This latest Tory rebellion was not just cynical, it was completely bogus

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/04/andrew-rawnsley-tory-eu-rebellion-cynical

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My congratulations to Mark Reckless – you couldn't make up a more splendid name for a Conservative MP – and the 52 other Tory rebels who teamed up with Labour against their government over the size of the European Union budget.

They have inflicted upon David Cameron the first parliamentary defeat of his time at Number 10. They have humiliated their leader, which was at least half the point of their mutiny for the significant number of them who loathe the prime minister with a passion almost as intense as their hatred for Brussels. They have added to the growing sense that the Conservative party is becoming ungovernable. That will not be terribly helpful to the future electoral prospects of their party, but they seem to like promoting that impression anyway. They have further enfeebled David Cameron's already weak negotiating position with other European leaders.

Above all, I congratulate the Tory rebels on making it more probable that the British financial obligation to the European Union will increase. Yes, you read that correctly the first time. By demanding an unrealisable cut, these supposed enemies of the cost of Europe have actually increased the likelihood that the British taxpayer will contribute more to the coffers of Brussels.

EU leaders meet every seven years to settle a multi-annual budget. At the best of times, this negotiation is complex and difficult. Budget summits are what diplomats call a "two shirter" because the leaders usually stay up all night trying to hammer out a deal. Sometimes, the host refuses to serve them dinner in the hope that, if all else fails, sheer hunger will force them to agree.

I am sure that David Cameron would have liked to persuade the rest of Europe to cut the budget. And you do not have to be a Eurosceptic to ask whether all the money is spent sensibly, nor do you have to be a Eurosceptic to question why, when people across Europe are suffering the pain of austerity, the only budget that should be protected is that of the EU. There is a particularly compelling case for reducing the absurdly large proportion of it that is paid out to subsidise farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy, which still gobbles up nearly 40% of the money. But a serious leader has to be realistic and there has never been a chance – nada, none, zilch – of finding enough allies in Europe to secure a real-terms cut.

A coalition of southern and eastern European states is actually pressing for an increase and the Germans, whom the British had originally thought might be allies on this issue, are not sounding encouraging. So before the rebellion, the very, very best that Mr Cameron might have hoped to secure was a real-terms freeze and that looked hard to pull off when the British government was taking the toughest position of any member state.

Thanks to the rebellion, he will not now be able to sign up to an agreement that involves even the smallest rise above inflation and, even if he could persuade his fellow leaders to freeze the budget, which would be a better outcome than any British prime minister has ever achieved, he would still face the possibility of the deal being thrown out by the Commons.

Much of Europe has virtually given up on Britain, but they still pay a bit of attention to what is going on across the Channel. Aware of how the Commons has voted, knowing the risk that even if an agreement can be reached at the summit the British parliament may reject it anyway, other European leaders now have even less incentive to move in the direction of the British position.

Well-informed observers think that the most likely outcome of the summit later in the month is no deal at all. What happens in the event of deadlock? There will probably be an attempt to agree an emergency budget to tide them over for a year. That would be decided by qualified majority voting; Britain would have no veto.

If they can't agree even to that, then the EU's rules say the budget will be set by autopilot, which means the 2014 budget would be the 2013 budget plus inflation. Which is why I congratulate the Tory rebels on making it more likely, not less, that the British taxpayer will end up contributing more to the EU.

"Are we going to continue to ask families throughout this country to stop putting new shoes on their children's feet in order to pay for the very large Mercedes fleet in Brussels?" demanded the Tory rebel, Mark Pritchard, before voting in a way that makes it all the more likely that those limos will carry on purring at the expense of the shoeless children he claims to care so much about.

Did the rebels not know this? Were they not also aware that putting Britain in an obstructionist position on the budget makes it even less likely that other member states will be co-operative when David Cameron starts to reveal which powers he would like to "repatriate" to Britain?

Perhaps some of the dimmer members of their gang acted in ignorance of the consequences of demanding the impossible. But I am confident that the vast majority of them were perfectly conscious of what happens if there is deadlock over the budget. Veteran Europhobes such as Bill Cash have made it their life's work to understand the mechanisms of the EU in the most arcane detail. They can bore for the world on the subject, as can the younger ones such as Mr Reckless. They made their impossibilist demand not oblivious to the consequences, but fully conscious of them. Stalemates and bust-ups, especially battles that set Britain against everyone else, serve the agenda, or so they hope, of putting us on a trajectory to exit the EU.

Their rebellion would not have had the capacity to defeat the government without the support of the Labour party. Labour, too, is in some agonies about Europe, though its splits are not as deep and noisy as those that seize the Conservatives. Ed Miliband has so far chosen to skate over those divisions rather than confront and resolve them.

It is an interesting fact about Mr Miliband that, more than two years into his time as Labour leader, he has not made a single speech about Europe. Allying himself with the Tory rebels did not mark a radical new departure in Labour thinking. There was an opportunity to defeat the government and hurt the prime minister that was just too tempting to resist.

But there will be a future price to pay for a tactical hit that has drawn attention to the absence of any strategic vision from Labour's leader about Britain's future relations with its continent. Mr Miliband and his colleagues were also perfectly aware that the consequence of demanding an impossible deal is no deal at all. They, too, know how the EU works. The Labour leader and Ed Balls were on Gordon Brown's team during many a negotiation in Brussels. The shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, was minister for Europe when Tony Blair negotiated for Britain at the last multi-annual budget summit in 2005.

So when Mr Cameron comes back without the budget cut they demanded, what is Labour going to do? Having previously attacked him for "leaving the room" and marginalising Britain, will Ed Miliband renew his unholy alliance with the Tory Euro-haters and demand that the prime minister uses the veto, isolating Britain still further – a policy that will end up increasing the budget anyway? Or will Labour ultimately switch position and support a budget deal that is not a cut, executing a reverse ferret on the posture the party struck last week?

Labour frontbenchers have so far declined to say what they will do, knowing that whichever answer they give will not make them look good.

Labour will also have to decide whether last week was a one-off or whether it is going to make a habit of forming opportunistic alliances with the Tory Euro-haters. Battles over Europe are going to erupt for the rest of the coalition's life. Each time they do, many will see them as a repeat of the self-destructive convulsions that consumed the Conservatives over the Maastricht Treaty in the 1990s. Yet that comparison is really quite misleading.

In John Major's time, only a tiny minority of Tories wanted to give up on the European Union altogether and quit. Under David Cameron, the exiters now represent a substantial proportion of the Conservative party and they are not balanced by a cohort of pro-European Tories. Of that once dominant group, there is Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine and that's about it. We may not have quite got to the point where a majority of Conservative MPs are withdrawalists, but we get closer to it by the week.

One senior minister reckons that were a referendum on membership to be held tomorrow, at least five members of the cabinet would vote to leave.

Ed Miliband taunted David Cameron: "It's John Major all over again."Oh no, it isn't. It's much worse than that.