Cameron’s hardman tactics over EU referendum could backfire
“The PM is changing electoral law and threatening ministers, but is this really the right approach to secure the yes vote he wants”?
Barack Obama may have been the G7 summit leader knocking back good Bavarian beer before lunch on Sunday. But something heady has got into David Cameron’s bloodstream too. Lifting restrictions on government spending during the EU referendum? Threatening dissident ministers with the sack ? Dave is laying down the law, his version, theguardian has reported.
The report stated, it sounds tough and is meant to do so. But is it smart politics and is it right? Cameron’s record in handling both his party and his EU partners on Britain’s tortured relationship with the neighbours is not one to encourage confidence that the answer to either question is yes.
Not that the two issues are comparable.
Imposing conformity on his ministerial team in the event that London’s “renegotiation” of Britain’s terms of membership delivers a positive outcome is a matter of internal party and government discipline: it’s up to Downing Street and chief whip, Mark Harper, to makes their own bed – and try to sleep on the consequences, which may be lumpy.
Matthew D’Ancona calls it “ High Noon”here. I’d just say it’s quite a gamble. At the1975 referendum, also conducted after a pretty cosmetic “renegotiation” two years after British entry into the then Common Market, Labour’s Harold Wilson allowed his cabinet to campaign for both sides. But this was an admission of weakness, not of tolerance. He’d have had six cabinet resignations if he hadn’t done so.
Fleet Street is already drawing up comparable resignation lists for Cameron. And 60 or so Eurosceptic Tory MPs, led by John Redwood and Owen Paterson, have formed a new group, Conservatives for Britain (as if other Tories aren’t), which pretends to be open-minded about its impossible shopping list for renegotiation, but is transparently hostile. Lively times ahead!
But the rules for the 2016 or 2017 referendum, the subject of Tuesday’s second reading legislation in the Commons, are something else. They are matter for all of us, since it is our decision, as Cameron keeps reminding us. On what I understand so far my hunch is that No 10 has got this wrong.
It’s not primarily a matter of money. The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (2000) (PPERA), Jack Straw’s worthy Labour reform, sets out how much each official campaign – the yes and no camps – can spend, £7m each, according to reports on Monday. They will each get just £600,000 from public funds, a free mail shot and some TV broadcasts.
On top of which the political parties will have their own spending capped in proportion to their share of the vote at the May general election: £5m for the Tories, £4m for Labour, £3m for Ukip, £2m for the Liberal Democrats (etc). Despite Cameron’s fighting talk about what he wants from Brussels most people expect him to declare victory – much as Wilson did in 1975 – and join Labour and the Lib Dems (plus assorted nationalists) in urging a yes.
Polls currently suggest they will win again, though not by the thumping 2 to 1 margin achieved last time. Ukip – whose leader Nigel Farage is keen to have a central role, (toxic, say more sensitive Europsceptics) – is already crying foul and setting itself up as David versus the Westminster and corporate Goliaths,
But anything can happen in the present disaffected state of public opinion. In any case this time Fleet Street, mostly in the yes camp in 1975 (except for the Express and communist Morning Star/Daily Worker), will be more evenly divided. The Ukip-fellow-travelling Tory press will try to have it both ways or campaign for a no. They too are large corporations but their products – TV and newspapers – are not traded abroad much, unlike for carmakers or pharmaceutical firms.
The bothering bit is the government’s plans to repeal the clause in PPERA forbidding the government, both local and national, plus public bodies from what might be seen as active intervention in the campaign for the 28 days preceding the vote. Those rules were applied in Scotland last year – as they should be.
I can’t believe the civil service, even in its current debilitated state, would let ministers do anything outrageous to win a vote. But fairness and the perception thereof is important. The Electoral Commission, admittedly a bit of a fusspot, is vocally unhappy,
Oddly enough, the gossip is that Cameron wants to take no chances of losing, even at the risk of reputational damage, and will use the change to send us all persuasive leaflets and their email equivalents.
In this he will be doing the opposite of this weekend’s cabinet unity doctrine at the G7 in Bavaria. He will be copying Wilson’s tactics in 1975 when a leaflet through every door greatly extended the yes vote’s clout, at least in the eyes of no campaigners like young Jack Straw, then adviser to dissident minister Barbara Castle.
It was the memory of this unfairness which prompted the PPERA clause in Straw’s 2000 reforms that Cameron’s own bill hopes to repeal. Perhaps repeal is just a red herring, a concession which can easily be granted to the Eurosceptics with little harm done. It didn’t make much difference in 1975, whatever Straw thinks. It may not this time.
All the same, the European battle lines have been drawn with startling speed barely a month after the election gave Cameron his (small) parliamentary majority. The sight of Redwood, Paterson and a Tory MP called Steve Baker, the free market software engineer who is chair of the new CfB group, already touring the studios to make heavy-handed points must alarm No 10.
Even if Cameron succeeds in rapidly getting a deal he thinks he can sell – I can’t imagine why – we could have two years of this at a time when events in the real world out there are looking quite serious: economic feebleness, great power tensions, climate change and energy shortages, terrorism – take your pick.
A veteran Labour pal of mine says: “Don’t worry about the Tories. Most of them are Tories before they are Eurosceptics, they’ll come round if Cameron tells them to.” Well, maybe. When I read the Daily Mail’s list of would-be resigners, starting with IDS and Phil Hammond, ending with Sajid Javid, I don’t spot any eager martyrs, though a few junior ministers would walk.
But I sat through the Tory right’s self-indulgent, self-destructive antics in the 1990s, the ones which finished off John Major and ushered in the pro-EU Blair/Brown government. The public mood is now more fractious and hostile to established politics. Europe is no longer the dream it was for many, making a bad fist of its currency management.
And Boris Johnson is back at Westminster on parade.
I hope Cameron knows what he’s doing. But I’m not sure he does. Having won his election Dave is pushing his luck.