05/03/2014
Nick Clegg
has decided that David Cameron's "peculiar" plans to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership ahead of a referendum by the end of 2017 are "condemned to failure".
This comes in a speech to the Centre for European Reform, in which he declared that "pro-Europeans" (the poor dear means EU supporters) were best placed to modernise the EU. As for Mr Cameron, he would only achieve a "little tweak here, a little tweak there". These would never satisfy hardline Eurosceptics,
Mr Clegg sees the situation in terms of Germans and others saying, "⦠we'd like to keep Britain in the EU, if we can do a little tweak here, a little tweak there we will help". But, he says, "A little tweak here, a little tweak there is not â as far as I can make out â not what large parts of the Conservative party want".
He added: "Just imagine after the next election the Conservative party get a majority, so they have the democratic mandate to pursue their ambition of a repatriation and a wholesale renegotiation of Britain's status within the EU and then put that to a referendum in 2017".
"It would condemn the next government to years and years and years of mind-numbing travel and negotiation from one capital after the next to try and cobble together a package which will never satisfy Bill Cash or Liam Fox".
This is as far as it goes with Mr Clegg, but we also have Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, telling the conference that the prime minister's strategy would fail because there would not be a major treaty change in time for his timetable.
This, on the back of what Lord Kerr and others have been saying, should be the lead, as more and more people attest to the Prime Minister basing his entire EU policy on a fantasy referendum. Yet it remains a bizarre feature of British politics, with media complicity, that a Conservative leader can offer the impossible, without being howled down in a tsunami of mockery.
But that is the way our politics works. Driven by "prestige" and the mind-numbing, conformity of the fourth estate, if a member of the establishment says something with sufficient conviction, the media will give him an easy ride.
Nevertheless, we are getting a slow dawning of reality. Eventually, even the bovine British press will realise that Mr Cameron's 2017 referendum is never going to happen. All we need to do is wait until one or other of the gifted hacks "reveals" it to us plebs, and then we will be allowed to believe it is true.
