"Twelve years ago selected members of John Major’s cabinet gathered at Admiralty House to hear the results of the French referendum on the Maastricht treaty. Eurosceptics like me [the former Defence Secretary] longed for a “non”, and the enthusiasts like Douglas Hurd counted on a “oui”. Major just yearned to be delivered from the nightmare of having to get the Maastricht legislation through his party and parliament. Opinion polls said the result was too close to call. <br />
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Within minutes of the ballot boxes being sealed Major received a call from Paris to tell him that the vote had been carried by 51% to 49%. That surprised me. In my experience of elections it had never been possible to know the outcome of such a close contest so quickly. To this day I harbour shameful doubts about how the French government could be so sure so soon. British ministers exchanged sceptical glances in private as Major went outside to tell the media of the result."<br />
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Those are the words of Michael Portillo, the former Defence Secretary of Her Majesty's Government. <br />
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Can you say MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD in France??<br />
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My God, Frogs. I pray Canard Enchaine has some good investigative journalists that read and understand English...
Michael Portillo: The escape door's open, but Blair stays on as EU hostage
The Sunday Times - Comment
March 27, 2005
London
Twelve years ago selected members of John Major’s cabinet gathered at Admiralty House to hear the results of the French referendum on the Maastricht treaty. Eurosceptics like me longed for a “non”, and the enthusiasts like Douglas Hurd counted on a “oui”. Major just yearned to be delivered from the nightmare of having to get the Maastricht legislation through his party and parliament. Opinion polls said the result was too close to call.
Within minutes of the ballot boxes being sealed Major received a call from Paris to tell him that the vote had been carried by 51% to 49%. That surprised me. In my experience of elections it had never been possible to know the outcome of such a close contest so quickly. To this day I harbour shameful doubts about how the French government could be so sure so soon. British ministers exchanged sceptical glances in private as Major went outside to tell the media of his pleasure at the result.
The French yes vote was a decisive event in Major’s destruction. After that he was condemned to force through the Maastricht ratification bill. It tore the Conservative party to pieces. Today a British prime minister’s fate is once more in the hands of the French electorate. If it votes yes to the European constitution in May, Tony Blair’s premiership may be doomed. He would be obliged to hold a referendum and if that were lost he would be unlikely to survive.
Logic would dictate that he would do everything possible to help the French people to deliver a negative result. It ought also to be a great pleasure for Blair to dish his implacable political enemy, Jacques Chirac, who has staked so much on carrying this French- designed constitution.
On every issue the two leaders are in opposite camps. The French president tries to exclude Britain from any guiding role in Europe. Along with Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, Chirac stoutly resists Blair’s attempts to liberalise the European Union economy. Above all, Downing Street and the Elysée have been at daggers drawn on Iraq.
The term Stockholm syndrome describes a condition in which hostages come to sympathise with their abductors against their liberators. Opinion polls indicate that in France the noes are ahead, which offers Blair a chance to escape having to hold a referendum in Britain. But our prime minister has thrown his weight behind Chirac as he tries to save the yes campaign.
No British interest is served by the new constitution. As Jack Straw said candidly before the EU countries reached agreement on it, “life would go on” even if the new treaty could not be brought into force. I can understand why, perhaps, Blair would not want the British people to vote no if every other member state had ratified. What motive he has for helping yes campaigns in other countries beats me.
One answer may be that Blair, like former prime ministers, has been bamboozled by the Foreign Office, which relentlessly pushes Britain towards ever closer European union. As we awaited that French vote, a number of that cabinet reflected that we had missed our opportunity to lose our chains a few months earlier when Denmark had voted no. That was the moment to pronounce the treaty dead. But the Foreign Office had prepared for a negative result and convinced Major to declare business as usual. The Danes were made to vote again.
It was to have tragic consequences. Major, like Blair today, had found the handcuffs unlocked, the guards asleep and the door to freedom open — and like Blair he chose to remain hostage to a European treaty.
An argument that European integrationists love to use with British audiences is that the EU is going our way. They cite the Lisbon process, a list of measures to liberalise commerce between member states to boost employment and economic growth. But little progress has been made since the programme was agreed five years ago.
Last week Chirac was allowed to use the European summit to grandstand against the services directive. It ought to create 600,000 jobs by allowing consumers to buy professional work from the cheapest providers, who may be based in eastern Europe. The French president called such liberal market principles “the new communism of our age”. With the French referendum looming, Blair acquiesced with the French demand to water down the proposals.
Chirac’s position is neither new nor atypical. When I was employment secretary my German opposite number (in Helmut Kohl’s centre-right administration) declared proudly that he was not a capitalist.
Thanks to years of stolid Franco-German resistance to liberalisation, today Schröder presides over massive unemployment and the EU bumbles along with a growth rate less than half America’s. In his anxiety to give Chirac a quiet life Blair chose last week to capitulate to old Europe on a fundamental matter. It was a timely demonstration that the EU is not moving in Britain’s direction at all.
If Blair wins the general election we shall soon be plunged into preparations for the referendum. It will be a hard sell. It is difficult to see why British voters would rush out to approve creating a post of European president. Naturally they will not then be invited to vote for who should get the job.
There is no reason for the government to be any keener on the constitution than the rest of us. For instance, a European foreign minister will be a nuisance to Blair since he is presently Europe’s pre-eminent figure on the world stage.
The integrationists want a constitution, president and foreign minister because those are the attributes of a nation state. The treaty does not bring about a United States of Europe, but it seeks to accustom us to the terminology and institutions of a country called Europe. It lays the ground for further integration that will doubtless be proposed if the constitution is ratified.
There is no evidence that the British people want to travel towards constructing a country of Europe. The government recognises that. It denies that we are heading there. But why then have a constitution, president and foreign minister? The main reason to vote no is that the EU has proposed no way of making its institutions democratic. That a democratic deficit exists is common ground between integrationists and their opponents. Little is being done to address it. There is no proposal to elect the European commission (which provides appointments for those, like Peter Mandelson, who have failed in national democratic politics).
Our experiences with the European parliament are not encouraging. We vote not for candidates but for parties. Those elected are chosen by the parties, not the people. Voters have little sense of choosing between competing policies in Europe. Elections are held at the same time in every country, but they are really 25 national elections.
Those problems are not easily wished away. Europe lacks a Europe-wide political consciousness. We Europeans do not have the Americans’ sense of nationhood. We have not defined what political values we share. Yes, we are all broadly supportive of liberty and democracy, but a Frenchman and a Briton have fundamentally different views about the power of the state and the citizen’s defences against it.
Blair cannot easily scare Britain into a yes vote by arguing that rejection would be apocalyptic. He once told the Commons that if the UK voted no, “we would sit down and discuss the way forward with other European countries”. He added: “That is what Ireland did after its rejection of the Nice treaty.” Of course Ireland (like Denmark) was persuaded to vote again and bowed the knee to integration at the second time of asking. I hope that is not what Blair has in mind.
He should recall the fate of Gerry Malone, the Tory candidate in Winchester who lost by two votes in the 1997 general election. Malone succeeded in his petition to the High Court to have the result voided because of a procedural irregularity. The people of Winchester were required to vote again six months later. They were offered the same Liberal Democrat and Conservative candidates as before. This time Malone was beaten by 21,556 votes.
The British do not like to be asked the same question twice.
