23/10/2012
Having refused to give the British people a referendum on EU membership, the Conservatives are racking up the rhetoric in an attempt to reassure their dwindling band of supporters that, despite all evidence to the contrary, they really are eurosceptics.
Completely ignoring the intense manoeuvrings of the "colleagues", who are working their way towards a new treaty, Tory strategists have thus chosen to make as their pretend "Alamo", the multi-annual budget negotiations, which are set to determine EU spending over the next seven-year cycle.
Thus, in a carefully co-ordinated publicity drive â with which the legacy media have happily fallen in â we see William Hague flagged up as going to Berlin today to give the Huns what-for, something which plays so well back home.
There, he "will say" (and in fact has just said) â as told by
diverse hacks, exercising their copy and paste skills â that "People feel the EU is a one-way process that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everythingâs decided by the EU". So the narrative goes, Mr Hague "will say" that the system needs to change: "If we cannot show that decision-making can flow back then the system will become democratically unsustainable".
This, of course, is complete garbage. The system is already "democratically unsustainable" and always has been. The idea that it will
become unsustainable is manifestly absurd.
More to the point, there is going to be no "flow-back". This is the Tory "renegotiation" meme, and it ain't going to happen. But then, such extrusions are not meant to make sense. They are sound-bites for domestic consumption, which the legacy hacks
gaily trot out
without taxing a single brain cell in the process.
The purpose of the exercise is not to inform people or even to achieve something constructive. It is merely the "dance of the seven veils" that the Conservatives play at, in an attempt to show that they are "being tough" about "Europe".
If it was real, of course, it would be all over the German press, but I have been through all the usual suspects and can find no mention of Hague's visit. We don't even get to know who Hague is meeting, or what he is actually doing in Berlin. But then, why should we? This is for British audiences, not the Germans.
In due course, though, the budget issue will be resolved. Mr Cameron will have been seen to take a "robust line", and to have laid down the law, spinning furiously to maximise what political gain there is to be had.
And so the theatre of the absurd continues. The politicians posture and prance, and the media
claque waves its programmes and applauds. But it is not real. It isn't real at all. They are taking us for fools, the whole lot of them.
