Johann Hari

I am about to write the most unpopular, the most heretical words any British person can ever utter: mes amis, we must be more like the French.

No, I don't mean we should elect a nasty Napoleonic little thug to slash social programmes and crack down on immigrants. But the French presidential election campaign that ended there has been a flaming, flaring model of democratic re-engagement, drawing 85 percent of French citizens to the ballot box and grabbing TV ratings as high as the World Cup. Compare that to the 38 percent who dribbled into the polling stations of England last week, or to the measly three million who watched the BBC's major election interviews in 2005.

Britain has never - never - seen a turnout as high as France's this week. Even at the peak of our political participation in 1950, we fell a percentage point short. So let's look across La Manche and ask: how did the French do it?

Turnout-Enticer One: Everybody's vote mattered. In a French Presidential election, the country acts as one vast constituency, so a vote in a sure-to-be-Socialist suburb counts just as much as a vote in a marginal, could-go-either-way district. Politicians have to concentrate their energy on all areas, all the time.

In Britain, by contrast, we have a dirty secret: the vast majority of voters don't count. Most of us live in safe seats - so we are safely ignored. It makes no difference if a solid Labour seat like Sedgefield is won by a thousand votes or twenty thousand; politicians have no incentive to drive up turn-out there.

So they concentrate almost exclusively on the half-a-million voters who live in middle class, Middle England swing seats, and tailor everything they say to their whims. The rest of us, uncourted and unrepresented, turn off. The election theme for every party, every election should be 'It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing'.

France has seen amazing grassroots campaigns - led by ACLEFEU (pronounced 'Assez le feu': no more burning) - to persuade the balieues, the concrete rings of poverty that circle French cities, to vote, vote, vote. Registration has soared by 10 percent in the areas that erupted in the 2005 bonfire of the car-and-vanities.

France's rappers like Rost have been able to honestly tell the residents that they might just swing the election against Sarkozy, their sworn enemy, the man who dubbed them "racaille" - scum. In Britain, it's hard to get much traction for similar campaigns like Operation Black Vote, because the votes of minorities and the poor are rarely in swing districts. Bluntly, under our voting system, they can't make a difference.

The late Robin Cook said the best argument for introducing proportional representation was that it would make the votes of the poor count again, and force politicians to court them. This French election - with a different system that has a similar effect - has shown that when they are engaged and enticed and have real electoral power, the hard-to-reach poor will vote, and in massive numbers.

Turnout-Enticer Two: The voters had a real and clear choice. As Tony Blair is always telling us, this is an age of choice, where you expect thirty brands of toilet paper to pick from before you wipe. But when it comes to our political choices, our options are still binary - thanks, in part, to Blair's failure to hold the referendum on PR he promised in 1997. There are very few seats that are even realistically a contest between three parties today.

The French, by contrast, had a delicious menu of choices on the first ballot, ranging from the anarchist-left farmer Jose Bove to the fascist-right Jean Marie Le Pen and everyone inbetween. If you couldn't find somebody approximating your beliefs among those twelve, you're an eccentric person indeed.

Even in the second ballot, there was a clear and decisive left-right choice, with the attempts by the candidates to reach over to the other side - Sego pledging boot camps for young criminals, Sarko pledging "positive discrimination a la Francais" - sounding unconvincing.

Turnout-Enticer Three: The issues were not trivilialised. People have very little time to dedicate to learning about politics. They need to know what their choices are, in plain language. That is what the French press has provided them with throughout this campaign.

In Britain and the US, by contrast, a voter has to fight against a tsunami of trivia and disinformation to find out anything. They have to hear endless Westminster village gossip about the Blair/Brown row or the sex lives of Blunkett and Boris. Most just give up, unaware of their choices and assuming the political conversation has nothing to do with them.

The US pre-Presidential campaign is already descending into this: a few weeks ago, Newsweek said the third biggest news story of the week, after Virginia Tech and the Attorney General's disastrous testimony before Congress, was the fact that Democratic candidate John Edwards had a $400 haircut. One of the Republican candidates, Mike Huckabee, appears to be building an entire campaign around the fact he used to be fat and lost a lot of weight quickly. The US press is taking him seriously. Is it any wonder their turnout is rock-bottoming?

The French have put in place protections to help ensure democratic politics is not cheapened in this way. They have strict privacy laws, so that even the fact that Sarkozy's wife Celia appears to have left him on the day of the big Presidential debate has not been discussed. They have a ban on opinion-polls in the immediate run-up to polling day, to ensure the debate stays focused on the issues and not on the horse-race. It works.

I sympathise the people who react to our low turnout by calling for Aussie-style compulsory voting, but that treats the symptom, not the disease of disengagement. The French have shown us there is another way: if you give people serious politics, they will take it seriously.

Donc, oui, il faut qu'on resemble davantage aux Francais. Sa va?

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read some more articles I've written about European politics here.

This week, a summit will take place in Berlin that not so long ago would have looked like a piece of utopian sci fi. The leaders of a unified Europe - free, democratic and at peace, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Ural mountains - will gather to celebrate the 50th birthday of the European Union. They will truck and barter over a hundred issues, but it would not occur to them to pick up arms against each other, and it never will again.

There's so much poison pumped into the British psyche about the EU that it's worth stopping for a second to realise how incredible this is. When my grandparents were born, the face of Europe was scarred with mud-trenches where one group of gangreous young European men massacred and gassed another group of gangreous young European men in a meaningless parade of nationalism. When my parents were born, Europe was a rubble-strewn wreck recovering from a genocide and the death of more than 40 million fighters. The historian Mark Mazower wrote a book called 'The Dark Continent' - and he meant us.

So wipe the angry flecks of Euroscepticism off the pictures you'll see from Berlin and celebrate. Whatever happens in Europe in the next fifty years, it will not be war - and that is, to a significant degree, thanks to the EU. But it is not enough to build the Union on a negative. We have to ask: what is the EU for now? Some honourable supporters of the Union believe there is no need to offer a new agenda. They argue that - to borrow a phrase form the Northern Ireland peace process - there should be "strategic ambiguity" about the EU's role, so each member can project onto the Union whatever they want to see. I don't agree. The rejection of the European Constitution by a string of European electorates in 2005, and the ongoing dire poll ratings of the EU, shows that if the Union doesn't have a clear purpose, it will sag and sunder. If it is going to last, the EU has to be able to say to its citizens: this is what we do for you.

Flourishing across Europe, it's possible to glimpse three missions on which the Europe's next fifty years - and a shared sense of purpose - can be built.

Mission One: Beating global warming. Only Europe is taking this, the greatest threat to the future of the human species, seriously. The commitment last week to ensure the EU derives 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 is on this issue the boldest move by any government, anywhere. It will have a marked physical effect on the planet, but more importantly, it will strip other CO2-pumpers of excuses. We know we will only deal with this catastrophe if we all act together. Europe is showing the world how.

Mission Two: Saving social democracy. Since the 1980s, the US government has been promoting an economic model that funds and fosters corporations and the rich, but largely leaves the middle class and the poor to fend for themselves. Europe believes in a very different model. We know that markets are an essential tool for generating wealth, but we also know that the state must act to compensate for the failings and toxic side-effects of the market. Although there are certainly examples - like France - where this can go wrong, it can also work brilliantly. The Swedes do everything the Americans say you shouldn't: they have a 55 percent top rate of tax, more than a year of paid parental leave, a very high minimum wage, and more. The result? They have 6 percent unemployment, negligible crime rates, and the highest quality of life and the best social mobility in the world. Europe should stand for preserving and spreading this model.

Mission Three: A different kind of foreign policy. If you compare how the US and Europe have dealt with their immediate neighbours, you discover two different ways of approaching the world. The US has attacked Colombia, sprayed it from the air with poisons, and funded one side in a civil war - and the country is a mess. By contrast, Europe has coaxed and cajoled Turkey, holding out the prospect of EU membership on the condition that Turkey becomes more democratic and free. The result is that Turkey is now the most liberal majority-Muslim country in the world. The Europhile writer Mark Leonard calls this "the power of passive aggression". Where the US too often impatiently bludgeons the world while waving the flag, Europe should stand for a softer, smarter post-nationalist approach. Yes, there are instances in which Europe should have been tougher - like the disgraceful failure to act in the Balkans - but Europe's Venusian disposition is something to be proud of.

Of course, we mustn't be unrealistically unbeat; I'm not opening a new branch of Europol called Europollyanna here. To achieve these missions, Europe will have to overcome a slew of serious challenges, from stopping the increasingly dictatorial Vladimir Putin from buying up all our gas supplies, to finding a much better way to integrate the immigrants who are necessary to keep our social democracy afloat.

The most urgent challenge is to dismantle the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Does anyone think it is sensible that in 2007, more than half of the EU's budget is spent on agriculture, when fewer than 3 percent of EU citizens rank it as one of their top priorities? This policy is one of the biggest factors in the starvation of Africa, smothering Africa's agricultural industries in their cot by making it impossible for poor farmers to sell competitively in the most enticing markets. For every one euro we give to Africa, the EU takes away seven euros in thwarted trade.

To end this kind of dysfunction, the EU has to make an institutional shift from being a top-down, people-fearing monolith to being a more responsive, democratic body with clear purposes. Ah, sceptics might ask, but responsive to what? At the moment, the EU largely holds the ring between competing national interests. A shared European consciousness is only slender and confined to elites. Yet it is worth bearing in mind how recently other identities we now take forgranted were invented. According to the historian Dennis Mack Smith, in 1871 - the year Italy was fully unified - only 5 percent of its citizens had heard the word "Italy".

The first Italian Prime Minister, Massimo D'Azeglio, said, "We have made Italy, now we must make Italians." The EU has made Europe, now it must make Europeans. We can only do this with clear misisons that mark us out from the rest of the world. So when our leaders gather in the once-broken, now-brilliant city of Berlin, they should not only mark the past fifty years of peace. They should launch new missions that can make the next fifty years a period of real, lasting European unity this time.

POSTSCRIPT: You can e-mail comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

There's a critical response to this article at http://ewanwatt.blogspot.com/2007/03/europe-europa.html

The story of this week’s Non and Nee votes is like an Agatha Christie thriller with an especially perplexing twist. We know who the killer is – the French and Dutch people. We know they knifed something in the ballot box. But the question is: what exactly did they kill?

Of course, it is the blood of the European Constitution that was found at the scene. A few hardy souls – Jacques Chirac, Bertie Ahern – might try to give mouth-to-mouth to the corpse, but it is no good: a quick, tearful funeral is best for everyone. But we all know something else something died with the Constitution. The only problem is that nobody can agree about the identity of the real victim.

For the most foaming of Eurosceptics, the answer is obvious: the European Union itself. Roger Knapman, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, describes this vote as "the beginning of the end for the European project." The French and Dutch peoples have killed the very idea of a transnational body stretching from the shores of the Atlantic to the mountains of the Urals. They have asserted their desire to return to the Europe of the late nineteenth century: a place of sovereign, independent states.

But is this true? The Non and Nee camps (apart from the Le Pennist fringes) argued that a rejection of this Constitution was not a rejection of the EU itself. The French left campaigned for a pro-European no, arguing for a different Europe, not no Europe at all. The polls show there is no majority for withdrawal from the EU in France, the Netherlands or indeed any European country.

Detective Tony Blair has identified a very different victim. Speaking from Italy on the night of the long Non, he said, "The question that is being debated by the people of Europe is how do you, in this era of globalisation, make our economies strong and competitive?" For Blair, these votes were an expression of rage against the French and Dutch political elites, because they have failed to deliver decent employment rates and growth. Stuck in a stagnant economic bog, the voters simply chose to kick their leaders in the ballots. Never mind the detail of the Constitution; just feel the anger.

So for New Labour, the casualty is the social Europe promoted by the French and German governments. Say goodbye to a Europe of high regulation, high tax-and-spend, and slow growth, they say with a smile. Europe will now drift towards mild liberalisation, led soon by Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

But this is no more plausible than the Eurosceptic denoument. The whole thrust of the Non campaign was that the proposed Constitution would impose Anglo-American capitalism and crush the wings of France’s generous welfare state.

Whether Blair likes it or not, Western Europe is committed to a different kind of capitalism to the cold Atlantic model. The peoples of France, Germany and Spain have understood that – once a certain level of prosperity has been achieved – scrambling desperately for more, more, more doesn’t bring sufficient increases in human happiness. They do not want to work 60-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year, and rarely see their children. They do not want vertiginous income inequality, a retreat into gated communities, and 2 million people rotting in jail. They do not – in other words – want to become like America.

It is a myth to suggest that Europe must strangle its social model if it wants to succeed. The Swedes have a lavish welfare state married to a healthy economy and the best social mobility in the world. (Ironically, they are achieving the American dream far better than America itself. All the figures show a poor Swedish child is far more likely to become rich in his lifetime than a poor American kid). German social democracy is in chaos today not because it is inherently flawed, but because just a few years ago it had a collapsing communist economy bolted onto its side. If Britain had to absorb and subsidise Albania, do you imagine we would be doing any better?

So, Mesdames and Messiurs, the victim of the events of the past week is not the EU itself, nor the social model of Western Europe. Mais non! I have gathered you here in the library today to reveal that the victim is… Jean Monnet.

You may not recall him. He was the man with the garlic who you saw first at the beginning of this story, mes amis. Monnet was one of the first exponents of the European ideal, and his Europe was built on protecting the peoples of Europe from themselves. He believed in a technocratic, top-down Europe that kept its functions deliberately vague and was (at best) equivocal about the will of the people.

Monnet’s vision was an important phase in the development of Europe. In a continent devastated by demagogic Nazism, his cautious Europe of elites was a necessary antidote. But it has persisted for far too long. Pro-Europeanism has remained in the paternalistic, people-fearing mold of Monnet, even in the age of Google and mass referenda. Its powers have raced ahead of the mechanisms of democratic accountability. The anti-populism of this approach could be spotted in the sight this week of senior pro-Europeans saying they will carry on regardless of what the people say, or even muttering that the votes should never have been held at all.

The best arguments offered by the nay-sayers were all about Europe’s democratic deficit. How can we transfer huge powers over the way we live to institutions unaccountable to us? True, the constitution contained a handful of democratising measures: the introduction of Swiss-style referenda that permit a million citizens to force legislation onto the EU agenda, along with greater powers to national parliamentarians to monitor European legislation. But overall, Valery Giscard D’Estaing had written a Monnetian constitution: unreadable, technical, legalistic, and written for a handful of civil servants rather than Europe’s 450 million citizens.

The EU is a rolling, rollicking experiment in transnational government. It is the nature of experiments that they sometimes go wrong and must be put right. The solution is not to vandalise the European Union itself and return to a continent of snarling nineteenth century states. It is to begin the slow, tough process of properly democratising the EU – making sure that every decision is checked by the people’s representatives – and building a popular pro-Europeanism.

It’s a gargantuan challenge, but the possibility of continuing with a remote, technocratic Europe died this week. The EU’s soundtrack cannot consist solely of Monnet’s 1950s speeches, spliced only with a few tracks of 1980s neoliberalism for variety. If we don’t begin building a populist democratic EU now, we will be calling on Hercule Poirot to explain European mysteries at the ballot-box far into the distant future.

If you want to see the dozens of small ways a Labour government is better than Tory rule, look for blank spaces. Remember the deadly "winter crisis" that would freeze the NHS every year? Gone, because Labour has tax-and-spent our hospitals out of the abyss. Remember cardboard city, and streets lined with beggars? Gone, because Labour has tax-and-spent the issue of homelessness away, slashing the number of rough sleepers by two-thirds.

And remember the periodic outbursts of Hun-bashing, frog-thrashing xenophobia, as a Tory minister would declare he was off to Brussels to slay the Euro-dragon? Remember the "beef wars" and the sense that Britain was a Europe-hating freak, forever trashing the source of Europe's 50-year peace and prosperity? Now, all this is only a blank space.

Nobody today talks about Britain wrenching itself out of Europe. Well, almost nobody. Ignored by the press, the Tories now have the most vehemently anti-European policies of any major party since Labour ditched its withdrawal plans in 1983. This - in all seriousness - is their plan: at their first EU summit, they will simply announce that they will never again belong to the Common Fisheries Policy, the Social Chapter, or any common European immigration regulations, and they will never sign up to an EU Constitution of any kind, ever. Unpick the Treaty of Rome right now, Johnny Foreigner, or... or what?

John Redwood, the shadow Deregulation Minister, was asked about this a few weeks ago - and he pointedly refused to rule out withdrawal. He's right - if the Conservatives make these demands, they will have to threaten to leave. In the end, either the Tories will have to break their core manifesto promises, or Britain will be forced into the logic of withdrawal.

The Tory election campaign so far has been "Hague - The Director's Cut", a new version of the 2001 campaign with - crucially - Europe snipped from the picture. The Tories know their Europe policies are vulnerable to even the most fleeting scrutiny. (By the way, William Hague said in 2001 that "after another term of Labour government, Britain will be a foreign land". Okay William - since this isn't your country any more, hand in your passport and off you go.)

Below the political radar, the Tory party has been UKIPped. If the Tories are ever returned to power without a drastic change in their policies, the summer of 2004 will turn out to have been a silent turning-point, not just for the party but for the country. The surge of the United Kingdom Independence Party in the European elections will be seen as the moment the Conservatives were nudged beyond the point of political sanity . This isn't just my judgement. Nigel Farage is one of UKIP's MEPs, and he has a vested electoral interest in saying the Tories are not as hardline as UKIP. But even he says with a smile that it is "interesting" to see the Tories "talking for the first time about renegotiating Britain's membership of the EU".

Today, more than 30 Tory parliamentary candidates have included withdrawal from the EU in their local manifestos - and Michael Howard has silently waved them through. For example, the leaflets for Douglas Carswell, the Tory candidate for Harwich, say: "The EU doesn't know where to begin to solve Europe's problems. That's because it is the problem ... Britain must be an independent country." One newspaper investigation has found that 70 per cent of Tory activists are in favour of total withdrawal, and it seems they are selecting candidates who match their prejudices.

The Tory pro-Europeans - Clarke, Heseltine, Heath - are old and can no longer offer any counter-balance. The hardline Eurosceptics - once dubbed by John Major as "the Broadmoor wing of the Party" - have total control of Conservative policy. (Britain's political debate is so shallow that Tory divisions are A Big Story, but Tory unity behind a crazy policy isn't.)

But the Tories can only get away with such extraordinary policies because pro-Europeans have allowed themselves to be bullied into silence by the right-wing press. Britain's Europhile politicians have been - with a few honourable exceptions - feeble. There was a bleak moment at Labour's manifesto launch this week when Tony Blair was asked if he had given up on joining the euro. There was a long, chilly silence. Blair looked to Brown and back again. Tumbleweed floated past. "I don't think anybody would say we should join the euro right now," said Blair at the start of a rambling answer that can be summarised in one sentence: yes, I have given up.

Blair's Things-Can-Only-Get-Better commitment to challenge Europe-haters has now shrivelled so far that many people close to him believe he actually wants the French referendum to reject the European Constitution next month. A Gallic Non would rescue him from a nasty, up-hill referendum campaign at home. Has it really come to this? Hoping for the victory of Euroscepticism abroad so we can avoid confronting Euroscepticism at home?

Roger Liddle, Blair's policy adviser on Europe from 1997 to 2004, warns that "Labour cannot afford to let the case for Europe go by default". He points to the root of the problem: British pro-Europeans have failed to develop a new set of arguments. The old Heathite case - that the EU prevents war - has been a victim of its own success. Nobody expects Germany to bomb Poland, even if the EU crumbled. But all we have found to replace this argument is a low drum-beat of threats: leave Europe and we lose 3 million jobs. Leave Europe and you give a victory to foul xenophobes. This is true enough, but it's not enough - where's the pro-European carrot to accompany the stick?

Liddle tries to point pro-Europeanism in a new direction. He argues that the best case for the EU comes from the centre-left - we must sell the EU as offering a way for Britain to maintain its social democracy in an age of globalisation. Do you want to milk the benefits from the global economy without being relentlessly Bushed by business's demands for lower taxes and lower spending? Do you want to maintain a strong welfare state and high public spending? These are the things the British public wants, according to every opinion poll: they are mainstream European social democrats, without accepting the label. So look across the Channel: only the EU offers a way to "mould global capitalism in a social democratic way". Only the EU offers a path leading away from Texas.

But just as Blair is silent about his Government's social democratic policies at home, he is silent about the social democratic potential of Europe. Today, he is reduced to trying to fend off the most extreme Euroscepticism simply by changing the subject, while the euro recedes into a hazy fog far beyond the horizon.

There are only two weeks to let the British people know the United Kingdom Independence Party is not a harmless repository for their protest votes. UKIP is now set to come third in the European elections - yet they have been almost entirely unscrutinised by the British press, waved away as a band of harmless single-issue amateurs. In fact, in many parts of Britain, a vote for UKIP is a vote to be represented by paranoid far right wingers - but who knows it?

Let's look at some of the people you'll be voting for if you put a cross for UKIP. The party is running on a manifesto co-authored by a man called Aidan Rankin. He writes articles and letters for Third Way, a breakaway faction of the National Front, and believes that races should not mix. To this end, members of Third Way have made contact with black separatists and Orthodox Jews who believe the world should be divided into segregated racial groups.

At the last general election, UKIP's list of candidates included - in the words of Searchlight, the magazine which monitors and exposes the far right - "former racists, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers". The magazine claimed that UKIP's parliamentary candidate for Dunfermline West just three years ago, Alastair Harper, had been a leading figure in the neo-fascist Northern League founded by eugenicist Roger Pearson. It also said that the party's candidate in Beaconsfield, Andrew Moffat, was championed by the Holocaust denier David Irving after he was discharged from the Coldstream Guards without explanation.

Searchlight even alleges that UKIP's current national chairman and one of its leading candidates, Mike Nattrass, has been a member of the extreme right, pro-Apartheid, pro-Rhodesia New Britain Party.

UKIP boasts that it now requires all candidates to declare they are not racists. Yet they don't seem to try very hard to make sure these anti-racist declarations are accurate: Private Eye recently provided a summary of the public racism of UKIP's new star recruit, Robert Kilroy-Silk. "Pakistanis want to generate hate ... but then what else can we expect from Pakistan?" he asks. Iraqis are "not worth the life of one British soldier, not one. All they seem to do is moan, incessantly, about their lack of amenities". He raves against "pushy blacks" and "talentless Asians", and suggests that asylum- seekers should be "herded together" by the paras and "dumped on a secure slow boat to ... wherever".

Kilroy-Silk was very publicly sacked by the BBC for these views. UKIP seems not to have noticed. Other forms of bigotry are equally welcomed: boxing promoter Frank Maloney, their candidate for London mayor, has said he will not be campaigning in Camden because there are "too many gays" there.

Similarly, UKIP's claim to reject xenophobia and seek friendly relations with our European neighbours does not seem to match the evidence. Their website links to a guide called "European Union myths and follies", which cites Winston Churchill, speaking in 1918. "Once the apparatus of power is in the hands of The Brotherhood, all opposition, all contrary opinion must be extinguished by death ... You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." Churchill was talking about the Bolsheviks (and supported the idea of European Union) - but what's a few gulags when you're panic-mongering?

The site then leaps directly from mis-describing the EU to the second verse of our national anthem, which, they complain, has been suppressed by fiendish political correctness. "Oh Lord God arise/ Scatter her enemies/ And make them fall/ Confound their politics ... Oh, save us all!" It seems fair to point out that there is some contradiction between UKIP's public desire to seek a friendly relationship with our trading partners, and this plea for God Almighty to smite them.

UKIP's links section - the people they choose to identify as political allies and friends - is an interesting guide to the party's world view. A typical site belongs to Credence Publications, whose top book is Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day. It details "the coming takeover of Britain by the axis powers of France and Germany ... [and] the raw and terrible facts of what treason carried out in British politics has cost our once great nation". Their other links are just as appealing. They point their members towards Northern Ireland's UK Unionist Party (a fringe group not to be confused with the Ulster Unionist Party), which denounces the peace process as "a disgrace".

Many of the symptoms of far right politics are on display among UKIP and its friends: a paranoid hatred of metropolitan political classes, a belief in dark conspiracies operating in the shadows, and the characterisation of anybody who disagrees with their extreme position as "treacherous" and "disloyal".

Indeed, UKIP routinely denounces Edward Heath, John Major and Tony Blair - who, whatever you think of them, have dedicated their lives to serving Britain - as "traitors". It seems strangely appropriate that Joan Collins has joined the Party. Their view of the EU and of our political leaders is like something from a Dynasty plot-line: cartoonish motivations, evil scheming and dastardly foreigners. If Romano Prodi as described by UKIP had bigger shoulder-pads and classier ball-gowns, he could easily be a partner in ColbyCo.

But beneath the layers of bigotry and silliness, it is important to note the appeal of UKIP's arguments. Large numbers of British people - more than 40 per cent in some polls - want to withdraw from the EU. Many are decent people tempted by the UKIP argument that after withdrawing from the EU, we could still engage in full trade with our European partners. It seems like we could cherry-pick the best of the EU - access to European markets - without the political entanglements of belonging to the Union itself. The Withdrawal Brigade points to Switzerland and Norway as models of a post-EU future. These two countries trade with the EU without having to adhere to its rules, UKIP boasts.

There's only one problem with this neat vision: it isn't true. Many of my relatives live in Switzerland, and it is a simple fact that Swiss people have to follow the vast majority of EU regulations. If almost all your products are sold within the EU, then you have to meet EU rules at almost every step of the production and distribution of goods.

After withdrawal, Britain would still, in practice, be bound by EU regulations. The only difference would be we would have absolutely no say in formulating those regulations. They would be made without us. Britain wouldn't even be shouting from the sidelines, as we so often are today. Our government would be outside the stadium, yelling in an empty street. They could more accurately be named the UK Isolation Party.

Nobody has an excuse to vote UKIP in the European elections. If your priority is to kick Europe in the teeth, vote Tory: they are extremely hostile to the EU and have obsessive Europhobes like Bill Cash on their front bench. If you want to kick Tony Blair and the political class in the teeth over Iraq, vote Liberal Democrat or Green. If you insist on voting UKIP, you won't be striking a blow against Europe or Blair. You'll be casting a vote for paranoid bigotry.

Aidan Rankin has requested that the following rider be added to this article:

'Aidan Rankin has had no contact with Third Way since 1998 or the UK Independence Party since 2001. He assures me that he has never at any stage
supported racial separatism. He is committed to individual freedom, equal rights for all and the multi-racial society, and has abandoned any
support for right-wing politics. He regards UKIP, in particular, as institutionally homophobic.'

There's a discussion of this piece at http://united-kingdom-independence-party.wikiverse.org/

For the first time in thirty years, pro-Europeans are going to stand and fight. Since 1975, the case for British membership of the European Union has been left almost unspoken. Europhiles have confined their quiet, sane case to seminars, think-tanks and debates in the House of Commons. The Eurosceptics have screamed their dishonest argument every day at the British people in accessible, often witty chunks of political propaganda.

The result has been disastrous. British people are consistently found in opinion polls to be the most anti-European of all the EU states. Downing Street's private polling shows how successful the Eurosceptic disinformation campaign has been. A majority of people think signing the new European constitution would require Britain to join the euro, sign away an independent foreign policy, place the British Army under European command, and lose control of our borders. All lies.

This drift into Euro-fantasy cannot be allowed to continue. The EU has what opinion pollsters call "low salience": very few people rank it as one of the issues determining their vote, so pro-European politicians have mostly ignored widespread but low-level Euroscepticism.

At times, Tony Blair has even nodded sympathetically in its direction - he wrote a preposterous article for The Sun during the 1997 election campaign entitled "Why I Love the Pound" which bragged about "slaying the Euro-dragon".

But Blair seems to realise he has reached the limits of this strategy of ignoring Euroscepticism or appeasing it. If public opinion drifts any further out into the Atlantic, staying in Europe will become untenable.

Defenders of the EU must not run away from democracy; they must run towards it. A general election campaign fought in opposition to Tory calls for a referendum would have reinforced the impression that Europe is a sneaky, elitist project. But if he is going to win the referendum, the Prime Minister will have to do something very uncongenial to him: he will have to fight the Murdoch press and its lies.

The idea that Poland, France and the Czech Republic are conspiring to surrender their nationhood and live in some massive totalitarian super- state is so silly - so manifestly, utterly barking - that every time I hear it uttered I involuntarily laugh. Yet this is what most British newspaper readers - and Murdoch's in particular - are told every day.

I find it hard to believe Eurosceptics when they say they are genuinely concerned about the erosion of national sovereignty, rather than dislike of Europeans. If they were really worried about sovereignty, surely they would occasionally complain about the fact that foreign multinationals have bullied sovereign British governments into whittling corporation tax and workers' rights to almost nothing.

Or they would complain that large parts of Britain's sovereign army - including its nuclear weapons - cannot be used without American authorisation. Or that large parts of our incredibly powerful media are accountable to foreign billionaires who shamelessly use their newspapers to pursue their own business interests rather than Britain's (or - wild idea! - a human rights agenda).

In fact, the totally independent nation state - which is so selectively fetishised by Eurosceptics - was always a myth. Nation states deal with the world as they find it, with all sorts of messy bargains and ad- hoc pooling of sovereignty.

Of all the compromises of national independence in which Britain is now entangled, the EU is by far the most sensible. For Britain to lacerate itself from the 420 million-member trading block on our borders would be an act of national suicide. We would lose three and a half million jobs. We would lose all ability to influence economic rules that we would be forced - in almost all our trade - to abide by anyway. The anti-Europeans want to hum "Land of Hope and Glory" as they nuke the British economy. It wouldn't be much comfort to wave the Union flag from our smouldering post-European crater.

Of course, most Eurosceptics claim they do not want us to withdraw from the EU. They argue instead that Britain should prevent the entire EU from progressing, in the hope that one day the foolish Europeans will see the light and behave exactly as the British Eurosceptics want them to.

The EU is about compromise and about building alliances. The British Eurosceptics are opposed to all compromise and they have nobody to build an alliance with. No other major European political party - except for Jean-Marie Le Pen's neo-fascist National Front in France - supports the Tory position of not having a constitution at all. Their policies can only represent withdrawal through the back door. The more honest right- wingers - such as the shadow Attorney General, Bill Cash, and the former chancellor Norman Lamont - have admitted this and flirted with leaving the EU.

The joke is that all this Eurosceptic pus comes at a time when the EU is moving in Britain's direction at an unprecedented velocity. For decades the biggest debate in the EU has been between supranationalism and intergovernmentalism, staggeringly boring terms describing a very important difference.

Supranationalists believe that the EU should be accountable directly to the peoples of Europe through institutions above and beyond national electorates, such as the European Parliament and the European Commission. Intergovernmentalists believe the EU should be a federation of nation states, and the focus of accountability should be national governments. Britain has always been on the intergovernmental side - and now we are being joined by 10 new members who agree.

The European constitution - far from being some wild federalist blueprint - actually restores many powers to national governments. It is a mostly intergovernmental document.

Of course there are still terrible problems with the EU. The Common Agricultural Policy is a monster. It takes up half the European budget, and it is in large part responsible for Africa's starvation by making it impossible for the continent's farming industries to compete with Euro-subsidies. But we only have a chance of changing the EU if we are part of it.

This referendum will be a deafening wake-up call for the British people. This is a European country, and we must not allow a lying Australian-American billionaire and his paid lackeys to poison our sense of our own national interest.

A successful referendum will energise Britain's pro-Europeans, drain the confidence of the Euro-liars and prepare our way for membership of the single currency. Tony Blair has finally found his nerve on Europe, after a decade of cautious Europeanism invariably followed by maddening genuflections in Murdoch's direction. Europhiles must rally to him: we won't get a better chance than this.

The Independent (London)

May 9, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 1208 words

HEADLINE: BLAIR WILL NEVER FULFIL HIS EUROPEAN DREAMS
UNLESS HE COMES OUT FIGHTING

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
As ever, the great European debates pass Britain by.
Over the last year, the peoples of Europe have
assembled a constitutional convention - like the
Americans in 1787 - to craft a legal and political
foundation for a Europe that from 2004 will run from
Portugal to Estonia. This has been marked by us Brits
with, um, well... there was a story in one of the
broadsheets, I think, and, er, Newsnight mentioned it
a few times and - ah, yes - there have been a crop of
scare stories in the tabloids. The constitutional
convention - isn't that the thing that's going to
enslave us all to the Germans and end a thousand years
of British history? Yes, you've got it.

The facts about the new European constitution - which
is still being written - are fairly straightforward.
After decades of "ever-closer union", the arguments
are moving in Britain's direction. Today, even a
German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, talks about
"repatriating" some powers from the Commission and
codifying in the constitution the decision that key
powers must remain at the national level. The 10 new
members from Eastern Europe did not gain their freedom
from Moscow a decade ago only to hand them over to
Brussels now; they are far more sympathetic to the
British view (as we saw over Iraq) than to the
hyper-integrationism of, say, Joschka Fischer. You
can't run 24 countries from Brussels, and few people
want them to be.

What they do all want is to co-operate in their common
interest, not least in establishing a single market
for goods and services. Why do Eurosceptics find that
so hard to understand? The legitimate European debate
is about whether we, as a nation, make a net gain from
the inevitable compromises inherent in membership any
club, never mind one as complex as the EU. The
evidence clearly indicates that we do - so the
Eurosceptics change the subject and pretend that the
EU is really a secret, evil conspiracy. The historian
Andrew Roberts - a key figure on the Eurosceptic right
- has written an appalling novel, The Aachen
Memorandum, which perfectly illustrates this view.
Europe in just a few decades is painted as a fascist
state which drives (among others) John Redwood into a
patriotic underground. They seem in all seriousness to
think that this is the covert agenda of the EU.

Back on the planet earth, Britain will, of course we
will, through the convention, pool some bits of
sovereignty, as we have for 30 years. The idea,
however, that this means losing control is based on a
misunderstanding. As Edward Heath, our most
pro-European PM to date, argues, sovereignty isn't
something you hoard in your cellar like a miser, and
go down once a year with a candle to check it's still
there. It's something you spend and use. We can cling
to the illusion that we have our sovereignty by
hugging it close to our chest and telling the world to
go away; but while we do that, the real decisions that
affect us will be made elsewhere without our input. We
are interlinked with Europe in a thousand ways, and we
always will be. The convention is simply a sensible
way of carving up which decisions should be taken
collectively and which will be taken internally. It
looks like the balance - once the convention's
decisions are published - will fall, as it always has,
towards leaving the vast majority of decisions up to
us.

But the Blair government cannot avoid some of the
blame for the fact that the convention and EU
enlargement have been seen in Britain (when noticed at
all) as a threat rather than a vindication. Even at
his most astronomically popular, Blair chose to
politely cross the street when he saw an alcoholic
Eurosceptic tramp in his path, rather than interrupt
his mutterings to point out that they contain some
serious misunderstandings and paranoias.

The PM knows that Europe comes very low on voters'
list of concerns - in the pollsters' jargon, it has no
"salience". So long as politicians deliver on other
issues, the vast majority will let their leaders do
what they like on Europe - an issue that seems distant
and irrelevant. Voters will acquiesce in
pro-Europeanism if it is done quietly, they believe;
why provoke a pointless row with the likes of Rupert
Murdoch, and needlessly risk turning powerful figures
against everything the Government does?

But this approach means that the only time the average
Brit ever hears about the EU is in a hatchet job.
There is a vacuum where pro-European arguments should
be. As Blair's old friend, the late Roy Jenkins,
pointed out, great politicians make the weather;
others shelter from it - and on Europe, Blair has
occasionally tiptoed out of the shelter, only to
retreat at the first sight of a raincloud. The result
is that too few British people know that in 1972, the
year before we joined the EU, only 42 per cent of
goods exports went to EU countries; by 2001, 58 per
cent went to the rest of the EU - in addition to, not
instead of, our exports to the rest of the world,
which have also grown. The EU is making us all richer
- and has been for a long time - but who knows it?

The only area (other than asylum) where the Tories are
supported more than Labour is Europe - and IDS is the
most Eurosceptic leader the Conservative Party has
ever had. The man is an obsessive anti-European
headbanger: he admitted in an interview last year that
he missed the birth of one of his own children because
he was so engrossed in a telephone conversation about
Maastricht. He and his fellow Eurosceptics predicted,
in the same apocalyptic tone they use today about the
convention, that the Maastricht Treaty would mean "the
end of Britain as a self-governing nation". So, um,
why do you want to be Prime Minister now, Iain? And
why don't you say you'll repeal Maastricht and
advocate withdrawal from the EU, the only logical
conclusion to your views? Yet if pro-Europeans like
Tony Blair don't give voice to their arguments, people
like this set the tone.

The tragedy is that these silly debates - usually
based on a fictional EU which has never existed, and
will never exist - prevent us from discussing the
important questions about the new Europe. What does it
mean to be European? Is our identity based on, in
Giscard d'Estaing's words, "a shared Judaeo-Christian
heritage" (in which case Turkey is excluded), or is it
based - as I'd prefer - on shared social democratic
values? Another huge controversy: do we want to build
Europe as a partner of the US or a rival to it?

Some Europeans - Jacques Chirac is the most obvious,
although British intellectuals such as Will Hutton
agree - see the EU as a alternative power-block to the
US, protecting its social-democratic vision against
neoliberalism. Others see this as a nightmare - Tony
Blair and the recently retired Czech President Vaclav
Havel are the most eminent - because it would entrench
pointless conflict, distracting both continents from
their shared interests in tackling Islamofascist
terrorism and spreading democracy and some form of
capitalism.

These are big, meaty rows - yet what are we talking
about in Britain? Whether we are about to be conquered
by a dastardly Fourth Reich. Are we Brits really
incapable of discussing Europe seriously?

April 16, 2003, Wednesday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 891 words

HEADLINE: THERE WILL NEVER BE A BETTER TIME TO GO FOR
THE EURO

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI - YOUNG JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR

BODY:
Depending on which paper you picked up at the
beginning of this week, Tony Blair has either decided
to "go for it" - in the words he used in his last
Labour conference speech - on the euro, or Gordon
Brown has decided to rule it out until after the next
election. This isn't bad reporting. Different, usually
reliable sources are saying different things, which
makes me suspect that everything is still up for grabs
in this debate.

Mr Blair, it seems, has yet to steady his nerve ahead
of the announcement - due by the first week of June -
about whether the five economic tests for joining the
euro have been met. His aides are cautious, as though
they don't really know their boss's thinking on this
issue either. This means that he could still make the
bold, history-making choice and call a campaign.

The confusion we are seeing now is nothing new: one of
the Government's first crises, in autumn 1997, was
over mixed messages on a euro referendum. We have seen
a six-year euro dither because the stakes are
fantastically high. It's no wonder Mr Blair is
nervous. If he called a referendum and lost, he would
go from being the most electorally successful Prime
Minister in Labour's history to being recorded by the
history books as the PM who shot himself in the
stomach - from hero to zero in just six weeks. The
Tory party, currently trundling slowly towards the
crematorium furnace, would leap from the coffin like a
villain at the end of a bad horror movie, bleeding but
with a chance of throttling our hero after all.

And yet, and yet... The people around Tony Blair say
that he is learning from his new, risk-taking style.
He always said that one of his key aims in government
was to secure Britain's destiny within the EU. He
knows only too well that, without the euro referendum,
he will be remembered in Europe as the man who pushed
Britain even further away from the continent by
publicly scrapping - to the glee of the Murdoch press
- with Chirac and Schroder.

The Iraq war showed how a determined Tony Blair could
reverse a 70-30 majority against a policy in just a
few months. On a smaller scale, Ken Livingstone's
brave decision to introduce a congestion charge has
impressed Mr Blair by showing how another substantial
chunk of the electorate gloomily predicting disaster
could be turned into a whopping, irreversible majority
in favour.

Suddenly, bad polling data looks more volatile - and
easier to turn - than ever before. Polls now provide
Mr Blair with an indication of how hard he will have
to fight, rather than - as in the recent past -
psychologically sealing off with iron bars any policy
that does not already flow in the direction of
majority opinion.

And if Blair is serious about ever going for the euro
- as I believe he is - there will never be a better
moment than now. After the next election, the few
remaining pro-Europeans in the Tory party will be
ageing and further from the public's memory than ever.
Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke already
have one foot in the grave; they will look more grey
and less plausible as each year passes. The Tory
Europhiles will disappear just as surely as Labour
Eurosceptics like Peter Shore, Barbara Castle and Tony
Benn have disappeared.

We don't like to admit it in Labour circles, but the
old tag that the Tories are divided over Europe is now
largely untrue. The older Tories are split - Maggie
can still take a swing at Ken and party like it's 1989
- but they are now in the Lords or retirement. They
seem to most voters now like the ghosts of Recession
Past. Tories in their fifties and younger - the
generation who now run the party - are only divided
between those who want to resist the euro and those
like Bill Cash who privately want to go for the crazy
nuclear option of withdrawing from the EU altogether.

A euro campaign will be far easier to win with the
sane-sounding wet Tories vigorously campaigning on the
same side. Each year of waiting sees that prospect
receding a notch further into fantasy. And will there
ever be a Tory leader who is more of a liability to
the anti-euro cause than IDS?

The talk of Tony Blair sacking Gordon Brown if he
tries to veto a referendum seems overblown. For all
the journalistic hype and the whispers of over-
enthusiastic aides, the pair have stayed incredibly
politically united for more than a decade. The
Chancellor did seem to pour cold water on hopes for a
referendum by repeatedly dissing the eurozone
economies in the Budget last week, and there are
reports that his assessment of the euro tests will be
negative. But Gordon Brown is sensible enough to know
that he and Tony Blair sink or swim together - and it
is time he admitted to himself that he did not win the
leadership in 1994. Either way, the longer Mr Blair
waits, the deeper these divisions will cut.

It would be a huge leap into the void to call a
referendum - but today, with Tony Blair still buzzing
from vindication in Iraq, anything is possible. There
is a limit to how long he can keep the pro-euro camp
waiting at the altar before they become so
disheartened that they won't perform on their wedding
night. Mr Blair should remember what he said last year
- "New Labour is at its best when we are at our
boldest" - and lift the euro-veil before it is too
late.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

February 12, 2003, Wednesday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 18

LENGTH: 1166 words

HEADLINE: THE GULF DIVIDING AMERICA AND EUROPE IS ONE
OF HISTORY, NOT JUST GEOGRAPHY;
THE CRISIS OVER IRAQ

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
Nato is shattering into jagged shards. It is time to
ask if Europe and the US now have fundamentally
conflicting visions and values. Have the continents
linked together by the twin tyrannies of the Third
Reich and the Soviet Union - for not just my lifetime
but my parents' - been blasted apart by George Bush's
foreign policy?

The debate over European-American relations is being
dominated by a recent essay by the US neo-conservative
policy wonk Robert Kagan called Power and Weakness. He
begins, provocatively: "It is time we stopped
pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common
view of the world, or even that they occupy the same
world." The key dividing line is over attitudes
towards power.

In Europe, the shadows of Hitler, Mussolini and Vichy
France darken their attitudes towards their own
governments. Europeans have sublimated their national
aspirations into a European Union which repudiates war
between its members. The sole legitimate foreign
policy tool is dialogue; violence is taboo. The
founding principle of the EU is supranational - it
believes that by erecting peaceful bodies that stand
above nation states, we can eradicate violent
conflict.

The commitment to supranationalism is so strong that
the EU is seen as just one such body: the United
Nations is another institutional layer that should
facilitate dialogue and prevent war. Therefore, as
Kagan explains, Europe "is moving beyond power into a
self-contained world of laws and rules and
transnational negotiation and co-operation". The
European vision, he notes with a revealing sneer, of
"a post-historical paradise of peace and relative
prosperity, is the realisation of Kant's Perpetual
Peace'." Kagan should also have pointed out that the
key European value is to prevent war, at almost any
cost.

In the US, the lesson drawn from the 20th century, and
indeed before then, is very different. They believe
that confronting "evil" (a word used without
embarrassment), even at the risk of war, pays off in
the end. It is only through the threat of violence
that peace and freedom can ultimately prevail. The
American public overwhelmingly understands their
historical narrative as one of the nation fighting
bravely against evil, time and again: the British
empire of George III, the Third Reich, the Soviet
Union and now Islamofascism. Sometimes, they admit,
this has led them into mistakes, like Vietnam, but
these were mistakes made in a noble cause. The key
American value (in their own self-understanding,
although often not in practice) is to prevent not war
but tyranny - and, crucially, threats to US security.

The US therefore, in Kagan's words, "remains mired in
history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbseian
world where international laws and rules are
unreliable and where true security and the defence and
promotion of a liberal order still depend on the
possession and use of military might". This
fundamental divide "is why on major strategic and
international questions today, Americans are from Mars
and Europeans from Venus".

Of course, as he admits, Kagan is caricaturing vast
continents, but he has hit a nerve. His very
broad-brush distinction rings true. By using his
model, we can see more clearly some of the flaws in
the current European position towards Iraq. The
Venusian vision ascribed to Europeans is, I believe,
generally a good thing. I hope that, sooner or later,
the European model, of regional collections of
democracies pooling their sovereignty to secure peace
spreads and, in time, the globe is regulated in this
way.

The fundamental problem with the current European
vision (and I suspect this is Blair's complaint too)
is that it assumes that we can adopt the same approach
both inside the EU, whose members acknowledge
supranational authority, and externally, towards
countries such as Iraq that repudiate all
international norms, including those on genocide.

Nation-building and the spread of democracy require
both an acceptance of violence as a means to an end
(overthrow Saddam, build democracy) and a degree of
optimism and self-confidence that Europeans seem to
have lost. French culture is riddled with nihilism,
from popular movies such as Irreversible to the
intellectual classes who venerate the hateful and
utterly bleak writings of Michel Houellebecq and the
bizarre denial of reality propagated by Jean
Baudrillard.

At the fag end of nationalism, as they push beyond it
after seeing the damage it can bring, they find it
impossible to imagine themselves back to the moment of
its realisation. Their nationalism emerges only in
deformed, semi-racist nostalgias such as the reveries
of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Chirac's foul rants about his
"sympathies with the poor French writer" who "has to
put up with the noise and smell of immigrants". While
American neo- conservatives, at least, have a vision
of democracy for the Arab peoples - through violently
overthrowing the Arab dictators who stand in its way -
the French offer the oppressed Arab people nothing but
a pessimistic shrug and a few million francs more for
the corrupt Yasser Arafat.

Of course, there are problems with being too credulous
towards US neo- cons. The current administration
contains too many individuals - especially Dick Cheney
- who sneer at international norms and see the US as
accountable only to itself. It has refused to sign up
to Kyoto and the International Criminal Court and
wrecked the Convention on Biological Weapons. Even as
you read this, the US is, in the name of its absurd
"war on drugs", spraying Colombia with carcinogens
that wreck the environment and seriously harm the
health of local people. The European model is
certainly preferable to this; but the solution is to
try to draw the US, just like Iraq, into the web of
nations.

This isn't as difficult as it sounds: 70 per cent of
the American people support the International Criminal
Court having jurisdiction over the US, and it is US
public opinion, along with the prompting of Blair and
Colin Powell, that is forcing the current
administration to go as far down the UN route as
possible (the UN route will probably be halted only by
a French veto). Most Americans want to be part of the
civilised world, although we may have to sit out the
current unelected hard-right administration to
experience this.

But it would be wrong, in the meantime, to oppose
democracy for the Iraqi people (and the war that is
the only means to achieve it, unless Saddam goes into
exile) because of the flaws of the military power
bringing it into place. If Europeans want more say in
projects like this, they will have to do three things:
develop a far more substantial military; reject the
quasi-pacifism coming from the German government, that
would condemn the Arab peoples to autocracy for ever;
and, most importantly, if they want eventually to live
on Venus, support the Martians when they
constructively rebuild the world around us.

johann@johannhari.com