I was, to say the least, surprised to read William Hague’s speech to the Royal United Services Institute this week which outlined the EU’s “enormous importance to the United Kingdom and its foreign policy”. It was also interesting to note that William Hague went out of his way to wish Catherine Ashton well in her role as EU High Representative. Perhaps he should have a word in the ear of some of his MEPs, who have been anything but supportive.
Hague’s speech demonstrates that, with a General Election approaching, Tory flip-flops on key policy areas know no bounds. For the past two years Hague himself has been scrambling around Europe making alliances with unsavoury parties from the fringes of far-right politics in order to create the Tories’ new European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament. In doing so, he seriously undermined the credibility of the Conservative Party in the eyes of key European leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, both of whom made known their dismay that the Tory MEPs were being withdrawn from the mainstream centre-right EPP group to which their political parties belonged.
This policy, albeit entirely misguided, has won Cameron and Hague a lot of support from the Tory grassroots, with ConservativeHome website reporting that 45 of the new Tory candidates for the forthcoming general election listed repatriation of powers from Europe as their top priority. As regular readers will be aware, we all know how realistic that hope is.
Cameron and Hague are walking a tightrope here. On the one hand, they have done very well out of EU-bashing with their grass-roots supporters over the past two years. On the other hand, they have alienated important allies throughout Europe to the detriment of the British national interest.
William Hague’s speech dripped with hypocrisy and was surely a belated attempt to undo the damage their anti-EU stance has done.
I doubt that leaders throughout Europe will have such short memories. And I can only imagine what the new breed of anti-EU Tory candidate makes of this U-turn.
I predict Cameron will lose and disappear into some money-making oblivion and Hauge will lead the Tories in the election after that.
Let us hope there will be STV at that stage so that never again there will be a Tory majority6 in Parliament without 50% of the electorate.
Mary, I can’t really share your surprise at the Tories and I never expect any consistency or any correlation between what they do and they say they will do.
This is particularly apparent with matters concerning the EU. They are, in my view, the party of Europe. They took us into it and although they always insist that they are against further integration they always sign up to everything.
It is so dishonest of them They make EUsceptic noises to steal votes from UKIP but it is just noise, they will go with the EU flow. As you correctly pointed out, they will not suceed in repatriating any powers from Europe – it is all set in stone now.