Comment: Cameron should join euro-liberals
David Cameron’s allies in the European Parliament continue to dwindle to an unsavoury hardcore. The Liberal grouping is far closer to his sensibilities.
By Edward McMillan-Scott MEP
As his European alliance faces another crisis, David Cameron may make a virtue of necessity again by taking his coalition with the Liberal Democrats to Europe, in order to win greater influence for the UK. There are difficult negotiations in Brussels to come, especially over Britain’s financial contribution.
The controversial ‘anti-federalist’ European alliance created last year by Cameron, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group – described by Nick Clegg in the Leaders’ debates as ‘a bunch of nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes’ – is in disarray.
The Polish leader of the ECR, Michal Kaminski, whose easily discovered extremist past caused a storm when I successfully stood against him for vice-president of the European Parliament, has now broken with Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS), describing it as ‘dominated by the far-Right’ in the Daily Telegraph this weekend, as Poland votes in local elections today (November 21).
Cameron’s dilemma is that “radicals are taking over” the PiS, the party he chose to ally with in Poland according to the man who leads his group in the European Parliament. Kaminski and two other Polish MEPs – there were 15 in total – have said that they wish to stay in the ECR. Something will have to give.
On Tuesday, the 25 Conservative MEPs will choose a new chairman of their delegation within the group, after Timothy Kirkhope stood down. Kirkhope’s behind-the-scenes deals to get himself the leadership of the ECR without an election unravelled spectacularly when I made my stand in July last year in Strasbourg, throwing the spotlight on the dodgy ECR allies and causing major embarrassment to Cameron.
Writing in the Times last week, ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie revealed that this affair shifted the Tory leadership away from Euroscepticism, preparing them for the sensible coalition approach: ‘Mr Hague and David Cameron were shaken by media reaction to their decision to take Conservative MEPs out of the federalist European People’s Party (EPP) and concluded that Euroscepticism was simply too exhausting.’
I know that Cameron was very defensive about his leadership pledge to split with the EPP, the family of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. When one of the Conservative MEPs urged Cameron against the divorce, Cameron said ‘f*** off’.
After my stand on a point of principle – there are shadows in my family’s past which have made me oppose totalitarianism all my life – Cameron expelled me from the Conservative Party. His behaviour was described as ‘thuggish and panicky’ by Henry Porter in the Observer. Although I appealed, my lawyers concluded that Cameron had dug himself into a hole and could not afford to back down and so I resigned and joined the Liberal Democrats.
His slap down of David Young reveals something of Cameron’s character too. This was the man of whom Margaret Thatcher said ‘when other people bring me problems, David brings me solutions’. I suspect the reverse will be the case for Cameron.
As prime minister he cannot afford to let his snappy nature get in the way of the national interest. He will have to accept that the ECR was a political disaster. During a welter of media criticism of his new group last October, the Economist described the ECR as ‘a shoddy and shaming alliance’. By early November, Cameron’s Euroscepticism was wilting. He declared that there would be no referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
In the European Parliament, the ECR is sidelined, impotent and fragile. For survival it relies on several individual MEPs to comply with the European Parliament’s rules. It has no commissioners and Cameron’s only ally in power is Petr Necas, the Czech prime minister. So while all the other EU leaders gather in pre-summit ‘family’ meetings to prepare the agenda – the EPP, Socialists, Liberals – Cameron has a twosome with Mr Necas.
As it is highly unlikely that the EPP would welcome him back, some form of link with the continental liberal family is the way forward for Cameron. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, which I joined earlier this year, is on the winning side in 90% of votes in the European Parliament . The LSE described the group as the ‘king-makers’, a phenomenon I witness when chairing the votes.
As Nick Clegg said during another leaders’ debate about the EU, “size does matter”. While the EPP governs 14 EU countries and deploys 13 Commissioners, the liberal family is also in government in 13 countries, has five prime ministers and no less than eight Commissioners.
It is not just in Poland where Cameron’s allies are moving to the right. Unnoticed by the British media, its Latvian ally, the Freedom and Fatherland party (which celebrates the wartime role of the Waffen-SS) has linked up with an even more extreme nationalist group there.
In the recent Belgian, Dutch and Hungarian elections, the ECR’s allies have seen their vote disappear and in June’s Polish presidential election, the candidate of Cameron’s allied Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, flopped too.
Even if Cameron as prime minister enjoys good bilateral relations with Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy, it is his ministers, diplomats, civil servants and MEPs who need the throw-weight of a serious European political family in order to deliver for Britain in an increasingly powerful post-Lisbon European Union.
It is in the national interest that Cameron swallows hard and admits that he made a mistake. It would also show true character.
Edward McMillan-Scott is a vice-president of the European Parliament. This article is based on a speech he gave at the Liberal Democrat West Midlands AGM on Saturday November 20
The views expressed in politics.co.uk’s comment pages are not necessarily those of the website or its owners.
