27/07/2015
It was on 21 June that Mr Cameron
was reported as seeking "associate membership" of the EU, and then only a few days later that we got confirmation in the
Financial Times that the Prime Minister was expecting to go to the country without a new treaty under his belt.
Confirmed at the
European Council,
this then pointed to the near certainty that Mr Cameron would have to rely on a declaration by the "colleagues" of a new treaty, announced before the referendum but with the negotiations starting afterwards.
Last Sunday, we also had
Hollande indicating that he has fallen into line with Germany, to accept an
avant garde Europe, effectively kicking into touch any idea that the EU is prepared to consider "reform" of the nature being suggested by the Conservative government.
There can be absolutely no doubt that this is on the agenda for the next treaty, centred around the idea of
core Europe, which has been kicking around
for many years and which is being addressed by the policy and constitutional experts as
differentiated integration - the next big challenge facing the Union.
One would hardly expect this to appear in the British media although, ironically, there is a reference in the
Financial Times only in relation to the dishonesty of the UK debate on "Europe" (aka the European Union, if we are going to be scrupulously honest).
However, it is not necessary to be imbued with even the slightest tinge of Europhilia to agree that the debate is indeed being handled in a thoroughly dishonest way â by politicians and their handmaidens in the British media.
And that must be the case with
yesterday's report (pictured, top) that Chancellor George Osborne is "take Britain's case for European Union reform to Paris", seeking support from his French counterpart "for a deal the Conservative government can put before voters" in the promised referendum.
After
Hollande's statement last Sunday, not by any possible stretch of the imagination can anyone believe that the French â or any other EU Member State â is going to sit down with the UK seriously to discuss "reform". Mr Osborne's actions are such a transparent charade that no one should be able to report it seriously. Yet the legacy media
trots it out with no hint that reform is no longer an issue - if it ever was.
What this amounts to is that Mr Osborne and his fellow politicians, and the media which so uncritically reports them, are taking us for fools. Treating us with utter contempt, they assume that we are so ignorant and untutored that we cannot see through the charade and do not realise that everything we are being told lacks substance.
The same goes for the facile story in the
Independent on Sunday. This paper wants us to believe â without a shred of evidence other than the word of a journalist who was convinced that there would be a
hung parliament at the general election â that the referendum poll will be in June of next year.
Nothing in politics can ever be totally ruled out, but there would have to be some very substantial evidence offered before the
IoS story could be given any credence, especially as recent events tend to confirm the best time frame as October 2017, or thereabouts.
Sadly, though, there are those who are prepared to take such reports at face value. Few seem to stop and think that a Europhile newspaper would enjoy seeing the "no" campaign peak too early and waste its energies fighting an early referendum. Thus, there are eurosceptics who don't bother to question media motivations when they pass on tendentious stories, despite their lacking any credible evidential base.
To that extent, politicians and the media get away with taking the electorate for fools because so many behave like fools. They may call themselves eurosceptics, but actually lack scepticism. They are gullible to the point of naivety, accepting everything they are told, as long as it comes from a "prestigious" source, like a newspaper.
As to the date of the referendum, the best remains autumn 2017, during the UK tenure as "rotating president" of the EU council. It will come after the "colleagues" have announced their intention to hold a treaty convention. It will, I fear, put associate membership officially on the agenda only weeks before the poll.
If he wasn't trying to take us for fools, Mr Cameron would already be identifying this as the outcome he is most likely to be asking us to approve. But there again, deceit has been writ through the project ever since it started, so if we are the fools, the likes of Mr Cameron are most certainly the liars. The combination, though, does not make for a happy mix - too many people seem content to be led by the nose to a humiliating defeat.
