There’s only one story in the Sunday papers this morning: Nick Clegg’s”fury” (the Observer) at David Cameron’s refusal on Friday to sign up to a revision to the Lisbon treaty. For the first 19 months of its existence, the coalition has managed to choreograph the tensions between its constituent parts reasonably effectively, helped, it has to be said, by the Lib Dem leader’s emollience. As Marina Hyde put it in the Guardian yesterday, Clegg’s instruction to his party in government appears to have been to “take bucketloads of crap and wield none of the power”. But not any more, if newspaper reports are to be believed.
According to the Observer‘s source: “[Clegg] could not believe that Cameron hadn’t tried to play for more time. A menu of choices wasn’t deployed as a negotiating tool but instead was presented as a take it or leave it ultimatum. That is not how he would have played Britain’s hand.” Clegg is said to fear that Cameron’s flounce in Brussels on Friday will leave Britain the “lonely man of Europe”. This is a view echoed by one of his predecessors as leader of the Lib Dems, Paddy Ashdown. In a piece for the Observer that runs beneath the headline “We have tipped 38 years of foreign policy down the drain”, Ashdown argues that Cameron succeeded merely in “isolat[ing] [Britain] from Europe and diminish[ing] ourselves in Washington”:
[W]e have used the veto – but stopped nothing. In order to “protect the City” we have made it more vulnerable. At a time of economic crisis, we have made it more attractive for investors to go to northern Europe. We have tipped 38 years of British foreign policy down the drain in one night. We have handed the referendum agenda over to the Eurosceptics. We have strengthened the arguments of those who would break the union.
These latter, Ashdown argues, include not only the 81 eurosceptic Tory MPs who are now effectively “running” the prime minister, but also Alex Salmond, for whom the fiasco on Friday represents an “unconvenanted gift”: “If England is to be out of Europe, why should Scotland not be in?”
What of Labour? Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander gave a rather assured performance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show this morning, arguing that the upshot for Britain of the negotiations in Brussels last week were “economically inadequate and politically disastrous”. There was a deal to be made, Alexander insisted, but Cameron never wanted to make it: “This was about the politics of the Conservative Party.” That’s true, but Labour oughtn’t to derive too much comfort from their opponent’s misfortune. Andrew Marr asked, reasonably enough, what deal Britain might have made. Here Alexander was evasive, content simply to point out that there are no “legal protections” for the City of London in place today that weren’t in place on Thursday.
Much the most interesting part of the interview concerned Alexander’s view of the deal that was cooked up by the other European leaders, with Germany and France in the vanguard. As Owen Jones pointed out in a blog here on Friday, “François Hollande – the Socialist candidate for the French presidency – has already spoken out against a treaty cooked up by Europe’s overwhelmingly right-of-centre governments,” one that effectively outlaws Keynesianism. Hollande has argued that deficit reduction in Europe is a necessary but not sufficient condition of economic recovery: “Without growth, budgetary readjustment on its own will not achieve the desired results.” Alexander, for his part, wondered how the “austerity package” agreed on Friday, which will work for Germany, will work for Italy or Greece. It’s a good question, and one that Labour, together with its social-democratic partners in Europe, ought to pressing in the coming months.
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