European Affairs

It is a matter of great regret to me that the Government's policy can best be characterised as "no compromise with the electorate." Irrespective of whether we agree with the results of the recent European elections, we are beholden to pay some attention to them. It might very well be okay for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to take the view that the people have let down the Government, but it is not appropriate for an elected Government to take that view. As the Foreign Secretary was outlining the Government's policy on the forthcoming European Council, it struck me that not a single word, jot or comma had been changed as a result of the European elections. Not the slightest attention had been paid to those results, and that is a cause for some considerable concern. The party that secured the most votes would generally be seen by the public to be Eurosceptic, and the party that got the second highest number of votes would generally be seen to be "withdrawalist". The Government were characterised in Europe by two things: first, that they were enthusiastically in favour of ever-greater union; and, secondly, that, having promised a referendum and then refused to provide one, they were damned by it. The party that is most enthusiastically in favour of the European project, the Liberals, came quite a bad fourth. That balance of voting was not just simply an act of God, random or due to the expenses scandal; it represented a clear pattern of political opinion in the United Kingdom.