One of the responses to the Tory rebellion yesterday on the EU referendum vote has – rather predictably – been a call for ‘pro-Europeans’ to be more assertive. Clegg has said Britain should lead and not leave the EU, and over at LabourList Luke Akehurst has a piece entitled “We need to recapture the passionate European voice“.
There are a serious problems with these sorts of responses.
April 2, 2001. Less than a decade ago, but the European Union looked rather different, and the careers of 3 politicians looked rather different.
Enlargement to central and eastern Europe was in process at that time, and the Euro would be found in citizens’ pockets less than 8 months later. Wrangling over the Treaty of Nice the previous December was perhaps a sign of things to come, but with Blair’s Third Way and Schröder’s Neue Mitte in full swing and the war on terror not even thought of it was a generally optimistic period.
Important in today’s political context are pages 40 and 41 from that edition (PDF here), featuring then MEPs Michiel Van Hulten (then 32), Lousewies van der Laan (then 35) and Nick Clegg (then 34). The same van der Laan has recently given the Lib Dems a controversial pep-talk about the coalition (poorly reported in The Guardian here, and in a misogynist fashion in the Daily Mail here (‘glamourous Dutch ally’ – oh, come on)).
The important thing with all three of these young MEPs, written about under the heading “Shaking Up the Brussels Bureaucracy”, is how their approach has changed, and how they have encountered problems. Van der Laan took the same route as Clegg – back to national politics – and ultimately failed to lead D66. Van Hulten also returned to national politics, becoming chairman of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) between 2005 and 2007, and now seems to be doing think-tank work. Clegg, as we know all too well, returned to UK politics, becoming a MP in 2005 and is now Deputy PM and focus of major student anger.
“If you’re young and want to change things, you should follow the power – and power is shifting towards Brussels,” said van der Laan in the article. Seems that all three of them did precisely the opposite, and did they perhaps regret their choices?
And the author of the Time piece back then? Gareth Harding, now (among other things) a lecturer at IHECS, and I’m working with him there next month…
I have a problem. A serious problem. I’m beset by some kind of political depression.
It’s not because I fear the result of the UK’s forthcoming general election – even if Labour wins there will be scant optimism. The battle is about who cuts what, when – aside from occasional forays into whether Brown is a bully or whether Cameron u-turns on marriage tax. Brown is battered, Cameron is weak, and Clegg is non-existent. Will even 50% of the population be enthused enough to vote? A heavily indebted, inward looking, security paranoid, deeply unequal population needs some cause for optimism, but where is that to be found?
It’s good to see that the story that the UK government is cutting funding for the College of Europe is starting to be seen more widely – today’s FT has a story entitled “Funding cut for places at Eurocrat college“. I first wrote about the issue on Friday last week – maybe the FT Brussels people do keep an eye on this blog? Anyway, the FT has a quote from Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg who is an alumnus and he criticizes the UK government’s position – good.
There is one line I really dislike in the FT piece though:
Based in Bruges, it has for 60 years fed prospective civil servants an unabashedly federalist diet of courses for a post-graduate degree in political studies.
Oh come on folks, is that the best that FT journalists can do?
