30/03/2014
The only real value of Lord Ashdown,
writes Booker, is that he is one of those politicians we can use as a touchstone. Whatever he says about anything, we can usually assume the opposite is true.
So when, amid all the synthetic excitement generated by Wednesday's confrontation on "Europe" between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg, this Lib Dem panjandrum pronounced that the only real winner was "the British public", the very reverse was the case.
Again the only real message to emerge from their exchanges was how far the vacuity of what passes for our national "debate" on the EU stems from the fact that our politicians have never properly grasped what the EU is about, and how far it has degraded our political life.
The most revealing moment came when Mr Clegg wheeled on yet again what has become the only real argument the Europhiles put forward for why Britain must remain a member of the EU: the claim that "three million" jobs depend on our trade with the EU â so that, if we were to leave, we would be excluded from its single market, implying that all those jobs might suddenly disappear.
There is no better measure of how unreal our politics have become than how this fatuous mantra has been allowed to remain at the centre of the debate. It originated, of course, 15 years ago, when it was picked up by "Britain in Europe" from a study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) as the basis for its slogan "out of Europe, out of work".
If we left the EU, we were told, millions of jobs would be lost. This was such a travesty of what the NIESR actually said â that our withdrawal would, in the long run, have little effect on employment â that its director called it "pure Goebbels⦠in many years of academic research I cannot recall such a wilful distortion of the facts".
But when Mr Clegg again played this trick last week, Mr Farage was found equally wanting, in failing to make the crucial point that it is perfectly possible to trade freely with the single market without having to be a member of the EU. Dozens of countries around the world already do so, led by the two most prosperous countries in Europe itself, Norway and Switzerland.
Not the least disconcerting thing about Ukip and my friend Mr Farage, dedicated as they are to extricating Britain from the EU, is that they do not make this the centrepiece of their policy: that we could continue to trade with the EU just as we do now, simply by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and joining Norway and Switzerland outside it as members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Furthermore, this would give us considerably more influence over deciding the single market rules than we have now, with only 8 per cent of the votes; not only because EFTA is fully consulted before those rules are agreed, but also because, as a sovereign nation, we would sit in our own right at the "top tables" of all those international bodies such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, whence many of the rules now originate.
By hammering this home, UKIP and the Tory Eurosceptics could, at a stroke, pull the rug from under what, for Europhiles such as Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron, has become almost their only argument for Britain staying in. It is their success in keeping this out of the debate that more than anything condemns it to such wearisome sterility.
What we heard on Wednesday was like listening to two bores banging on in a pub. Neither really landed any serious blow on the other, because neither was remotely engaging in the reality of what we are up against. It is unsurprising that our national debate has become so trivial and so tedious. It is this which makes the "British public",
pace Lord Ashdown, the only real losers.
