There’s some bon mot out there which teaches us that heroes always end up dead. I wonder whether David “call me Dave” Cameron considered that assertion before he began to charge the ramparts of European Union convention in his attempt to halt the march of the Muppet-in-Chief, Jean-Claude Juncker to the Presidency of the European Commission?
I do have sympathy with Cameron but I do believe that he is expending a huge amount of political capital on a futile quest.
Playing the hero in Brussels while the domestic electorate is watching football and tennis could well prove to have been a badly timed effort at huge cost and with next to no benefit
If there is one thing we have learnt over the past years, then it is that powers behind the Grand European Project will mow down anyone and anything in its way and that straying from the orthodoxy is rarely, if ever, rewarded with success. Brussels is not Tallinn and Cameron cannot expect an Estonian style singing revolution to back his calls for resistance to the near Stalinist adherence to core ideology. Many appreciate that Juncker is one of those old-style Europeans in the mould of Jacques Delors with his rather 1970s centre-left belief that government knows best and that the more power that is dispensed from the benign core, the better. Cameron, for his part, is nothing more than a rather bland neo-Thatcherite who differs only from his predecessors at the head of the British Conservatism (with a capital “c”) by dint of hiding that fact (or trying to hide it) behind a slim veil of populism. Sorry Dave, you don’t have a handbag.
I see where Cameron is coming from but what he fails to grasp – with a first in PPE from Oxford you’d expect better of him – is that like the Soviet Union the EU survives on not permitting anyone to question its axioms. The edifice is too big and too ossified to permit subtle changes and radical overhauls are simply too complicated and in conflict with too many vested interests. He would do well to study King Canute, that wily old fox who sat in the sea not to halt the tides but to prove to his followers that not even he was powerful enough to do so.
So is Cameron a hero for showing up the small mindedness of the old self-congratulatory Eurocracy in the face of some damning election results or is he a fool for trying to play a game of chicken against an overwhelming odds? Guerilla tactics are to storm out, attack and then to immediately retreat again. They never stand and do open battle with organised armies. Cameron has done just that and will, with near certainty, walk away looking like a fool. Playing the hero in Brussels while the domestic electorate is watching football and tennis could well prove to have been a badly timed effort at huge cost and with next to no benefit.
Cameron happens to be my own constituency MP and it is no secret that I do not have a lot of time for him either as a person or as a politician but I would have expected more guile from an Oxford man with a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Maybe there is some truth in the words of a fellow PPE graduate – the closest England has to Enarques – who suggested that the Prime Minister had given up Philosophy after the first year and hence really only has a degree in PE.
Flexibility
Meanwhile in the real world, there is renewed discussion as to how flexible the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact should be. Benoît Cœuré, the French member of the Executive Board of the ECB, reckons that the structure is flexible enough but that it should not be stretched to the point where it loses credibility. He reminded us of the original questions which were raised when the ECB began to assume greater responsibility for keeping the European economy afloat namely whether national governments would use the benefits of loose monetary conditions to enact or to postpone reforms.
The cries for more flexibility – Plan B in effect – are worrying and I doubt any formal leeway will be forthcoming, although the imposition of sanctions will in all likelihood be if, as and when rules are broken as effective and immediate as it has been in the past. Hmmm.
The ECB is hoping for growth and although many might sneer at its optimism, the speed of the UK recovery has taken all and sundry by surprise. In the same vein, it would be easy to misread Europe and to blow the bear trumpet too loudly. It would be foolish to expect instant miracles but equally it would be wrong to assume that the eurozone is condemned to recession in perpetuity. Austria’s rather outspoken Ewald Nowotny suggests growth should return by 2016 but concedes that things don’t always happen as predicted. He might well following Moody’s mass-downgrading of the long-term ratings of banks in the Austrian mortgage sector.
There is really not much new in the markets at the moment with BNP and Alstom dominating the headlines. A good time to do a bit of drilling down and finding that the same key themes remain and most of them unresolved.
