Robin Harris very much gets the point in today's Telegraph about the lessons Michael Howard should be learning from the UKIP debacle for the Tories in the Euro elections. It's no use saying, as many deluded Tories are doing, that this was merely a transient protest vote and all those Tories who voted UKIP will dutifully return to the fold at the general election. Some will, but many will not; and here's why. The Howard line on Europe is patently untenable, and is directly in the inglorious tradition of successive Tory positions on Europe which pretended one thing but actually meant they did the opposite in practice. It was the Tories who got us into Europe in the first place on a false prospectus, the Tories who signed us up to the Single European Act and Maastricht, the Tories who told us the lie that we could be 'in Europe but not run by Europe'. And now the same weaselly ducking and diving is continuing. As Harris observes:

'There is not the slightest point in calling, as the Tory leader has done, for a "Europe of nation states", a "more flexible and tolerant Europe", an "enterprise Europe" or a "positive Europe" (whatever that may be). These things are not on offer. Europe is driven by an economic and social doctrine of statism that is fundamentally at odds with the liberal capitalism practised in the Anglo-Saxon world. Indeed, it is because Mr Howard implicitly recognises this that he talks about restoring national powers that have already been yielded to the EU. He knows that, whether or not any new European Constitution is passed, Britain will be dragged further and further into corporatism if present arrangements go unchallenged. Yet what finally makes the whole Tory position incredible is the refusal to admit that the disengagement required will lead to a crisis. And it will. True, continental Europe has no long-term interest in cutting relations, let alone trade, with Britain. But in the short term, if Mr Howard should become prime minister and try to embark on the programme that he has promised, he would find Britain subject to a ruthless campaign of destabilisation from Brussels, Paris and Berlin, with precious little sympathy from any other European capital.'

The problem is that the eurosceptic Tories aren't really very sceptical at all. And their erstwhile voters, who understand very well that you can't belong to a club whose express design is to subsume national powers in a supra-national entity while claiming that you can somehow retain those national powers, have rumbled the deceit.

The crucial point is this. The belief that these voters will return like lambs to the fold fails to acknowledge that the political universe has changed. Voter disaffection with the entire political class is terminal. There is a collapse in belief in government -- all government. As a result, politics is becoming fragmented, as people vote in ever greater numbers for small or single issue parties which don't have a hope in hell of getting elected. The argument that fragmenting the vote in this way will 'let in the other side' no longer has the resonance it once enjoyed because, with the major parties saying such similar things, fewer people care if the 'other side' does get in. What becomes important instead, for people who feel so fundamentally disenfranchised, is to make their voice heard.

Yes, some UKIP voters will retrurn to the Tories; but many will not if they carry on misleading the electorate in this contemptuous and patently dishonest way. And it only needs a proportion of these UKIP voters to stay the course for the Tories to lose all their marginal (and maybe not so marginal) seats. The Tories will not get anywhere unless and until they grasp the fact that they find most difficult of all to get through their cerebrally-challenged pates -- that what the voters are looking for, above all, is realism, honesty, principle and steadfastness. This the Tories are signally failing to deliver, on Europe and indeed across the board.

Posted by melanie at June 16, 2004