservative party that will miss its defectors most. At this late stage, it’s not clear what the Tories can do to entice enough of them back in time.

City Under Siege

The Weekly Standard, July 1, 2013

Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form of Europe’s new Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), set to be levied at a rate of 0.1 percent on equity and debt transactions, and 0.01 percent on trades in derivatives. It will ensure that the financial sector “makes a fair and substantial contribution to public finances.”

We’ll see. This new “contribution,” potentially much more onerous than those fragments of a percent suggest, may or may not be substantial (taxes of this type have a record of backfiring), but the revenues predicted by the commission ($45 billion or so, but the math is fuzzy) could be eclipsed by the punch that the tax delivers to economic growth.

Whether the FTT is “fair” is fuzzier still. That’s because the real objectives of the tax​—​to be introduced by 11 eurozone countries in 2014​—​have little to do with that. To start with, the FTT is about​—​dread word​—​the narrative. Problems within the banks were the immediate cause of the crisis​—​it’s not called the financial crisis for nothing​—​but working out what caused those problems is a messier matter altogether. The number of plausible suspects rivals the haul on Agatha Christie’s Orient Express. Prominent among them is something for which the commission bears a great deal of responsibility​—​the euro, a reckless, politically driven piece of financial engineering that has outdone the worst of Wall Street’s mad science. With the single currency still the focus of potentially dangerous debate, it makes sense to keep attention focused on fat cat bankers and away from Brussels’s more discreet architects of financial destruction. Similar thinking helps explain why​—​when the euro’s troubles grew too big to ignore​—​there was so much talk of dodgy markets and dark Anglo-Saxon plotting.

Sadly, in a way, not all of this was​—​or is​—​deliberate disinformation. Much of continental Europe’s leadership class​—​across the political spectrum​—​distrusts “financial capitalism” of the Anglo-American kind, a venerable suspicion that appeared to have been vindicated by the fiascos of 2008. Why there is this distrust is a topic for another time​—​Roman Catholicism, socialism, and the twists of history have all played their parts​—​but that it exists is undeniable. The idea that free markets are the least bad way of allocating resources has limited appeal in a political culture still in thrall to the notion that some authority somewhere knows best, a belief that remains the essence of what the EU stands for. This is more than a matter of philosophical disagreement. So far as Brussels is concerned, Anglo-Saxon finance is not just objectionable, it’s in the way.

The euro was an attempt to override the market. A nation’s currency is a measure of its relative economic performance. If its value falls that’s a signal to investors and, in time, a chance to restore international competitiveness. By abandoning marks, francs, lire, and all the rest, the creators of the currency union junked a useful economic tool, replacing the collective sense of the market with crude administrative fiat. France was Germany was Portugal, and that was that.

As millions of jobless Europeans know, the market bit back. But the instinct of those managing the currency union was not to revert to market discipline, but to move farther away from it. There were bans on the short-selling of certain securities, attacks on credit ratings agencies that were at last telling some inconvenient truths, and, crucially, a vow by European Central Bank president Mario Draghi to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, a declaration buttressed by the prospect of significant intervention in the sovereign bond market. Markets are far from perfect, and some of what has been done can be justified on pragmatic grounds, but it’s not difficult to notice the direction of a broader ideological current, one that is not good news for the City​—​London’s Wall Street​—​or, indeed, American financial firms interested in European business.

That current is sweeping an increasingly burdensome, increasingly made-in-Brussels regulatory regime, expensive and rigid, into the City and beyond. Much of it is profoundly antithetical to the intuitive, principles-based, flexible, and often self-regulatory approach that has done so much to transform Britain’s financial sector into a world-beating business. That some of these rules​—​such as the new Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive​—​will (effectively) weigh even more heavily on enterprises headquartered outside the EU is bound to damage London’s status as a global financial entrepôt, diverting business beyond the reach of Brussels.

The commission doesn’t appear to be particularly concerned where that business goes. In fact, it would probably like much of it to go away altogether. Many of Britain’s continental partners agree. And jealousy is only a part of it. The inherently unruly (markets are like that) and, to them, morally suspect financial sector is an obstacle to the ideal of a technocratic, tightly controlled Europe. Meanwhile the “island sewer” (to quote a deputy director of the supposedly serious El País, Spain’s highest-circulation newspaper) acts as a low-tax, lucrative lure for some of the continent’s best and brightest: some 300,000 to 400,000 French citizens now live in the U.K., mainly in London. Perhaps most annoyingly of all, financial services’ large contribution to the U.K.’s ramshackle economy (directly and indirectly perhaps at least 14 percent of GDP, and a badly needed export earner) helps fund Britain’s fondness for going its own way, an independent-mindedness that its European partners could do without.

But if the pie is to be smaller, that doesn’t mean that those partners don’t want a larger slice of it. National rivalries still flourish beneath that shared EU flag. The mechanism of “ever closer union” is not infrequently used by one member-state against another. It is, of course, only a coincidence that the (Frankfurt-based) European Central Bank is seeking to introduce rules that would force the relocation of clearing houses that handle euro-denominated instruments (in any significant quantity) out of London into the eurozone, to Paris, say, or, uh, Frankfurt. The U.K. is suing to prevent this, but if the currency union deepens, or banking union comes into being, there will be more of the same to come.

Taken as a whole, Europe’s financial sector will shrink further​—​even after the bloodletting of the last few years. London, as its hub, is bearing, and will continue to bear, the brunt. Jobs in the City have fallen by roughly a third and now stand at a 20-year low. In part this is natural, the product both of hard times and the necessary reconnection of the financial sector to economic reality. In part too it’s a matter of mathematics. Tougher capital requirements and more restrictive limitations on leverage (and, possibly, areas of business) are a reasonable response to some of the disasters of recent years, but they will make much of the banking sector less profitable than in the mirage years, and that’s before we begin to factor in the costs of Brussels’s wider regulatory onslaught.

The FTT adds both further insult and injury. The belated realization that the tax may be even more destructive than its supporters intended (the governor of the Bank of France has warned of the damage it could do to the Frenchfinancial sector) may mean that it will be diluted prior to its planned introduction, but two key features​—​some targeting of trading volumes and extraterritoriality​—​will remain, and both will hurt London disproportionately. The extraterritoriality is particularly galling. A trade will bear the tax even if only one counterparty is in the FTT-zone, and so will a transaction where both counterparties are outside the FTT-zone (in London and New York, say) but trading a security (a Peugeot share, for example) where the issuer is based within it. The U.K. and the United States will be acting as the collectors of a tax that hurts one of their key industries​—​and they won’t get a penny for their pains.

As if all that were not enough, the intervention of Europe’s reliably authoritarian parliament means that new caps on bonuses have recently been approved. The bonuses of bankers classified as “material risk-takers” (including anyone who earns over $660,000 a year) will be capped at one times salary, or two times with the approval of a supermajority of shareholders​—​an arbitrary diktat at odds with more subtly designed measures preferred by the U.K. The possibility that similar limits may be imposed on asset management firms (a group that received no bailouts from the European taxpayer) gave the lie to the never convincing argument that these changes are about risk control. Rather, like the Swiss referendum in March that also imposed restrictions on executive pay, they are both an exercise in collective punishment and a manifestation of the neo-egalitarianism growing on either side of the Atlantic. There is something else at play. Members of the European parliament see themselves as the continent’s elite (check out the deeply discounted tax rates that most of them pay), the vanguard of a new Europe. Earning so much less than those arrogant, unnecessary bankers maddens them: The chance to put a brake on financial sector pay is difficult to resist.

That’s more bad news for the City. The cap will​—​surprise​—​hit London hardest (that’s where most of the EU’s “material risk-takers” are to be found) and will make it a less hospitable place for the type of international business that could just as easily be located in New York, Hong Kong, or Zurich. Not only that, mandating less flexible wage structures will discourage hiring, the last thing that London needs now. And if these changes do end up crimping total compensation, that will be a blow to Britain’s cash-strapped treasury, long accustomed to raking in a good bit of that income, among other large “contributions” (to use that fashionable word) from the financial sector.

And so British prime minister David Cameron finds himself in another European swamp. All he can do about the FTT’s extraterritorial reach is protest (the United States is also objecting) and maintain a fingers-crossed legal challenge. He could (very) arguably have vetoed the bonus cap under the Luxembourg compromise, a severely eroded understanding dating to 1966, which might still permit a veto in defense of a vital national interest even where no veto power formally exists. That would have been a long shot, but Cameron didn’t even attempt it. Going to the mat “against Brussels” in defense of bankers’ bonuses would have played no better in euroskeptic Britain than anywhere else.

But one important, and generally Conservative, section of the electorate might have supported him. Traditionally nervous about political uncertainty and understandably wary about being cut off from European markets, the City’s grandees have long endorsed​—​if on occasion through gritted teeth​—​British membership in the EU. That’s not going to change quite yet, but some of them must be beginning to see that staying in an EU fixed on its current course could well be riskier than taking their chances outside. Whatever he is now claiming, Cameron is not going to be able to nudge the EU in a different direction, and he does not have the imagination to see that Britain would be better off out. Sooner or later, the City will have to confront the fact that if the EU is the problem, Cameron is not the answer.

A sign that it may be starting to was a high-profile event hosted last month by London hedge funder Crispin Odey and designed to introduce Nigel Farage, the leader of the uncompromisingly Euroskeptic U.K. Independence party, and a former City trader himself, to financial types. A long-term and generous, if sometimes critical, member of the Conservative party, Odey has not switched his support to UKIP, but this looked a lot like a warning shot.

Cameron would do well to pay attention. The 3 percent scored by UKIP (which up until now has principally drawn its support from the right) in the 2010 general election cost his Tories their chance of an absolute majority. UKIP is now polling in the mid-teens or higher, a feat it has managed on a shoestring. If UKIP can begin to attract City money, and the credibility that can come with it .  .  .

It’s not easy being David Cameron.

Just Say No

National Review Online, February 14, 2013

Have we just witnessed a cynical attempt to induce an old ally to sacrifice itself for the benefit of the United States? Possibly: Foreign policy is not for the morally squeamish.

Look no further than Philip Gordon, the U.S.’s assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. In January, Mr. Gordon hurled himself into Britain’s contentious debate over the EU with the observation that America viewed the U.K.’s continued participation in that wretched union as “essential and critical to the United States.” This did not play well with Blighty’s euroskeptic hordes, a crowd all too willing to suspect that Uncle Sam takes John Bull for granted. An indignant Nigel Farage, leader of the insurgent euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), snarked that, as the U.K. had rejected the Americans’ suggestion that it might lend a hand in Vietnam, the U.K. would also “say no to them over the EU.”

Undeterred, Barack Obama waded into the controversy a week or so later, releasing some comments shortly before David Cameron was due to deliver a much-anticipated speech on Britain’s role in the EU. The timing was intended to stiffen the back of a prime minister under immense domestic political pressure from his euroskeptic critics. The president began softly enough, politely underscoring “America’s close alliance with the United Kingdom,” but then came to the point: The United States values “a strong U.K. in a strong European Union.” Following Cameron’s speech, that message was echoed by Joe Biden, never a man afraid to repeat the words of others, during the course of a visit to Europe earlier this month: “We believe the United Kingdom is stronger as a result of its membership [in the EU]. And we believe the EU is stronger with the U.K.’s involvement.”

On one level, that was not so far from what Cameron had ended up saying. In his speech, he called for a reformed, “leaner, less bureaucratic union . . . with the single market at its heart,” a union open for business with the rest of the world, a decentralized union that would return powers to its member states but that would have room within it for a smaller group of countries on a pathway to “much closer economic and political integration,” but no sin bin for those who did not. If that is a vision in any way connected with reality, the State Department ought to be able to relax.

Of course, it is not. Fears among the EU’s leadership (alluded to by Cameron in his speech) that a restructuring on the lines he proposed could lead to the union’s unraveling will mean that it will never take place. If Britain is to loosen its ties to Brussels, it will have to do so on its own. That would involve persuading all the other 26 EU countries to go along (since changes to the EU treaty require unanimity). That’s not going to happen either.

No matter, Cameron has guaranteed British voters a referendum once his implausible negotiations for an impossible deal have been concluded. It will, he explained, be “a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether.” So would that be something for the White House to worry about? Not really. The Conservative manifesto for the general election, due in 2015, will include a promise to hold a referendum. But here’s the catch. The Conservatives will almost surely not win that election, for any number of reasons that we don’t need to go into now.

Even in the astounding event of a Tory victory, what then? Doubtless there would be an elaborate pantomime of negotiation — there is still a large constituency within the EU (including, most importantly, Germany) that would like the Brits to stay in — and doubtless a few crumbs of concession would be tossed Cameron’s way. Indeed there were sections in his speech where the prime minister already seemed to be signaling his willingness to find a way to accept them. For older Britons, this brings back memories of the 1975 referendum that rubber-stamped a cosmetically “renegotiated” deal with the precursor to the EU. And a rerun of that would probably be what they would get.

Disregard the polls currently showing that a majority in the U.K. would opt for Brexit (yes, that’s the term). That’s just venting. Given their druthers, because of anxiety about what lies outside, reinforced by skillful scaremongering (and there’s been quite a bit of that lately), most Brits would prefer to remain within the EU, albeit one that is less intrusive. The nature of the EU — an “ever closer union” — means that that is not on offer. But presented with a prettily packaged excuse to avoid confronting that unpleasant reality, and battered by warnings from the great and the good of the supposedly hideous implications of quitting, the British electorate would almost certainly stick with the devil it knows.

So Cameron’s gambit is highly unlikely to get anywhere, let alone lead to Britain’s escape from the EU, and yet the Obama administration still seems oddly concerned. In part this may be a feint, aimed not at London but at Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, crafted to demonstrate to a bloc of some consequence that the Brits might be euroskeptic but their cousins across the pond most definitely are not.

And in part it may be caution. Cameron is right: “Democratic consent for the EU [within the U.K.] is now wafer thin.” If the Labour party were to shift in a more euroskeptic direction, the political equation would change dramatically. Despite electoral logic and some tentative maneuvering, that’s not likely for now. The party’s leader is firmly in the Brussels camp. But its supporters are rather less so. All things considered, the White House may have thought that spreading a little of what euroskeptic blogger Richard North has dubbed FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) over the consequences of a Brexit might be a sensible preemptive step.

More than that, the EU is in a tense, febrile state. The underlying structural failings of its monetary union, combined with a nutty determination to dig that hole still deeper, may well force the countries of the euro zone (and perhaps others) into a degree of integration that will, however much they might try to avoid it, necessitate amendments to the EU treaty. Those will be amendments to which the Brits will have to give their assent (unanimity, remember). At that moment, whatever the fate of Cameron and his referendum, the U.K.’s relationship with the EU will be up for discussion. As matters now stand, it is, to put it mildly, unlikely that the country will opt to join any inner core, but, by spreading a little FUD in advance (with more, unquestionably, to come), the U.S. is obviously trying to contribute to the creation of a climate of opinion within Britain that will prevent the U.K. from wandering too far from the heart of Brussels’s realm.

And as to why the administration should try to do this, well, that (if it is thinking straight) is where the cynical sacrifice of an old ally would come in. The EU is fundamentally anti-American. Designed as a counterweight to American power, it is a project that, lacking any genuine positive identity of its own, defines itself by what it is not. What it is not, its grandees like to emphasize, is America. Economically, the ideas of its founders were rooted in central planning at home, and, in dealings with the outside world, mercantilism. But British membership (and the example set by the success of Thatcherite reforms within the U.K.) has helped nudge the EU on a somewhat different (but not irreversible) course, more open to free markets and free trade and thus more to Washington’s liking (for instance, talks on a U.S.-EU free-trade deal are set to start in June). Similarly, Britain has acted as a brake on the construction of a common — and overarching — EU foreign policy that would, almost by definition, make the union an increasingly awkward partner for the U.S.

The problem is that the EU’s original suspicion of free enterprise has never disappeared, and hard times have given it fresh life. There are clear signs that Britain can only block so much for so long (the evolution of EU financial regulation is just one harbinger among many of trouble to come). The trudge toward a common foreign policy continues. Nevertheless, so long as the Brits stay relatively close to the center of the EU’s decision-making, there remains a decent chance that Brussels’s more damaging initiatives can be diluted, delayed, or derailed. Seen from an American viewpoint, there is thus a brutal logic to convincing the U.K. to hang in there, even if, from a British angle, it makes no sense at all.

But what if the White House is not looking at this question in the coldly Machiavellian way that Americans have a right to expect? One alternative interpretation of Obama’s effort to insert himself as a counselor into Britain’s unhappy European marriage is that his administration is still in thrall to the Cold War calculation that regarded (Western) European unity as a strategic good in its own right, an obsolete notion kept alive today by intellectual laziness in Washington and, somewhat more legitimately, by an appreciation of the genuinely useful role played by the EU in the transformation of the post-Communist part of the continent. It’s a mindset that has led successive White Houses — Republican and Democratic — to view the EU’s progress toward that ever closer union with insouciance, or even, sometimes, enthusiasm. A more tightly unified EU, gushed Condoleezza Rice back in 2005, would be a “positive force.” Maybe the Obama administration has simply succumbed to this delusion, and cannot grasp why Britain would not wish to sign up for the ride.

Then again, there could be a yet more troubling explanation. Does Obama look across the Atlantic to Brussels and rather like what he sees, an entity developing in a supranational, “progressive,” environmentally correct, corporatist, and technocratic direction that is not so far removed from his own agenda for this country? If he does — and it’s not so far-fetched an idea — he won’t have much sympathy for a bunch of what he doubtless sees as “bitter” Brits clinging to what’s left of their independence.

But whatever the reasons Messrs. Obama, Biden, and Gordon had for saying what they did, from the British perspective it is clear what David Cameron’s response should be. He should pay absolutely no attention.

Cameron and the Euroskeptics

The Weekly Standard, February 11, 2013

David Cameron leaves things late. Leadership by essay crisis, it has been called, a nod to procrastination by generations of students. But his belated response to the mounting political turmoil over Britain’s membership in the EU​—​a speech proposing an in/out referendum​—​won’t save him from disaster in the 2015 general election.

Some early responses were encouraging​—​outrage from EU parliamentarians, a disapproving Obama administration, cries of good riddance in France, and, according to one grandee, “shock” in Davos​—​but British voters were not so easily taken in. Polls showed the Conservatives trailing Labour by a little less, mainly on the back of a few percentage points grabbed from the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party, but Cameron’s speech was no game-changer. UKIP still stood at around 10 percent. UKIP, which largely draws its support from the right, took just 3 percent of the vote in 2010, but that was enough to cost the Tories some 20 seats​—​and an overall majority.

That’s the math forcing Cameron to call for a referendum he had always opposed. With his own (largely euroskeptic) Conservatives mutinous, UKIP polling in the teens, the economy faltering, and 2015 drawing closer, something had to be done. Cameron’s calculation was straightforward. With no other establishment party (for now) backing a referendum, and with UKIP (thanks to Britain’s first-past-the-post system) having little prospect of winning a parliamentary seat, let alone forming a government, the Tories are tempting euroskeptics with the only chance of the in-or-out showdown for which they have been pining. By contrast, voting UKIP in 2015 would divide the euroskeptic vote, help (europhile) Labour and the (euromaniacal) Liberal Democrats, and risk throwing that opportunity away.

The referendum timetable has been organized to underline that point. Nothing much will happen for now. Instead, Cameron will go to the polls in 2015 with a request for a mandate “to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners.” Once those negotiations have been concluded there will be a “referendum [in 2017, most likely] with a very simple in or out choice.” The referendum is thus dependent on Cameron’s reelection: Vote for him, or the nation-state gets it.

That so many UKIP supporters have yet to be won over is, to a degree, a reflection of the way the party has become an expression of broader popular discontent with the liberal status quo. UKIP is “about” more than the EU. But there’s something else: On closer inspection Cameron’s proposal looks less than convincing, and that’s even if we ignore the fact that his chances of victory in 2015 are on the order of a snowball in hell, or Romney in California.

There is a credible way for the U.K. to exit the EU (it involves Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty; I’ll spare you the technicalities), but Cameron’s “negotiations” are not it. Anything involving the repatriation of enough powers to impress enough euroskeptics would need a new treaty to be agreed on by each EU country, a tall order for reasons that are both practical (there are currently 27 member states) and philosophical. The EU is driven by the idea of “ever closer union,” a process that only moves in one direction. Once a competence has been transferred from the national level to the EU it cannot​—​must not​—​be handed back. Were Britain to win an exception to this principle, it would make a shambles of what the EU is meant to be. “Europe,” warned the EU’s prominenti, is not “à la carte.” Britain was either in or, well, the rest was left unsaid by just about everyone other than the French.

Cameron understands this. He has framed his proposed negotiations​—​they should be part of a wider effort to create “a leaner, less bureaucratic union”​—​in a way designed to address this concern. If the broader Brussels menu could be made more attractive, Britain would need fewer special orders. Given the rhetoric in Berlin (sometimes), Stockholm, Prague, and elsewhere in the EU’s north and east in favor of Britain’s more free market tack, this is an approach that ought to make sense.

But talk is cheap. When it comes to actually doing something to reduce the Brussels deadweight, the EU’s more economically liberal governments typically fall silent, still in thrall to the European dream to which most Britons​—​who were told they were joining a “common market”​—​have never subscribed. And when Cameron asks for support for a less dirigiste treaty, that dream (or nightmare) will stand in his way. For once negotiations start, where will they end? After all, the EU’s electorates are restless, and profoundly divided about what they want from “Europe.”

Within hours of Cameron’s speech, a leading member of Angela Merkel’s party was talking darkly about the dangers of opening “Pandora’s box,” a comment then echoed across the continent by a cast of characters that included the finance minister of the crumbling Hellenic Republic, Pandora’s repeatedly bailed-out basket case, sternly warning of the dangers of renegotiations, a performance that would suggest that chutzpah as well as cynic is a word with roots in ancient Greek.

Cameron may be gambling that the euro’s problems will force that box open regardless. National politicians sucked into the eurozone’s drama will keep trying to bypass the need for treaty revision and its awkward requirement of unanimity (as they did with the 2012 Fiscal Compact, which is formally a side-agreement) in their efforts to fix the currency union. But the far deeper integration that this repair work must eventually entail (and for which the Brussels bureaucracy is pushing) cannot be achieved without it. Amending the treaty would require British consent, and that could be Cameron’s moment. The U.K. would never be expected to opt into any EU “core,” but the price of doing nothing to impede its formation ought to be agreement to the sort of looser association that most Brits would anyway prefer over a clean divorce.

That’s how this story could work out, but it relies on improbable contingencies, stretched assumptions, and tightly crossed fingers. Many euroskeptics​—​even if they could be persuaded that Cameron has a shot at victory in 2015​—​would not regard that conclusion as a happy ending. What they want is a clean break. What they fear is that even the half-decent second-best solution​—​a looser association​—​will not be what it could be thanks to David Cameron. He may be frustrated by the EU, but he doesn’t have the imagination to risk anything approaching separation.

What, I suspect, they anticipate is that he won’t even get that chance, that the eurozone will struggle on as is, and that Cameron will be thrown a few scraps at the end of pantomime negotiations, which he will then declare to have been a triumph. This will set the stage for a referendum in which a misled, there-is-no-alternative British public will vote for the “yes” for which Cameron has already declared​—​an odd thing to do ahead of any negotiations​—that he will campaign “heart and soul.” That is not the language, and these are not the scenarios, designed to reassure euroskeptic hearts, minds, or even souls in time for 2015.

Europe, Bloody Europe

The Weekly Standard, August 13, 2012

It’s always bloody Europe. It was Europe (specifically, Tory splits over Britain’s relationship with the EU) that finally did in Mrs. Thatcher, and it did in poor John Major too. Now it is beginning to look like David Cameron might eventually go the same way, felled by the issue he has tried to dodge since becoming party leader in 2005. To borrow his phrase from the following year, “banging on” about Brussels was over. Saving the planet was in.

But the elephant was still in the room, increasingly intrusive, increasingly destructive, and increasingly unwanted. Britons have never truly warmed to the EU, but a 2009 poll showing that more than half of them wanted out was just one more sign that resigned exasperation was at last giving way to something more determined. With the economic crisis drawing attention away from the Conservatives’ divisive past and onto the ruling Labour party’s dismal present, some carefully calibrated Brussels bashing would have been a smart way for Cameron both to score points against a notoriously europhile government and, no less important, to calm a restive (and euroskeptic) Conservative base dismayed by their leader’s often clumsy attempts to reboot the party’s image. It was an opportunity Cameron largely ignored, preferring to stay in his comfort zone and sing the old tunes that had worked so well. Carbon menace!

Many voters weren’t impressed. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the euroskeptic—and distinctly maverick—UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence party) beat Labour into second place behind the Tories, grabbing 16.5 percent of the vote, up a sliver from the already remarkable 16.1 percent scooped up in 2004. It was a humiliation for Labour but a warning for the Conservatives. Less than 12 months before a crucial general election, the Tories who had flocked to UKIP’s side had not come home. A commitment from Cameron to hold a referendum on the EU’s pending Lisbon Treaty—if he was elected before it was in force—reassured few. Rightly so: The treaty came into effect ahead of the election. The Conservatives dropped their referendum.

It may be a coincidence that it was from roughly this point that the Tories struggled to retain a clear lead at the polls. What cannot be denied is that UKIP won enough votes in enough constituencies to deprive the Conservatives of an absolute majority in the 2010 general election. Rather than shoot for a minority government (the bolder, better course), Cameron opted for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the most europhile of all Britain’s major parties. The irony was obvious. The self-inflicted wound has taken a little longer to become visible.

With the keys to 10 Downing Street so close, Cameron’s choice can perhaps be forgiven. The same cannot be said of his reluctance to take a more aggressively euroskeptic tack in the years that have followed. The constraints of coalition have something to do with it, naturally, as do memories of earlier Tory disaster. Nevertheless, with the woes of the euro—a dangerous experiment lauded by many in the Labour party and by the Liberal Democrats—both unnerving the electorate and vindicating those squabbling Conservatives, it ought to be a time to make hay. But that’s not what Cameron has done.

And the chances thrown away may not just be domestic. As things stand, the currency union’s nervous breakdown offers the only remotely realistic prospect of a successful renegotiation of the U.K.’s position in the EU along lines that most Britons, including (he claims) Cameron, really want—to remain in the club, but less so. That’s because any credible long-term fix for the eurozone is likely to involve amendments to the EU’s governing treaty. That would need the approval of all member states including the U.K. That in turn might give Cameron the leverage he would need to secure all the other member states’ agreement to the treaty changes that would be required to accommodate the U.K.’s EU lite.

It’s not going to happen. Holding the global financial system ransom (and that’s how it would be portrayed) is a gamble too far, particularly for the prime minister of the country that hosts that hub of international finance, the City of London, and even more so when that same prime minister is unwilling to risk a breach with his Liberal Democrat partners.

It’s possible—just—to see the current approach as one of accidentally masterful inactivity. If the 17 eurozone countries are permitted to merge into a politically united core within a broader “multi-speed” EU, that could leave Britain to its own devices in a more congenial outer-EU. But you’d have to be very naïve to believe in such an outcome. All 27 EU countries would still be trapped within a European project that is explicitly set up to grind relentlessly forward (“ever closer union”). The speeds might differ, the direction would not.

If that’s to change, there will have to be treaty changes of the type that Cameron, pleading crisis and coalition, has not begun to attempt to renegotiate or, for that matter, even design. To be fair, his government has passed legislation designed to subject any future significant transfer of powers to Brussels to a referendum, a step almost unthinkable a few years ago. It was a start (and one day it may trigger a necessary confrontation), but the suspicion with which the new law was greeted by euroskeptics (because of the loopholes lurking within it) was yet another sign of how estranged Cameron has become from those who should be his party’s natural supporters.

That estrangement has been sharpened by a series of recent blunders. One of the biggest was an effort last October to browbeat Tory MPs into voting against a largely symbolic motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU. The motion had no hope of passing, but Cameron’s rather telling overreaction helped provoke a massive revolt within his parliamentary party, a revolt that goes some way to explaining the prime minister’s decision to keep the U.K. out of the fiscal pact cooked up by Merkel and Sarkozy in December.

The goodwill generated by that faint flicker of the bulldog spirit has since been squandered with characteristic carelessness of euroskeptic sensibilities. Cameron may have respectable, even euroskeptic, reasons for rejecting a referendum just now, but to argue (as his spokesman did in June) that there was “no popular support” for an immediate referendum at a time when half the voters were telling the pollsters they wanted just that (another third wanted one “in the next few years”) was not only inaccurate but, politically speaking, nuts: Cameron is lucky that Labour remains unenthusiastic about such a vote.

Even nuttier, and much more damaging, was his subsequent observation that he would “never” campaign for the U.K. to quit the EU. Again, there can be good reasons for a “practical euroskeptic” (as Cameron styles himself) to oppose an in/out referendum, not least the danger that, faced with a stark decision (made, doubtless, to seem even starker by big business), the electorate might well “keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse.” Read that way, opposition to such a vote is a question of tactics, not principle.

But by going further—and in such categorical terms—Cameron shredded the shreds of his euroskeptic credibility for no evident reward other than, perhaps, a smattering of the bien-pensant applause he treasures for reasons, sadly, other than cynical political calculation. How now was he supposed to be able to renegotiate a better deal with the EU? With the threat of a British withdrawal removed (quite a few EU countries still want the U.K. to stick around) and the idea of vetoing closer eurozone integration long off the table, it’s unclear what cards the prime minister would have left to play. “Practical” euroskepticism looks to be not so very practical after all.

The inescapable logic, for euroskeptics, points to an in/out referendum, followed, in the event of an “out” vote, by a total recasting of Britain’s relationship with Brussels, as the country begins the withdrawal process provided for under the EU treaty. That’s not what they will get. The best guess, amongst a bewildering range of scenarios, is that at the next general election (due in 2015) the Conservatives will guarantee a referendum on whatever feeble deal Cameron, reelected and freed from the chains of coalition, might (fingers crossed) manage to extract from the EU. Will that lure enough UKIP Tories back to the fold?

It’s unlikely, not least because there will probably be more of them than in 2010 (the 2014 elections to the European Parliament should add to UKIP’s momentum). The chances of a Conservative majority in 2015 thus appear (in the absence of an intervening economic miracle) slight. Instead the odds must be that Labour will be back in power, in which case there will be no renegotiations with Brussels, and that will be that.

What was that slogan about a roach motel?

What Is Going on in Blighty?

National Review Online, May 10, 2010

Britain’s election has left the country’s politics in a chaotic, confused mess. With the situation in such flux, there’s a decent chance that much of what I might write now (Sunday afternoon) will be obsolete by the time that you read it. So here instead are the answers to nine questions that should be relevant for some time. Well, a few days, anyway.

HOW DID THE VOTE GO?

To use an understatement: inconclusively. The House of Commons now has 650 MPs, so for one party to secure a majority, it needs to win 326 seats (in practice one or two fewer, but let’s not worry about that). For the first time since 1974, no one party has won that absolute majority. Parliament is “hung.” So far, the Conservatives have won 306 seats in the 2010 election and are forecast to win another after a special vote later this month, but it still won’t be enough. Labour came in second, with 258, and the Liberal Democrats third, with 57. With the exception of the eight sturdy Ulstermen of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist party, the remaining 28 seats (located in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and, in the case of Brighton — where a Green was elected — outer space) were mainly won by Celtic nationalists, few of whom have any time for the Tories. David William Donald Cameron has two Scottish names, but only one Tory MP in Scotland.

DID THE CONSERVATIVES BLOW IT?

Yes, if by less than some would claim. Thirteen years of Labour misrule capped by an economic and fiscal crisis ought to have paved the way for a solid Conservative victory. For most of 2008 and 2009, the opinion polls signaled that the Tories were set for an overall majority. Then something changed. In part this was the usual reversion of voters to their traditional voting habits in the run-up to a general election. And in part it was the fallout from a parliamentary expenses scandal that left the electorate disgusted by politicians of both the main parties. But there was something else. Looking at the support for David Cameron, it was striking how little enthusiasm for him there really was, even amongst the Tory faithful. To many voters, he came across as likable enough, even if he had a touch too much of the salesman about him, but that was it. In particular, he did not appear to be for anything worth getting excited about. I’ll go into the reasons for that in the answer to the next question, but let’s just note for now that in 2010 being Not-Labour was not quite enough.

But the word there is “quite.” Critics of David Cameron need to remember how far his party has come since the last election, in 2005, its third consecutive humiliating defeat. This time round, the Tories increased their tally of votes by 2 million, the same number by which their score exceeded Labour’s. They won more new seats than at any election since 1931, and they secured almost as big a swing against Labour as did Mrs. Thatcher in her legendary 1979 triumph. With 97 additional seats in the bag, the parliamentary party is roughly 50 percent larger than it was a week ago.

At the same time, the Conservative share of the popular vote only increased from a little over 32 percent to 36.1 percent. Financial crisis, broken borders, rising social disorder, and the peculiarities of that strange Gordon Brown ought to have been worth more than that.

WHAT DID THEY DO WRONG?

David Cameron took over a Conservative party that was, to put it bluntly, unelectable. Rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly) it was seen by many as the “nasty” party, not least thanks to the efforts and metropolitan prejudices of a media elite that is far more influential in Britain than are its counterparts in the United States. To tackle this, Cameron had to soften media hostility to a degree sufficient to enable his party to get its message out. He succeeded, but it meant dragging the Conservatives in an ostentatiously (to use the bleak newspeak) “inclusive” direction, a direction that (to be fair) at least partly reflected contemporary political attitudes amongst the wider population. Britain is no longer the Britain that elected Mrs. Thatcher.

Unfortunately, Cameron failed to realize he won the argument years ago. He had “decontaminated the brand,” and yet he went into the election still seemingly apologetic for it. He campaigned in 2010 as if it were 2007, afraid or unwilling to play those traditional Conservative tunes that — whatever they may say in Notting Hill — are still capable of pulling in the crowds. Instead, Cameron made clear that his faith in Al Gore’s gospel was undimmed by Climategate. He could barely bring himself to mention immigration, and his big vision was of a “Big Society” (I have no idea). Meanwhile, sending his most senior Europhile on a secret mission to Brussels added insult to the injuries of the Tories’ restless Euroskeptic core. In that context, it’s worth noting that Cameron’s lead at the polls started to decline almost immediately after he reneged late last year on a “cast iron” pledge to hold a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty. This wasn’t an altogether unreasonable decision (the treaty had since come into effect, and would be extremely difficult to unscramble), but politically it was a serious mistake.

Perhaps this was simple miscalculation, the error of an out-of-touch individual surrounded by a small, like-minded clique. Perhaps. But there was another possibility: Had Cameron drunk too much of his own Kool-Aid? For the Tory leader to have changed his party’s course out of cynical political calculation is understandable; for him actually to believe the more obviously idiotic “progressive” nonsense he has been spouting would be unforgivable.

Either way, the base was unimpressed. In the most telling sign of this, over 900,000 people (roughly 3 percent of the popular vote, and an increase of 50 percent over 2005) voted for the euroskeptic UKIP, Britain’s fourth-largest party. To quote blogger Archbishop Cranmer, UKIP is a “lost tribe” of conservatism, made up of natural Tories whose politics are, to quote another blogger, the entertaining Guido Fawkes, those of the Conservative party “after a few gin and tonics.” Their votes may have cost the Tories as many as 20 seats, and thus a parliamentary majority. More than a few of those UKIP supporters might have returned to the Cameron fold had he been prepared to give them some sort of sign that he was, you know, just a little bit like them. Instead, he did the opposite.

IS THERE A LESSON FOR U.S. CONSERVATIVES?

When it comes to policy specifics, not so much. The U.K. is not the U.S. Its politics are very different (to start with, the British mainstream tends more to the center-left than is often understood over here). The challenge faced by David Cameron was very different from that now confronting the GOP. If there is one thing, perhaps, that Republicans could learn, it is this. Neither RINOs, nor the “reformers” of various hues, nor the various keepers of the conservative flame should drink too much of their different varieties of Kool-Aid. They should deal with the electorate as it is, not as they would like — or believe — it to be.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CLEGG?

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party, shot to prominence after a strong showing in the first televised party leaders’ debate. According to one opinion poll, “nice Nick” had become the most popular politician since Winston Churchill. He was articulate, a fresh face, and, briefly, “none of the above.” Unfortunately for Clegg, he was also a Liberal Democrat, and he was unable to carry his reliably unsuccessful party along on his coattails. The Liberal Democrats ended up losing a net five seats. Their 23 percent of the vote, slightly more than in 2005, was well below the high 20s (and more) recorded in the giddy days of early Cleggmania.

Despite that, the hung Parliament has left Nick Clegg in the game, busy being wooed by David Cameron and shouted at by Gordon Brown (it’s a tough-love thing).

HOW BAD ARE THE LIB-DEMS?

Pretty bad. The Liberal Democrats are usually described as left-of-center, and so they are, but that’s not the end of it. Nine decades out of office will leave any party looking a tad strange, and Clegg’s crew has proved no exception. Their ideology is a ragbag of policies, some good, some bad, some plain loopy, some well-intentioned, some not, the flotsam and jetsam of nearly a century of passing fads, prejudices, and dreams untouched by the realities of government. What does unite this somewhat fractious party, however, is a belief in electoral reform.

ELECTORAL REFORM?

British general elections operate on a strict “first past the post” basis. The candidate with the most votes in each constituency wins. Historically, this simplest of systems has been a force for political stability, generally producing governments with a majority large enough to govern by themselves for the whole of their term. Thus, Tony Blair’s Labour party won 55 percent of the parliamentary seats in 2005 with only 35 percent of the national vote.

This extreme, but not entirely untypical result was just the latest in a series bound to raise questions of fairness, questions that have been asked with mounting insistence in recent decades. The old system worked well enough when the two major parties carved up most of the vote between them, but in the multiparty Britain that has been evolving since the 1970s, it has come to look increasingly rough-hewn.

Crucially, first past the post squeezes a third party with appeal across much of Britain, but lacking the regional redoubt enjoyed, say, by the Scottish Nationalists. In short, it squeezes the Liberal Democrats. With 23 percent of the vote in 2010, they only won 9 percent of the seats. That’s why they are yet again calling for some move towards proportional representation as the price for their support. Labour is now desperate enough to make a move in that direction. For the Tories, it’s not so easy. Not only are there good practical arguments for preserving the current system, but also, a change to proportional representation would almost certainly mean that the Right would never rule Britain on its own again.

HAS HER MAJESTY BEEN MINDING THE STORE?

No, the constitutional position is that Gordon Brown continues to serve as prime minister (basically as a caretaker) until a replacement is found. It would take a vote of the newly elected House of Commons to force his government out of office, but Parliament is not due to sit until May 18.

AND THAT DEBT BUSINESS?

The renewed spasm of global financial uncertainty could hardly have come at a worse time. With a public-sector deficit at a Greek 12 percent of GDP, the United Kingdom is highly vulnerable to market panic. International investors have waited for months to see what steps Britain would take to reduce its deficit and when. Neither the Liberal Democrats, nor Labour, nor the Conservatives have come up with a convincing plan, but many market players seem to have taken the view that such discretion was inevitable in a closely fought electoral contest. They appeared to have been reassured by the thought that the Tories would prevail and that somehow “something” would be done. That comforting illusion has now been dispelled. However you parse the election results, there was no majority for spending cuts on the scale that will be needed, and with another election almost certainly in the offing who now will be prepared to suggest them?

Hang onto your hats.