Telegraph Pundit Is A Europhobic Idiot

Young Dave and his jolly good chaps have taken their ideas for renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU to this week’s European Council summit in Brussels. To no surprise at all, there were more pressing things to think about, mainly Greece and its impending debt repayments (or not), together with the issue of refugees arriving from the Middle East and North Africa. Priorities, priorities.

So Cameron has had to accept that, should he want to have his referendum next year, all the other 27 member states may not have agreed to the renegotiation - whatever that turns out to be. And some of the demands he has no chance of getting this side of hell freezing over, such as opting out of free movement of people, and abandoning the commitment to “ever closer union”. This will be nobody’s fault but his own.

Of course, that is not how the Tory-supporting press sees it, and there is no more slavish backer of The Blue Team and sniffy critic of the EU than Charles Moore (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge) who has shown his displeasure at those dastardly garlic-crunching foreigners as he tells “Europe’s dining-table diplomacy will leave Britain with indigestion. Seduced by EU hospitality, we have ignored our friends in the Commonwealth”.

The logic of Moore’s argument, such as can be ascertained, is thin at best, as witness “All euro notes depict a bridge, but really they should show a dining table. Most EU crisis stories … climax with a dinner”. Yes, we can manage to travel without bridges, can’t we? And the discussion has to come round to his heroine Mrs T: “When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher hated these Euro-scoffs”.

The EU, you see, has a “lack of legitimacy in the eyes of many. It did not arise from the votes or wishes or common practice of the citizens”. Nor did the United Kingdom. Did the electorate vote on union with Scotland, or the partition of Ireland? Heck no, and in any case, even after The Great War, not all adults had the vote anyway. Moore then claims that the EU will replace, or perhaps has already replaced, its member states.

This is drivel, but he saves the most staggeringly mindless non sequitur for last: “New Zealand has half the number of sheep it farmed 30 years ago, but produces the same amount of meat from them, with far greater profit. In a similar period … The EU’s share of world trade has fallen”. If only all we traded in was sheep, eh? “While the Europeans have been eating their dinners, the world has been eating their lunch” adds Moore.

What he is trying to drive at, and it’s a Telegraph favourite, is that we should club together with other who speak English, despite Canada hitching itself to NAFTA, and Australia and New Zealand doing more of their business around the Pacific Rim. Anything other than have anything to do with those ghastly mainland Europeans. It’s a view that ran out of road half a century ago. It contributes nothing to any real world discussion.

But it fills column inches and makes Moore feel important, so that’s all right, then.