Over-egging the pudding

The European debate (or rather the EU debate) is an obsession of the right-wing where the split is not between pro-EU advocates and anti-EU proponents, but between genuine EU-sceptics like David Cameron and EU-phobes in the boondocks of the Conservative Party and in UKIP.  Ed Miliband hasn’t committed to a referendum and for that he is lambasted as being a ditherer.  However, Miliband knows that were he to do so, he would get a kicking in the polls in mid-term blues rather than the actual question of our place in Europe, the UK would exit and he might not recover in time for the next general election – he has precious little to gain and almost everything to lose on an issue only 3% of the British public view as their top priority.  Secondly, the fringes of Labour are really just that – the EEC/EC debate was settled in the Labour Party during the 1980s.  So Miliband shouldn’t gratify the internal divisions of the Tories – he just has to make other issues take centre-stage.

In the echo chamber of the right, moderate voices work themselves into a lather as they talk to each other.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, comically, has been predicting the death of the Euro for four years (or, occasionally, sounding warning signs of a Chinese slowdown), stretching his licence as an economist and even J.K. Galbraith’s quip that economic forecasters were put on this earth to make weather forecasters look good.  But you expect it of him and one might as well humour the guy, as where else would he be able to get if off his chest to the masses.  Jeremy Warner though I hold in far higher esteem but recently he has become something of a crank on Europe, having the temerity to question the credentials of the CBI just because they expressed that Britain was better inside the tariff barrier helping make the rules, rather than outside and being forced to adopt them anyway.  The Telegraph editorial has always been sympathetic to those bitterly opposed to the EU project of ever closer union, but hitherto has always kept itself on the right side of the facts.  Yet it shows the level of the debate when it talks of the “European-imposed Human Rights Act.”  The HRA was adopted by a British (Labour) government of its own free will, irrespective that the European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU (and therefore a referendum on the EU) and that the European Convention of Human Rights (which the HRA was the vehicle for its effective incorporation into British law) was, in fact, largely drafted by the British after World War Two.  It is right to keep the heat on the EU as it is on all bureaucrats and politicians but a tone of moderation (and even, shock horror, listing positive EU and ECHR achievements from time to time) would win far more friends than is currently the case.  This is unlikely because, ironically, The Telegraph doesn't go far enough for those further on the right in print.