The great EU stitch-up gathers steam. By Peter Hitchens.
Be careful what you wish for. Is it just
me, or do I see a growing dawning of doubt about the referendum among anti-EU
types?
Mr Cameron’s new friend Jean-Claude
Juncker, head of the European Commission, was absolutely right when he pointed
out that the Government is not seeking an exit from the EU, and ‘Cameron wants
to dock his country permanently in Europe’.
A defeat for the anti-EU side in a
referendum will, of course, achieve this, diminishing all the ‘Eurosceptic’
poseurs in the Tory Party to the pointless blowhards they really are. What will
they do then, to pretend they are patriots?
Oh, and talking of defeat, spending
rules for the referendum have already been cleverly devised so that the ‘Yes’
side can spend up to £17million, while the ‘No’ side will be limited to
£8million. It’s done by giving each political party an allocation, on top of the
equal limits for the actual campaigns.
And a law which would have banned pro-EU
promotions by public bodies in the last 28 days of the campaign has been quietly
dropped. All this goes on undiscussed, while we obsess about Sepp
Blatter.
