The Queen has said what Cameron can’t: the EU is worth fighting for

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/25/queen-cameron-eu-worth-fighting-for

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The Queen, as a constitutional monarch, is supposed to be above politics, but when it comes to the most profound issues facing the UK she isn’t quite. When Downing Street had a panic attack over the Scottish referendum, she was encouraged to speak out on the issue, and – after much semantic to-ing and fro-ing between No 10 and Buckingham Palace – urged voters in Scotland to “think very carefully” about the decision. The code worked: the UK was saved. For the moment at least.

Now, as her nation comes to another fork in the road, she has intervened again, though this time it is less clear at whose behest. At a state banquet in Berlin on Wednesday, she made a speech that went far beyond her usual Christmas Day platitudes. For once, you felt there was real feeling here – and real political meat.

“The United Kingdom has always been closely involved in its continent,” she said. “Even when our main focus was elsewhere in the world, our people played a key part in Europe. In the 19th century in the Russian empire a Welsh engineer called John Hughes founded a mining town which is now Donetsk in Ukraine. And in the 17th century a Scottish publican called Richard Cant moved his family to Pomerania; his son moved further east to Memel and his grandson then moved south to Königsberg, where Richard’s great-grandson, Immanuel Kant, was born.”

Related: The Queen hints at desire for Britain to remain in European Union

In a single paragraph – indeed with that single tiny word “its” – she made it plain that a United Kingdom which stood alone from Europe was unimaginable. She could have said the continent – the us-and-them formulation preferred by Ukippers – but she opted for “its”, not I assume out of a sense of ownership but because we are an archipelago lurking off the north-west coast of a greater land mass. No man is an island, or even a collection of islands.

Her two examples are intriguing. I certainly had no idea that a Welshman founded the troubled city of Donetsk. In citing that mildly esoteric fact, she is subtly reminding us that Ukraine, too, is part of our history; their problems – and their relationship with Russia – should concern us.

The fact about Kant’s antecedents is even more obscure, and presumably included to make the point that Europe’s intellectual history is an amalgam of many elements, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. As with her intervention in the Scottish referendum, she is confronting nationalism, and standing up for the idea of a community of nations and ethnicities.

The Faragists, the Tory Euro-obsessives and little Britishers everywhere will hate this. Palace officials are denying that the speech was an attempt to influence the outcome of the referendum likely in 2017, but there can surely be no doubt that the Queen wants the UK to remain at the heart of European decision-making.

Her age may be the key factor here. She was 13 when the second world war broke out, and her formative years were spent first in the midst of that conflict and then in the shadow of the cold war. “In our lives, we have seen the worst but also the best of our continent,” she concluded in Berlin. “We have witnessed how quickly things can change for the better. But we know that we must work hard to maintain the benefits of the post-war world. We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it in the west as well as in the east of our continent.”

Amid our fallings-out in present-day Europe – serious ones over how to deal with migration, comic ones over the shape of bananas – we forget that the “European project”, to use that mind-numbing term, was born of a determination never again to let the continent become a battlefield.

In the year of the bicentenary of Waterloo, the centenary of the second battle of Ypres – when gas was used for the first time on the western front – and the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war, the Queen has done us a considerable favour by reminding us of the high-minded origins of the EU. Yes, it was established as a common trading bloc, but its underlying purpose was always greater than that: to foster cooperation, to keep the peace, to mould an organisation capable of making a difference in the world.

The European project was born of a determination never again to let the continent become a battlefield

The pettiness of much of the debate over Europe, in the UK at least, in the past 25 years has damaged perceptions of it. The political talk has all been about the size of our rebate, the opt-outs we should strive for, the way we might evade our obligations on the free movement of labour. The naysayers have been in the ascendant; the supporters have too often been cowed, unable or unwilling to articulate the big-picture benefits. There has, one might say, been more cant than Kant.

Given how negative the debate has been, how persistent the voices on the Europhobic right and the protectionist left, it is little short of astonishing that the most recent poll showed a three-to-one majority for staying in the EU. Whether we trust polls any longer is another matter, of course, but if we accept this is somewhere close to an accurate reflection of how the British public views Europe, it would seem that the Queen is indeed speaking for her country.

As rightwing, nationalist parties rise across Europe, it becomes ever more important for mainstream politicians to espouse the idea that standing together is usually better than standing apart. When it comes to migration, for instance, as former home secretary David Blunkett has pointed out, France is much more likely to assist British efforts to stop migrants getting into vehicles at Calais if we are members of a common political and economic organisation.

It is odd that it has been left to the Queen to make a philosophical defence of the EU, filling the vacuum left by politicians. David Cameron, for all his attempts to conceal the fact from his backbenchers, is determined to stay in Europe. He made a point of attending the banquet on Wednesday, and enthusiastically applauded the speech along with the German chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a way, he has made the Queen his proxy. Though it is not clear who wrote the speech – a combination of palace advisers, the British embassy in Berlin and possibly the Queen herself has been mooted – the prime minister will have been aware of its contents and of how it would be interpreted. Because he is scared of Ukip and of his own rightwingers, we have reached the bizarre situation where the Queen can make the profound – and uplifting – political speech that he is incapable of giving.

Despite winning a surprise victory in May and laying waste to his rivals, Cameron is still unable on the great issues to give true leadership. As with Scotland, he has taken a great gamble on the UK’s future by agreeing to a referendum, and once again he needs the help of an elderly woman who thinks that what has been established in the wake of conflict is worth fighting for.