Redwood Amusement
It’s always amusing when you hear someone tell you that a particular Conservative MP is secretly very much anti-EU despite that Member of Parliament completely lacking any kind of public comment backing up such a statement.
One such friend of mine claims that John Redwood would privately like the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Now, I can’t say I agree with my friend that John Redwood is secretly in favour of leaving the European Union.
If John Redwood was really so much in favour of the UK leaving the EU then he would have said something about it by now – but surprise, surprise he hasn’t.
Rightly or wrongly (and I would argue that it is probably wrongly), John Redwood is still held with some regard by Conservative party activists and lesser backbench MPs. If John Redwood were, for example, to sign the Better Off Out campaign pledge (okay, David Cameron has banned all Conservative MPs from doing so, but he could still be defiant) then many other Conservative MPs and activists would look at his actions and think that, well, if John Redwood has done something like that then so can I. The number of signatures to Better Off Out would surely increase.
Dr Helen Szamuely of the Bruges Group seems to have a similar opinion of John Redwood:
The great advantage of Redwood becoming Shadow Chancellor would be not his supposed euroscepticism, which, like most Tory euroscepticism, is worth considerably less than Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘piece of paper’, but the fact that, according to his own interminable stories, he knows how the European Union operates.
This means that when Mr Redwood assures us that a Conservative government will do such things, all of which happen to be EU competence, not only we shall know he is lying, we shall also be able to assume that he knows he is lying, something one can never be quite certain of with the rest of the Tories.
If John Redwood really knew what the EU was like and about and cared about leaving the EU then he would have made a public statement about his beliefs by now. But as I said, he hasn’t – and frankly I don’t think he will. He cares too much about his career as a Conservative MP and nothing that I can see will change that.
* This article has been edited since it was originally published on the 23rd October, 2008. I was asked by someone to remove certain comments regarding what was believed to have been said privately between two individuals.
Without this information, the entire context of the post changed and the originally written latter half of the article did not make sense without the missing content. Therefore I have significantly edited the whole piece.
However, the point about John Redwood (and anyone else for that matter) being utterly deluded in believing that we could fundamentally renegotiate our position within the EU still stands.
Your Comments:
-
- Richard
Chris, I have to disagree with you on this one. John Redwood is one of the most committed Eurosceptics in Parliament. Since joining the Party in 1997 I have heard him speak on the subject numerous times and have read several of his books on the subject.
Many MPs share John Redwood’s views on Europe but choose not to join the Bruges Group or Better off Out as they consider them to be not very serious organisations.
Far better to put your support behind an organisation like Open Europe or Global Vision - an organisation that makes the positive case for a UK outside the EU.
Look at the business leaders that support Global Vision and also look at the MPs who support them (note one of them is John Redwood).
-
Thanks for leaving a comment, Richard. Sorry for the delay in replying. I should say that I originally intended this reply to be much longer than it currently is – but I have been very busy of late and haven’t had the chance to reply as fully as I would normally like. I may do so another time.
Now, while John Redwood may be a ‘eurosceptic’ in your opinion; as Peter Hitchens rightly pointed out the other day:
The word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised.
I think that John Redwood is entirely wrong when he says that we could ‘renegotiate’ our position with the EU. (I should add in here that there is in fact a difference between wishing to withdraw from the EU – as I do – and wishing to ‘renegotiate’ British membership.)
For Britain to negotiate with the EU would require political will and a position of power. Currently we have neither, and even if we had the former we would still not necessarily have the latter, especially if we were basing this scenario on John Redwood being in charge, or someone else with similar views – Ruth Lea of Global Vision for example (more on her later).
To obtain a position of power in order to negotiate with the EU we would require some form of bargaining chip – without which the EU would simply laugh at our demands and carry on their merry ‘ever closer union’ way.
I think this point needs explaining a little bit further. The EU has no reason to agree to ‘renegotiate’ our terms of membership. Why would the EU and its supporters agree to break up the political union that they have spent over half a century creating just because one nation (Britain) wishes to ‘trade’ rather than burden itself with European political union?
It is a situation that is in some ways similar to that of Morgan Tsvangirai trying to negotiate with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The power rests with Mugabe and he has no reason to give it up. The only reason he has opened ‘negotiations’ recently (incidentally these negotiations are just a facade to give the appearance of the two working together to the international community – they will not transfer any real power,) with Tsvangirai is that he is facing massive worldwide condemnation.
The European Union would however be under no international pressure to ‘negotiate’ with Britain should someone leading this country come along with the intention of even wanting to doing so.
Regarding again Global Vision and Ruth Lea, I think that the comments made by Richard North this time last year still ring very true:
We have always regarded [Ruth] as ‘one of us’, so we tend to be polite about her on this blog, but her initiative today simply parades her own ignorance and demonstrates how far the Eurosceptic movement has to go before it even begins to understand the enemy it is dealing with.
Writes dear Ruth, ‘the EEC has been transformed from a customs union ‘with ambitions’ into a would-be ‘country called Europe’, somehow missing the point that the whole ethos of the ‘project’ was to employ economic integration as a means of achieving political integration. Thus, there has been no ‘transformation’ – the one was always intended to beget the other.
Anyway, as I was saying, we currently have no bargaining chip to use against the EU. The only bargaining chip we could possibly use against the EU is the threat of leaving – and to make this a real threat rather than empty posturing or calling their bluff we would have to mean it and back it up, ie. with the actual possibility of leaving, which John Redwood etc have publicly said they do not want to do.
But then, why bother attempting to negotiate with an organisation that will do their very best to stop you having anything your own way? Why not just leave and allow people in this country to freely decide the direction they want to pursue for themselves?
I should also say that Better Off Out is a campaign run by the Freedom Association of which John Redwood and a number of other MPs on the list of Global Vision supporters are members. If Better Off Out were not a serious campaign as you suggest then David Cameron would not have taken the extraordinary measure to ban all Conservative MPs and candidates from signing it, and promising that no current signatory of the campaign could join his Shadow Cabinet.
I think that really we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet. If we cannot even decide amongst ourselves what the best course of action is then we will continue to fail – which is why the ‘eurosceptic’ or anti-EU movement in this country does not actually get anywhere and why we are always out manoeuvred by the Europhiles; because we cannot collectively decide on a position to pursue.
Ruth Lea, like John Redwood is deluded in thinking that we could negotiate our way out of this one. We must leave. It is the only way.
