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2013 Annual letter from the WPCT Chairman to friends and subscribers
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Much else is also being written to feed
the debate on the EU and Britain's place in it - but you may find some
interesting thoughts in this paper from WPCT Patron Freiherr Helmut von
Verschuer click
here
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Where do we think the EU might be going; and will Britain go there too? Forty Years on: Britain in the EU ......................................................................................... Dear Readers and Friends, I attach the text of an article appearing in the current issue of The Round Table, the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. In mitigation of its length, it is preceded by an Abstract and a list of “Key Words”. The latter can profitably be learned by heart, as a preliminary to the detailed study of the text as a whole . My purpose was to offer a background analysis to the growing debate on how we should manage our involvement in the EU. In particular I recall the far-sighted and outward-looking Declarations of Nice and Laeken, adopted by the European Council at the turn of the century and on the threshold of major enlargement. They received very little attention at the time of their adoption, and have been virtually ignored ever since. Yet had they been followed up, instead of being brushed aside by the single-minded pursuit of a constitution under the banner of President Giscard, the EU would not now be in this sorry state. However, the dramatic developments of the last three weeks have cast a new, and highly positive, light on the situation. The prospects are correspondingly brighter for a distinctive and substantial UK input into the joint effort so obviously required to secure a beneficial outcome from our present toils. Specifically: (1) while reaction and comment on the Prime Minister’s speech of January 23 understandably concentrated at the outset on the referendum undertaking, and what might go wrong, there is a growing understanding of the EU-wide validity of the analysis David Cameron made of the EU’s current woes. There has been a notable absence of any challenge to it. Overall, reaction on the Continent to the speech seemed almost more favourable than in this country; (2) the mould-breaking outcome of the European Council meeting in Brussels on February 7/8 on the Multiannual Financial Framework, is another nail in the coffin of what I describe in the article as the Anglo-Brussels Orthodoxy. The Prime Minister was received with something near adulation as he made his statement on the meeting in the House of Commons; . (3) the full significance of the situation can be grasped more easily by comparing what we see today with the panic-stricken reaction to the Prime Minster’s “veto” of the fiscal compact at the December, 2011, meeting of the European Council. Hands then were freely wrung, and denunciations were plentiful of our self-inflicted “isolation” and “marginalisation” The panic died down in the months that followed. There was a very different son de cloche by the time the Prime Minister reported to the House on the December, 2012, meeting. It was a harbinger of a more balanced appreciation of our EU involvement. (4) in combination with the Prime Minister’s speech, the Foreign Secretary’s Balance of Competences exercise, conducted with both the breadth of perspective and emphasis on detail set out so imaginatively in the the Foreign Secretary’s White Paper of July, 2012 (Cm 8415), will go far to recreate the opportunity for a general re-think of the EU, as called for in the Declarations of Nice and Laeken. And Britain will be at the centre of the process; (5) the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, after their final evidence session with William Hague on February 6, will probably publish their report in the spring. The Committee are exceptionally well placed to appreciate how much our situation in the EU has changed for the better since they launched their inquiry last March. (6) as a schoolboy I remember vividly seeing newsreel pictures of a speech by Winston Churchill at the Mansion House on November 10, 1942, after the Battle of El Alamein. “This is not the end”, he said. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” A fitting comment on where we are today. The decisiveness, and the incisiveness, of these developments in our position in the EU prompt the question how it was that we laboured long under a dreary, defeatist orthodoxy, which went so much against our national grain on the one hand, and which was so anti-democratic, and so inadequate analytically on the other. In the article I suggest an answer from Julius Caesar: “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings”. Comment would be welcome. Yours Peter
Marshall, click
here to read
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