EU: the coalition wants reform

Europe is one of the policy areas where the instincts of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties are furthest apart. It is also one that has torn apart past governments, most famously John Major’s administration. It was also at the heart of many of the heated and personal divisions between Blair and Brown in the early years of Blair’s premiership.

Contemporary circumstances have eased somewhat the practical divisions over Europe between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives may be opposed to the euro on principled grounds which the Liberal Democrats reject. But with it being all but inconceivable that the economic circumstances for joining the euro will be right at any point in the next five years, in practice a majority Liberal Democrat government would have been no more likely to take the country in to the euro than a majority Conservative one.

The scope for further pragmatic common ground on Europe was touched on in the initial coalition agreement with its reference to working for a single home for the European Parliament. Ending the expense, inefficiencies and environmental costs of shuttling the European Parliament between two different countries appeals both to those who want to curb European institutions and to those who believe that for European institutions to prosper they must be more effective and more popular.

This tough love for Europe approach was trailed in Nick Clegg’s contribution to the infamous Orange Book, published back in2004. In fact, the title of the first publication usually listed in Nick Clegg’s CV shows the theme goes back even further, to 2000 with his publication titled Doing Less To Do More: A New Focus for the EU and then his 2003 publication Reforming the European Parliament.

The 2004 Orange Book chapter, written when he was still an MEP, opens with a plea to find a middle ground on Europe: “The British debate about Europe has long been disfigured by intellectual fundamentalism … This is a debate resistant to shades of grey, to the middle ground, to the multitude of subtleties that exist between two extremes.”

He went on to argue that pro-Europeanism should not become an excuse for turning a blind eye to necessary reform: “It is essential that the Liberal Democrats demonstrate that being pro-European is perfectly compatible with the legitimate doubts and quibbles which many people harbour about the EU. Someone who has general reservations about, say, the transparency of EU decision-making, or the impact of the EU regulation, or the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy, must be encouraged to believe that their views are consistent with a generally positive approach to the EU … A true pro-European stance should be creative, innovative and bold in proposing reforms.”

The chapter is not short of pro-European sentiments, going on to debunk many European myths, making points such as that “the Commission is half the size of Birmingham city council” and “the EU’s total budget is a mere 1% of total EU income”.

Yet it also strongly put the case against the EU making decisions which, whilst desirable in terms of their outcome, do not need to be made at the European level: “However desirable it may be, for instance, that the EU has set legislative limits to the time worked by junior doctors, there is no conceivable cross-border justification for this measure. The scandal of excessively long working hours for junior doctors is entirely a problem of the UK government’s making, and it should be UK ministers who are made accountable for that failing. It disrupts the key relationship between voters and those elected to public office if domestic issues with no obvious EU dimension are arbitrarily shuffled off to Brussels for resolution.”

Although there is a swipe at the Conservative Party – which Clegg wrote “remains bizarrely enthralled to an atavistic notion of political sovereignty” – the general tone of modest reform is one that it’s easy to see fit not too uncomfortably with a contemporary Conservative Party that may have William Hague as Foreign Secretary but also remembers the landslide defeat his strongly anti-European campaign led the party to in 2001.

This piece first appeared in Liberal Democrat News.