Eeek.

According to Nick Cohen in the Observer the Cameron Conservatives are heading for the Outer Darkness:

After the European elections, British Conservatives will leave the company of Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fredrik Reinfeldt and the other moderate centre-right leaders who gather under the banner of European People’s party. Although they share reasonable conservative desires for lower taxes and sound finance, Cameron cannot stick with them because they also believe in a federal Europe.

The Tories will ally instead with the proudly ignorant parties of eastern Europe. Know-nothing chauvinism, sexual and religious prejudices, and conspiracy theories from Europe’s dark heart motivate them, but they are against federalism and that is all that matters to Cameron.

What is it about progressive writers which makes them describe post-communist Europe in terms of the Dark Other? Maybe they need to get out more.

On he rambles:

The simple idea to keep in mind as you wade into the complexities of European politics is that the EU is closer to a diplomatic alliance than the "superstate" of Eurosceptic nightmare. Governments pursue political and national interests by forming coalitions with like-minded parties and states.

Primarily other governments, to be exact.

Cameron is proposing to remove himself from the table, leave Britain’s best cards behind and run off to the fringe. When Merkel and other centre-right leaders discuss tactics and priorities before meetings of the European Council, they will exclude Cameron.

On the next rung down, when continental conservative ministers do the same before meetings on trade and foreign affairs, they will exclude ministers from the new Tory government. As isolated will be Conservative members of the European Parliament, who will make the journey from influence to irrelevance overnight.

These latter points are just ignorant. Discussions at European Council level are utterly cynical and go by which government is likely to vote for what, not which EP grouping any one politician’s party belongs to. And the tougher you negotiate, the more influence you have (especially if you have quite a good bloc of votes).

As to how far the Conservatives will be ‘isolated’ in the European Parliament, that depends on how many seats they get and the overall balance of power (duh): being out of the main blocs and in the position of a bloc which helps decide which things get passed may be a far more powerful position in practice.

The deeper problem with all this flannel about the UK being ‘isolated in Europe’ is that it is just not true.

Why?

Because huge sums of UK taxpayers’ money flows into the EU pot. It may suit various European politicians pompously to intone that the Conservatives are ‘abandoning the mainstream’, but you can be damn sure they’ll be careful to make sure that our net contributions stay in it.

Which brings us to the only real point.

Namely, how hard will any Conservative government negotiate on the UK contribution to the European budget in the next Financial Persepctive negotiations?

Back in 2005 Tony Blair made key concessions on the Rebate to get a Budget deal and keep the rickety EU structure staggering on. Why? Because he really believes in the project as it stands.

Had he been a lot more ruthless, he could have used the powerful position the UK then enjoyed after the French and Dutch referenda debacles to force deeper institutional reforms, including burying the Constitutional Treaty and its unhappy offpsring the Lisbon Treaty.

But he didn’t. The one policy choice where he was wrong and Gordon Brown right?

So either the Cameron Conservatives will drive a very hard bargain next time round to force cutbacks in wasteful EU spending and maybe some institutional reforms as well to restore authority to national parliaments. Or they won’t.

As for not being part of the ‘mainstream’, who would want to be when the current is hurtling the EU rowing boat towards a steep and dangerous waterfall?

Abandon ship:

… the single currency has changed from a stabilising factor into a new source of vulnerability for members of the eurozone. The reason is that eurozone governments are no longer risk-free “sovereign credits”, like the governments of the US or Britain, or smaller countries, such as Switzerland, Australia or New Zealand. A government that borrows in its own currency will never default because, in extremis, it can always instruct its central bank to print money to pay its debts. But governments in the eurozone cannot do this. They are in the same position as US state governments or as Argentina, Indonesia and Russia when they borrowed in dollars …

… The plunge in the German economy has devastated the manufacturing industries and wage remittances in Central Europe, with output in several countries falling at annualised rates of up to 40per cent, never before witnessed in any capitalist economy.

Only Germany can lead the EU out of this appalling mess.

What political and economic price will they demand for doing so?

Maybe it is quite a good idea to keep out of the way for a while?