Memberships and relationships

Tweet

I can’t remember the exact date, but I think it was sometime in 1974, just before the referendum on continued membership of the Common Market.  Plaid Cymru was invited to send a delegation to Brussels and Luxembourg to learn more about the institutions.  About ten of us went, on what was obviously an attempt to persuade us not to campaign for a ‘no’ vote.  On that, it failed.

We had talks from the office of the Commission, as well as visiting the Parliament.  But perhaps most instructive, to me, were the visits to the offices of two of the Permanent Representatives.

As well as visiting the office of the UK Permanent Representative, Dublin gave special permission for us (there was some concern about being seen to be interfering in the affairs of another state) to visit the office of the Irish equivalent to get an Irish perspective on the same issues.  The contrast between the two was stark.  It certainly helped me to understand why the Irish had a different attitude to the European project.

At the office of the UK Rep, we were very formally ushered into a room where a senior civil servant with a suit, a bow tie, and a very posh accent politely offered us tea before asking how we thought they might be able to assist us.  At the Irish office, the host wore an open-necked shirt and a sports jacket, and said something like “Come on in boys – would you like a whiskey?”

That’s superficial stuff, of course, but it reflected for me the underlying current of the subsequent discussions that the Irish were into enthusiastic membership and collaborative working; the UK were more about maintaining a ‘relationship’ with the institutions.

The way in which people use language often reveals a lot about the underlying attitudes.  The language being used by politicians and commentators alike about the current situation in the EU is a case in point.  Time and time again, we hear the phrase (or variations upon it) that there should be a renegotiation of “the relationship between the UK and the EU”. 

The very words serve to frame the context.  They convey a message that the EU is somehow something different and separate; there’s an implicit externalisation.  It puts the UK in a different position to the ‘Europeans’.  It’s perhaps a reflection of a long insular history.  (I’d like to be able to say that it’s an English problem, and that Wales is different – but anyone who believes that attitudes in Wales are very much different on this question is probably delusional.)

It reflects the observation that I made all those years ago about ‘membership’ vs. ‘relationship’; no UK Government has never quite made the jump from the latter to the former.  Cameron is merely carrying on where his predecessors left off.  But he’s taking us down a very dangerous road.  It might suit the speculators in the City, but it will not help areas such as Wales.  Rhodri Morgan’s point in Saturday’s Western Mail about looking after the interests of Airbus rather than the interests of the City is a very valid one.

I campaigned for a ‘no’ vote in 1975, and still think that was the right position at the time.  (Actually, our slogan – ‘Europe yes, EEC no’ - was rather more sophisticated than that.  Probably too sophisticated to be able to communicate it effectively).  But after that vote, the facts changed, and I, like others, came in time to accept the changed context.

The EU is far from perfect.  There is much that I would like to change.  But we cannot, as some of the cheering Euro-sceptics seem to think, turn the clock back – being outside the EU now would be a very different prospect to remaining outside in the 1970s.  Europe and the world have changed and isolation is not a good place to be.