Just as it is increasingly hard to imagine the Maily Telegraph having once been a paper
of record, today’s crude and inaccurate rant by Charles Moore – on the subject
of the paper’s favourite bête noire, the EU – makes it increasingly hard to
imagine that he once edited it. A decent journalistic grounding preceded by
Eton and Trinity College Cambridge has counted for nothing.
“David
Cameron can prove de Gaulle was right about us all along” reads the
headline, as Moore harks back fifty years to when the French President vetoed
Harold Macmillan’s attempt to join the then EEC. Moore claims this was because
de Gaulle thought the UK would never commit to Europe as fully as France and
Germany. But he is plain flat wrong.
De Gaulle had one very straightforward reason for his
stance: that the UK had the chance to join the European Coal and Steel
Community (ECSC), and then the European Economic Community (EEC) at their
inception, in 1951 and 1958 respectively. The then Labour and Conservative
Governments missed the boat and we stayed out. For de Gaulle, that was that.
It should surprise no-one that there was no expansion of the
EEC until after de Gaulle had left office. So Moore is basing his analysis on a
false premise, but that is a minor consideration compared to the thoroughly
unfortunate language deployed, after the obligatory misinterpretation of Margaret
Thatcher’s Bruges speech of 1988 as a “cry
of pain”, which it was not.
So, after another obligatory prediction that the Euro will
collapse – how many of those have we had so far? – Moore tells his readers that
Harold Wilson “also led a Eurosceptic
party”. Baloney. Wilson’s problem was that Labour was at the time split on
Europe – not one thing or the other (where does he think Roy Jenkins, Denis
Healey and Shirley Williams were in 1975?).
Then comes the abuse. “The
European Union is becoming ... a tourist destination, not a great power”
(he wouldn’t dare say that about the USA, for instance), “Europhile fellow-travellers” (they’re really all Commies), and to
round it all off, “those of us who want
our country back” (Moore clearly fancies following Daniel Hannan onto Fox
News Channel (fair and balanced my arse)).
But, like all the others on the Europhobic fringe, Moore
cannot so much as approach what he knows would deflate his balloon at a stroke:
whatever defiant noises Young Dave makes whenever and wherever he delivers his
jolly good speech, one financial institution or carmaker even suggesting they
are about to up sticks and move to Spain or Portugal will kill their campaign
of hot air stone dead.
There is no credible Plan B on the EU. And no amount of abuse will create one.
Lord Snooty was prating about a thousand years of history in the Spectator. Just whose thousand years were these? Not mine since for a good 700 of them my country was trying to stay clear of the English co-prosperity sphere and had to bribed in to save the Protestant succession thank you. In passing, it's interesting to note that many of the Tory unionist politicians use 180 degree different arguments to preserve the union and to leave the EU.
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