Brexit camp might win the day if economy is in doldrums by 2017

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/15/brexit-economy-cameron-eu

Version 0 of 1.

David Cameron’s half-baked renegotiation strategy for keeping Britain in the EU gets deeper into trouble with every day that passes, even without the election of genial Jeremy “Is it Yes or No?” Corbyn to the Labour leadership, or the TUC cutting up rough over Europe on Tuesday. Foreigners have their Corbyns and Nigel Farages too.

A European diplomat chum explained the other day that, sunk in assorted crises as the EU is - not all of their own making - some member states are fed up with Britain’s self-absorbed agenda of divisive concessions and disruptive treaty changes which they mostly don’t want. In Brighton for its annual bean, the TUC decided it didn’t want them either if they eroded social protection.

Related: Trade union members could vote for UK to leave European Union

We could even call it Dave and George’s selfie agenda. PM and chancellor rock up to summits or bilateral sessions in foreign capitals, take a photo of themselves in front of a famous local monument, with or without local grandee, then come home and say they are winning allies for reform. “It’s all about me.”

Well, maybe. My European pal, who wants an outward-looking Britain inside the EU tent - “Don’t leave us alone with France,” says Berlin - suggests that more short-sighted ministers and officials in some capitals have got to the point where they don’t care whether we stay or leave. Sabotage, anyone?

Angela Merkel, Germany’s cautiously level-headed chancellor, is an ally, but has been in power for 10 years and wants to leave office before it goes bad for her, as it did for overstayers Thatcher (11 years), Mitterrand (14) and Kohl (16). France’s François Hollande is facing re-election or replacement in 2017. He is a fading force too. Poland may soon have a nationalistic government of the right, Spain one of the left. It’s hard to see them breaking a leg to help the Selfie Brits, whose energy might be better spent preventing Scotland leaving the UK – something they don’t want either because most have similar separatist tendencies.

So some such ministers may even be planning to make deliberately unhelpful remarks, SNP-style, during the UK’s 2017 referendum campaign to hasten the Brexit process, my pal suggests. Such as? “The renegotiation was a fix” and “Britain got nothing of value out of the renegotiation”.

The Europeans know to their cost how predatory Fleet Street can be and how EU-sceptic the oligarch press barons are, as they were not during the Tony Benn-inspired 1975 referendum which endorsed our 1973 entry by a ratio of 2:1. They may dimly remember Boris Johnson, the arch Euro-opportunist, making his name as an “EU straight bananas” Brussels correspondent in the early 90s.

For all his foolishness Ed Miliband knew who his enemies were. They included the medley of tax-shy rascals, phone-hacking foreigners and pseudo non-doms who own most of our great newspapers. Actually Tony Blair thought much the same about them, but realised that when you’re in a cage with a randy gorilla you have to pass the bananas to distract it from having you for lunch and again for tea.

In fact Miliband was more Blairite than Blair in opposing Cameron’s referendum wheeze, since Blair had conceded the principle over the EU’s aborted constitution, sunk by French and Dutch voters in 2005 who gave him a get-out card. The press never forgave him that either.

But nice Jeremy Corbyn, who gave me a friendly pat on the back at Westminster on Monday - I told him he no longer has time to waste on me - seems to be in danger of re-adopting Neil Kinnock’s boycott Murdoch strategy of the 80s, a mistake then and now. It may take time, but he must develop a coherent strategy to engage with the media, not with me, but certainly with Andrew Marr whose BBC sofa he vacated on Sunday.

Corbyn’s official position on Europe is what I will kindly call evolving. He says he’d like us to stay in a reformed EU. Well, most people outside Ukip’s woad-wearing tendency and the wilder shores of Tory little Englanderism can probably say yes to that.

It’s what Hilary “A Benn, but not a Bennite” Benn said on radio and TV this week as the boy scout in him struggled not to admit that Corbyn’s appointment of abrasive John McDonnell as shadow chancellor was a bad idea. It reminded me of the 70s, when his old dad struggled on TV to be disloyal to Labour cabinet colleagues without going too far and losing his cabinet job. Hilary’s struggle was more attractive.

But fighting to stay in “in all circumstances” - Benn’s phrase - was not what McDonnell was saying, nor what JC told peers and MPs at their private meeting on Monday night, by all accounts. Whatever the bottom-up, touchy-feely image Corbyn wants to convey - remember, he even touched me - message discipline remains important in the age of 24/7 TV and especially in the maelstrom that is social media, a hotbed of paranoia and betrayal.

It’s fair enough not to give Cameron a free pass on Europe, allowing him to take Labour’s support for granted in the referendum campaign, as McDonnell has said. Simon Jenkins certainly thinks so. But McDonnell and Corbyn’s basic equivocation about EU membership – consistent with their Bennite siege economy, anti-capitalist past – is no longer just a matter of esoteric discussion among leftwing dissidents for whom the narcissism of small difference is a central tenet of doctrinal squabbles.

As with his equivocation over Nato - Tom Watson is adamant that JC won’t campaign to quit - foreign diplomats will be obliged to try to make sense of it all for their masters at home. Why should Paris or Berlin waste political capital - they have suspicious voters too - on concessions to Britain when it may all be pointless?

The US is already pretty disappointed with the Brits’ feeble military performance in Iraq, Libya and Syria, even with a cost-cutting Tory government in power, as I was reminded at the launch of something called the British Influence Security Forum on Monday. Inexperienced MPs who prattle on about deeper UK involvement in Syria don’t yet grasp how merely symbolic much of it is nowadays. Vladimir Putin gets it, so does Hawaii’s Barack Obama. Does Jez?

This incoherence is not confined to the left. Cameron’s own ministers are as split on the merits of in/out as they are on refugees, students and other would-be incomers - Treasury and business department v Home Office. Hostile voters regard “Europe” as a euphemism for “immigration” and are unimpressed by rising numbers, often heedless of the humanitarian cause.

The EU’s failure to craft a coherent response to the crisis of mass movement from Africa and the Middle East is tailor-made for Ukip loudmouths. Germany has just changed its mind and closed borders. In or out of the EU, it will require a European response, not merely national ones. Farage is as incoherent on it as the rest.

A perfect storm is brewing. Cameron has reportedly told big business to keep its head down, though when Regent’s University London questioned experts, they found that most trade bodies for modern businesses that matter remain in favour of continued UK membership. So did the government’s own balance of competences review last year. Even mouthy entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers know deep down they are better off in.

But if the Tories are split, the pro-EU Lib Dems are back in the invisibility zone and Labour is equivocal, it’s easy to see how the Brexit camp might win the day if the economy is again in the doldrums by 2017. Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP will campaign to stay in, a mixed blessing in England.

Some Tories argue that a Corbyn-Farage-led campaign to take Britain out might be the best way to save Cameron’s EU bacon when the time comes. Don’t bank on it. Don’t bank on anything except unforeseen trouble.