March 4, 2002
How
To Say No?
The
nature of Conservative opposition to the Euro
Does
it matter if you win an important political battle with bad
arguments? The natural Tory reaction, honing straight in on that
evasive little word, 'bad', is to reply: not a bit, winning's the
thing. After all, who's to say what being bad in this context amounts
to? And as a guide to happy, or at least moderately content political
life, it's a reasonable enough approach. After all, being a weary
old cynic is so much more socially acceptable than being a bleary
eyed ideologue, continuously feeling the need to argue out every
position on (and feel free to stifle the yawn here) the basis of
'first principles'. Why, that's the sort of thing libertarians get
up to, and as we all know, they're no better than Marxists – mentally
ill most of them, as I think Russell Kirk once pointed out. A small
corner of the Tory universe, though, likes arguments, and that's
why we're going to have a look at the arguments that Tories advance
against the Euro.
Whether
or not Britain should adopt the single European currency is the
sine qua non of the Tory right, and being so, it ought to tickle
all our most old fashioned impulses, but chiefly that: some things
are just so right, or wrong, that custom and unthought-out wisdom – and all those other things liberals think so damningly encapsulated
as 'prejudice' – alone can determine the issue for you. In the instance
of putting the case against the idea of Britain giving up Sterling
in favour of the Euro, the Conservative Party, and those non-conservative
forces likewise inclined, have rested upon this, whether consciously
or otherwise. Given the hideous and unrelieved unpopularity of the
Tory party, since the 1997 general election the main political vehicle
for resisting the Euro, has been a pressure group called Business
for Sterling. They, as explicitly as they dare admit, are impressively
zen in their approach, in that they 'want to win by not fighting'.
In other words, in everything they do, they aim to convince the
cowardly Mr Blair that holding a referendum on the Euro would be
such a foregone victory for the No lobby that he's much better off
sparing himself this humiliation.
This,
then, would seem an immanently Tory approach, resting, as it does,
upon the proposition that, since preventing the adoption of the
Euro is the end, the means are as irrelevant as ever. However, as
I said, although this has fair claim to being the way most Tories
ought to go about most things, the matter of the Euro deserves a
closer and more rhetorical treatment for two reasons. The first
is to do with its place in the canon of the right, that is to say,
you're, in Britain, on the right only if you're opposed to the Euro.
Given this potential scope for factional excommunication, it's at
least worth examining (if you happen to be party to that faction),
whether the theology is up to scratch.
Much
more important, though, is the second reason why, for once, we should
be bothered about the 'hows' and 'whys' of an argument: the Euro
will only be adopted in Britain after merely the second national
referendum in our history. This vile, unparliamentary device (which
intellectually rigorous British Conservatives ought to, and in all
other circumstances, do, detest) stands between us and the abolition
of the Pound by majoritarian parliamentary fiat, simply because
the late Sir
James Goldsmith, by advocating it through a one-issue party
in the 1997 election, was able to intimidate the hapless John Major
into pledging one prior to any adoption of the Euro. Tony Blair
saw fit to match this pledge, and hence we are where we are today.
Hence, for once, a solitary political argument will stand starkly
over the run of normal politics. This, at least, is the theory.
In truth, as with any political act, it will, within it, subsume
a myriad of political motivations and consequences, but we'll stick
to the imagery of the thing: any referendum campaign on the Euro
is going to come over as being a honking great argument, so are our arguments fighting fit, and Tory as can be?
Happily,
the side supposedly in control of the Tory party at the moment,
is just that small tendency I alluded to above, the one that things
arguments are useful in and of themselves, because, by 'winning'
an argument, you don't just score just one more goal in what is,
in effect, an endless soccer match. Or as the ancients would have
seen it: these Tories, the 'hard men of the Eurosceptic right',
hold themselves to be practical in their advocacy of the primacy
of argument as, by winning a political argument thus, you knock
down your opponent's city and plough salt into the furrows. This,
they further contend, has explicit practical application to the
European issue, where an argument, if not settled conclusively (the
'how' in this theory is always vague, and of the moment), invariably
comes back to bite you on the bottom as firmly as it can. I'm unconvinced.
To take an obvious example, the case Europhiles disingenuously make
about our membership of the European Union itself, is that this
was settled, once and forever, by that first, and to date, unique
national
referendum on membership in 1975. Yet, as I'd hope my Sceptic
confreres would acknowledge after a moment's reflection, this doesn't
appear to have shut us up. We're still arguing, as ineffectually
as ever we've done, for either 'reforming' the EU (i.e. staying
in, but advocating change the rest are never going to agree to),
or, as fringe loons like myself favour, withdrawing from an irredeemably
rotten outfit.
'How
to best withdraw from the EU' is an essay in optimism in its own
right, so I'll come back to that at some future date, and will now,
at last, turn to those Tory Jericho trumpets, the 'No' case. Though
. . . for what it's worth, and the sorry fate of Ulster Unionism,
who may well have copyright protection on the word, tends to bear
this out, lovely and sexy and cool as we on the right think the
word 'No' is, wouldn't 'Yes' have been better? After all, the government
hasn't dared draw up even the wording of a referendum question to
date, so we've been free all this time to pre-emptively campaign
under the slogan, 'Yes: say yes to keeping the Pound'. I'll come
back to why I think that's the core of what a good Tory argument
would have been, but now let's finally, honestly, truly turn to
what Tory arguments are.
The
Arguments
The
first has been the assertion that surrendering the pound would threaten
"the continued existence of our country as an independent nation
state". This, as unhappy coincidence would have it, was also the
argument of choice for those who opposed our entry into the original
EEC, and our signing of the Single
European Act, and our accession to the Treaty
of Maastricht. By the time the Treaty of Amsterdam rolled around,
we'd kinda given up on this line. Defeatist sceptics would, I suppose,
tell you that this is due, plainly enough, to our having definitively
lost our sovereignty. Sadly more plausible is that even Eurosceptics
grow hoarse crying wolf all the time. Obviously, were there still
'national independence' to lose in 1986 (the SEA), it hadn't been
lost in 1972, and if it happened to still be on the go come Maastricht
(92/93), self-evidently it hadn't been extinguished in 1986. This
can be regarded as, according to taste, either, sceptic lie no.
1, or sceptic delusion no. 1. Its fullest form, which really cannot
be sustained for even an instant, is that we are not now an 'independent'
state. If you accept that, well, there's not a lot to say to you.
Our tragedy is that we are of course an independent state, but,
in a sort of metaphor for the individual's Christian experience,
we keep, freely, making all sorts of appalling choices.
To
take the specifics of the 'we stop being an independent nation'
case, as expressed through those arguments opposed to our membership
of the Euro, how exactly does the British government, democratically
mandated (i.e. under the sole circumstance in which this will happen),
deciding to pool its currency in
the Euro reduce, still less, abolish, British independence, since
British independence doesn't depend on the existence of an autonomous
currency?
History
is littered with states that were fully sovereign, partially sovereign,
co-sovereign, or as sovereign as they wanted to be, which lacked
currencies exclusively their own. From the Latin monetary union
of the nineteenth century, to the Sterling bloc of the last (where
central banks in the old dominions were no more than issuing branches
of the Bank of England) sovereignty and money are clearly quite
different propositions. As one painfully close to hand example shows,
it doesn't even take a mutual concurrence of aims, to wit the old
empire, when it comes to this matter.
From
her independence in 1922, as the Irish Free State, to her entry,
as the Republic of Ireland, into the long dead European Monetary
System, the Irish punt was little more than rebadged sterling, maintained
at exact parity with the mother currency. This, therefore, meant
that the Irish state not only lacked a true currency of her own,
but that she was also located in the economic, cultural and military
orbit of a far larger neighbour, whose currency she happened to
be using. Did this, as every Eurosceptic says it would of Britain,
who in their schema, would occupy exactly the same position vis-à-vis
the EU were she to adopt the Euro, reduce Eire to British vassalage?
Uh, no. And here's the reason: sovereignty is not located in some
magic pixie dust to do with symbols or treaties or the disposition
of your currency unit, but in what governments do with it. Dublin,
out of reflexive Anglophobic bigotry, had no foreign policy goal,
between 1922 and 1972, other than asserting her 'independence' from
Britain, no matter how pointless, or even damaging this course was.
She managed it, and it represents a characteristic lack of faith
in Britain that Eurosceptics assume us to be incapable of a similar
act today.
If
the case has just been made – and I accept for most Eurosceptics,
the above arguments are a series of tendentious tomfoolery – that
the Euro does not mean
'the end of Britain', there is a further (Tory) point to be made
about the economic
consequences of Mr Duisenberg. And these have to do with whether,
world without end, floating exchange rates are quite the panacea
contemporary defenders of Sterling make them out to be. Britain's
past economic success certainly didn't occur during a period of
free and competitive currencies, but instead during a commodity
based regime – that being the gold standard. Another argument is
perhaps more allusive: many pro-Sterling types defend the idea of
'market forces' having their say on the pound. But market forces
obviously have little to say on the pound within the UK – what we
have is a state monopoly currency. If currency competition, as opposed
to statist dirigisme, is what you want, then why not have genuinely
private competing currencies within the UK, rather than the state-tender
monopoly? What's so optimal about this particular scale of currency
area? (But that's one to bait the libertarians,
more than anything else.)
Though,
if the cry is, 'popular economic government in a national context, now!', as
our rationale for clinging on to the pound, then quite how does
anyone think we are going to achieve that in a rigorously capitalist
system? Or even the one we have at the moment, in which decisions
on our beloved currency are set not by elected politicians, but
by the entirely unelected governor of the Bank of England?
A
notable difficulty to this debate is that, the, as it were, mainstream
right wing Tory mantra, or to put that marginally less pretentiously,
official Conservative party policy, is 'No to the Euro, but Yes
to membership of the EU'. In the tricky context of opposing the
Euro (habitually, the 'engine of integration', which is held to
be a Bad Thing), but not membership itself, cleverness, a most unTory
vice, is required. Thus: "Britain
needs to stay out of the Euro, but firmly within the EU as a precondition
of offering other nations, especially the applicant countries of
central Europe, hope of an alternative model built on the principle
of freely co-operating states". Er, what? We have to stay in
so that we can offer 'hope'? Gosh, talk about brute realism and
the hard stuff of realpolitik – hope, I mean, did you ever? The only thing that big, tough, proud
Britain does to the ex-Warsaw Pact satellites by herself remaining
in the EU is say, 'no, you can't make it on your own, in a world
of freely cooperating states (you know, much like the one you're
in at the moment), instead you have to join a cartel with constantly
centralising impulses. Sorry'. We could do better for them than
that, and we could do it by getting out.
If
we transcend the petty confines of the continent, as a free and
proud nation presumably must, many sceptics soar in their exegesis
of the pro-Sterling case: "Britain's capacity to make the case for
a better Europe, and stronger West, relies on retaining the freedom
which the euro would remove". Ignoring the dubious mission specs
(if that's what the point of Sterling based 'British independence'
is, then quick, flush the pound down the loo), how does joining
the Euro do any of that? Even if being a member of it did retard
all those wonderful things, how do the vile federastes keep us in after we decide that, actually,
we want out? It is a peculiar form of fanaticism and fantasy that
concludes that our joining the euro would be irrevocable. It might
well be meant to be, but like so much else in life, that's a good
fight talked at the weigh-in, and less than an adequate guide to
in-the-ring performance. It is, to repeat myself, yet again a demonstration
that so much of Euroscepticism stems not from confidence in Britain,
but of fear in what she might do, were she not protected by all
these comforts.
One
always, to me, surprising line of defence for Sterling, often put
forward by the more Manchesterist
of my Conservative brethren, is their total conviction that we can
determine the issue on the grounds of, 'would this be economically
good or bad for Britain?' This bulwark depends totally on the answer
always being that membership would be a bad thing. This is an interesting
assumption for Thatcherites to make, though, as one would have assumed,
given how lean and efficient our economy is, and how flabby and
sclerotic and welfarist all the others are, a Britain-in-the-Euro
would wreck merry havoc
with continental markets; but then I don't understand economics,
so I'll move on.
The
conclusions
For
a final argumentative fallacy, it is surely seriously mistaken to
say that what is at stake (in the 'Euro: yeah or nay' debate) are 'eternal
principles'.
This is quite the reverse of why we should argue against the Euro. I.e.,
our case should be the eminently Conservative
one that, 'we're against this great disruption to the status quo
simply because the case for doing it has not yet been made'.
Another
issue that needs to be considered is this: if we frame all our arguments
against the Euro in such apocalyptic terms – 'the end of the nation
state as we know it' & etcetera – and then, after we stayed out for several more
years, it turns out that, after all, the other European nation states
(the ones within the Eurozone) haven't withered on the vine, then
we're going to look rather silly. There are plenty of good, economically
literate arguments against the Euro, and here
are some, but this, before all else, is a political matter.
We
should be opposed to the euro not because of, in the imagination
of Eurosceptics, what it will do, but because, despite the promises
of europhiles, what it won't
do. This is the negative way, this is the Tory way, and believe
me, this, pace 1975, is by far the safest way to go about our task.
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