Cameron is wrong to ape the right on EU membership

LOOK who is suddenly directing British government policy — none other than a bunch of “fruit cakes, loonies, and closet racists”, to use David Cameron’s words.

For that is how the British prime minister previously described the UK Independence Party, but now that they are hammering his poorly-defended right flank, he has decided to ape them, not bait them.

That is potentially good news for Ireland, but extremely dangerous for Britain.

Though it would reap the temporary benefits of inward investment scared away from Britain, the Republic would suffer a huge blow if London left the EU, but that is an extremely unlikely proposition. This is about holding the Tory party together, not about ripping Europe apart.

Cameron is an interesting political dichotomy with a serious, in-built fault-line: He is too socially liberal to be trusted by his own party, while too right-wing on the economy and public services to be trusted by Britain.

The upshot is that Cameron is constantly placating one side or the other, and often failing miserably to please either.

So he has plunged the British economy into years of uncertainty in a desperate gamble to buy off his rabid, right-wing Tory Tea Party element with the promise of an in-out (shake-it-all-about) referendum in 2017.

Not that Cameron will ever get to that point, though, because the notion of him winning the next British election is as believable as Bertie Ahern’s evidence to the Mahon corruption probe.

This is partly because Cameron’s “hung parliament” arrangement with the Liberal Democrats is even more passive-aggressive than our own Blueshirt/Labour slump Coalition.

The Lib Dems may be as humiliated as Eamon Gilmore & Co on a regular basis, and have suffered a similar collapse in the polls (dropping below Ukip in some recent surveys), but, unlike Labour here, they have the ammunition to hit back.

Thus, Cameron’s slim hope of a majority at the next election was snatched away when the Lib Dems withdrew backing for a gerrymandering of the Westminster constituencies that would have delivered around 25 extra seats to the Tories with the stroke of a pen on the map, because they were so angry at not getting their way on House of Lords reform.

Which leaves Ed Miliband’s Labour Party needing just a 1.7% swing to be the largest party next time out, and a 4.5% swing to bring majority government back to Britain.

With Cameron’s troika-esque austerity agenda about to tip Britain into a triple-dip recession, both numbers should be easy for Labour to achieve as it bounces back from its lowest share of the vote since 1931 — despite Mr Miliband being a leader focus groups most often associate with the word “weird”.

Cameron could not even secure a majority in 2010 when he was running against a self-destructing prime minister in the form of Gordon Brown, and against the backdrop of the worst economic crisis for 80 years.

Cameron’s referendum “scam” merely underlines the confusing political narrative he is putting before the British people.

In order to push his “detoxification” process to shed the Tories of their “Nasty party” image, Cameron will see the biggest rebellion of his premiership next month when he extends full marriage rights to same-sex couples.

A laudable, socially progressive, act of inclusion, but one that sits strangely at odds with the rebirth of the Euro-hating anger of the Tory Tea Party.

One of the most striking elements of repositioning the Tory guns to fire on the Ukip right is the horror it has caused in Washington — and the extraordinary intervention in Britain’s domestic affairs triggered as a result.

Despite all the jibes about Tony Blair being an American poodle during his time in power, America has never commented so publicly on the internal concerns of its supposed closet ally as when US assistant secretary for European affairs, Philip Gordon, used a trip to London this month to not only warn against the dangers of Britain leaving the EU, but also to make it clear that Washington was even unhappy about the referendum in which Scotland will vote on independence next year.

Never in recent memory has it looked so blatantly like the US was treating Britain as a client state.

But the biggest conundrum in this topsy-turvy enterprise is Cameron is right — but for the wrong reasons.

Britain needs a referendum to settle the question of its European destiny. A reality attack is likely to lead to a 2/1 vote to stay in, similar to the result of the 1975 referendum on the same issue, which will finally force the UK to engage in a positive manner in Europe.

Britain could still get that vote without Cameron, because Labour is likely to do an opportunist U-turn on their opposition to such a national poll as the general election approaches (Miliband is the man, after all, who knifed his own brother in the back to win the party leadership), but London would approach such a vote from a far more favourable hue with the Tories out of power.

And there will certainly be scope for change in the frenetic few years ahead as the eurozone moves inexorably towards becoming a single-fiscal “country” that will see German/French dominance entrenched and the new “province” of Ireland consigned to the western edges, and benefits like a separate corporate-tax rate consigned to the bin.

Cameron is right that the EU needs radical reform — it is too remote, too top-down and too undemocratic to survive in its current form. But improving the superstructure should be approached from a position of positivity, not because a bunch of “fruitcakes” and “closet racists” are holding a gun to his head.