Ed Miliband is unwisely playing short-term politics over a revolt wrongly seen as a fight between Tory shopkeepers and toffs
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David Cameron listens as the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, speaks during prime minister's questions before the vote on the EU budget. Photograph: PA
In the wake of Wednesday night's Commons vote to cut the EU budget (how cross that would have made a worldly EU leader like King Canute) I thought I heard a Conservative MP condescendingly explain that the 53 Tory rebels "want to see Europe get real". Oh dear, these are not wise words from head-in-the-noose romantics who want nothing better than to cut Europe adrift.
Who comes out worse from Wednesday night's defeat of the government in a rebels-plus-Labour format, David Cameron – or Ed Miliband? You can catch the bad-tempered debate here, Simon Hoggart's take here, tireless Andy Sparrow's live blog here, Paul Owen's update here, while Nottingham University's revolts unit provides some background here.
I'm not sure who's the bigger loser, but my hunch is that the short-term satisfaction the Labour leader gets from helping to humiliate the PM will be outweighed in the long term by the charge of shabby opportunism which fails to impress voters.
Cameron is in trouble. He appointed pro-European Old Etonian Sir George Young as his chief whip two weeks ago and the rebels, admittedly fewer than the 81 who defied Dave last winter, defied the whip. Miliband may have a point when he called it Cameron's John Major moment, though Major won a general election and survived seven years in office (five of them years of economic growth), none of which either Cameron or Miliband has yet managed.
But the Eurosceptic Tory right paid a terrible price for its intemperate and destructive opposition to Major's pragmatic stance on Europe. Their indiscipline – and his inability to crack the whip – appalled voters and helped New Labour into power in 1997. They uncorked the Ukip genie which threatens Tory seats in 2015 and is the calculation which lies behind so many of Wednesday night's cowardly votes.
The result was William Hague's dire four years as party leader which, campaigning to "save the pound" from the euro (it was never in serious danger), knocked just one seat off Tony Blair's majority in the 2001 election. On Radio 4's Today programme I heard George Osborne, like Cameron and his crew a son-of-Thatcher sceptic himself, calmly disparage the Hague era (he did not name Billy) as representing the same short-term opportunism that Miliband is now unwisely pursuing.
It's not that the EU budget should expand at a time when national budgets are contracting, though 17 of the 27 member states are net beneficiaries, so they stand to gain some cash by voting for it. Remember, it was the Thatcher Tories who insisted on widening EU membership to the east – wider, not deeper was the slogan – so they can't grumble about that. Nor should they. It was bold, but right.
But the issue is realistic politics. Cameron is probably right to say the best he can expect to get at next month's summit is a real-terms freeze, ie inflation-proofing only and that his second veto would be both unpopular and unwise since failure to agree a seven-year budget would mean the issue resurfacing via annual renewals, agreed by a majority, Britain's veto inapplicable.
You don't need to have as many GCSEs as John Redwood to work out that option could prove far more expensive. Even Nick Clegg is pointing that out. Olaf Cramme offers a big-picture view here for Cif.
But it's not what this row is really about for many Tory MPs and activists. Like Alex Salmond – another romantic nationalist with a soothing panacea – they think Britain/Scotland will be liberated by the chance to cut loose. Free at last to do all those things "Brussels" – or London – stops them doing (I don't think).
It's tempting to look at the list of Tory rebels and dismiss them as Ukip Lite, the revolt of the shopkeepers against the Tory toffs. Tempting but wrong. Apart from conspicuous plutocrats like Sir Peter Tapsell and Zac (Son-of-Jimmy) Goldsmith, there are a lot of lower-middle class Tories – poujadistes in the French term – among the rebels, but plenty of public school and Oxbridge types too. Like Britain's forests, the Conservative party is not riddled with the political equivalent of ash dieback fungus – imported from pesky foreigners.
Tree diseases that spread in a highly mobile world are a handy reminder that we're all in these things together. But let's not go there today. Cameron will go to the summit and hope that the Germans support his demand for a freeze as the best he can get. If he has to veto a deal again to please his domestic woad-wearers, they will go ahead without him one way or the other. That has been the lesson of the Franco-German axis since 1956.
That's not Labour's position, of course. Labour nowadays says it's the pro-European party, having passed the Thatcherites heading in the opposite direction in the late 80s. What Mrs T disliked about Jacques Delors's vision for Europe Neil Kinnock liked a lot. John Smith had always been pro-European, but he too played politics with the Maastricht treaty in 1991-92, much as Miliband is now doing.
That's OK, you may say. The opposition is paid to oppose. I think that's what I argued in 1992 when I had decided that the centrifugal national forces at work in Europe were already overwhelming Delors's federalist vision. Since the bank crash of 2008 the centralising imperative is back with a vengeance, perceived to be the only way to save the euro. It's a fearsome gamble which may not work. But Germany, which has lent them all so much money, has little choice: the Wonga reich.
Britain has been on the sidelines during most of the euro-drama. We have similar problems to many EU members states, from France down – too much public spending and borrowing, too sluggish growth – though like them we have stagnation with national characteristics, in our case a bloated, over-leveraged financial sector which has – how shall we put this? – been managed by Sicilians.
Europe's older leaders remember being lectured on the British economic miracle by Blair and especially by Gordon Brown, who did not even do them the courtesy of staying to hear their replies. Ho ho. They think we have cocked it up worse than they did and – wrongly – blame the Anglo-Saxon banking model for their own failure to design their new currency better.
Yet again perfidious Albion is unloved in Europe. We want to cut the budget. We want to have a referendum on new terms or even an exit from the EU. We don't even seem to be able to control regional politicians, they must mutter in Berlin and Paris. For God's sake, will a grownup do something about that Salmond man before he helps wreck Spain (etc) as well?
Labour could play to this sentiment, don the long trousers and join the grownup wing of the EU debate. That's what Douglas Alexander, shadow foreign secretary, was trying to do in interviews this morning. The trouble was that he could only play the unconvincing hand he has been dealt by the colleagues. Confronted with Margaret Hodge MP's overheard remark that "I hate this vote, I don't want to do it," Alexander sounded feeble. Perhaps he felt the same.
The first awkward fact for Labour is that its MPs and any voters who follow these things remember that Blair gave away half Britain's budget rebate on a half-promise that something would be done to cut agricultural subsidies, which still dominate the EU budget – weirdly so considering how small a part of the EU economy farming now is, though less weird when we remember the sacred French farm vote.
The second awkward fact is that it was a Labour government which piled on the debt during the boom years, over-dependent on the bankers' taxes which disappeared – like Vikings over the horizon – when the same under-regulated bankers ploughed their business and had to be rescued by you and me. Voters remember these things.
Lastly, voters can hardly fail to remember that Labour is campaigning at home for extra borrowing to boost flagging demand in the economy and restore a strong recovery that will take care of the debt and deficit instead of deepening both. It makes a half-decent case for some steps in that direction.
Is this the same Labour party campaigning for cuts in the EU budget? It is. If Cameron is lucky enough to come back with a deal from the summit it is unlikely to satisfy the rebels on his own side. So the two Eds – I detect the hand of Balls in this one – will have to decide whether to vote for it, to torpedo it or to abstain and let the Tories fight it out among themselves.
Abstain is the statesmanlike option, also the craftier option, that they should have chosen on Wednesday night. The headlines would have been less disastrous for Cameron's authority than they are. But politics is a long game where character matters more than headlines.
