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UK Foreign Secretary Upset At "Chamberlain" Slur
David Miliband has demanded an apology after a fellow Labour MP compared his attitude to the EU with that of Neville Chamberlain, who came back after meeting Adolf Hitler in 10938 promising "peace in our time."
Michael Connarty, who chairs the European Scrutiny Committee, made the remarks while the Foreign Secretary faced questions over Britain's "red lines" on the revised EU Constitutional treaty.
Miliband said, "You are saying what we are doing today is equivalent of Neville Chamberlain coming back in the late 1930s from Munich claiming to have an agreement with Adolf Hitler - that is not worthy of you."
Connarty retorted that Miliband's outrage was "your sensitivity - not mine."
Miliband's father and grandfather were Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis.
Does Connarty read EURSOC? Last week, we discussed the government's "defence" of Britain's red lines and a reader made the same remarks: "Broon will be back, clutching in his meaty Scottish paw a paper declaring "peace in our red lines", it will mean as much as the last time a British prime minister won something from Europe."
The European Scrutiny Society has been something of a thorn in the government's side in recent weeks, pointing out how the UK's "red lines" are unlikely to survive their first brush with a European Court.
(Open Europe has produced a PDF file on just how flimsy the red lines (on foreign affairs, tax, justice and human rights legislation) are. It notes that the lines are more red herring than red lines, as they represent the fields the government is willing to fight on, distracting attention from other serious issues of federalist encroachment.)
By all accounts, the session with the committee was a tetchy one. The Guardian reports that Mr Miliband frequently rolled his eyes at the questions and accused Conservative committee members of hijacking him with "soundbite" questions.
"William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, also raised the temperature, likening the British red lines to the Maginot line, which was easily circumvented by the Germans in the second world war," the Guardian adds.
Miliband and his boss Gordon Brown evidently see criticism of the EU Treaty as mischief-making from right wingers who are pushing for a potentially embarrassing referendum in Britain. The FT's Gideon Rachman has some interesting thoughts on calls for a referendum, which, he says, won't win him friends in Brussels:
"I lived in Brussels for several years, so it might seem odd that I want Britain to hold a referendum on the European Union’s new treaty", Rachman writes, "For the European crowd that I know well, advocating a referendum is not simply an act of political treason. It is a gross social faux pas – a bit like putting furry dice in your car. There is a range of adjectives that is readily applied to the pro-referendum camp: xenophobic, spit-flecked, swivel-eyed, Little Englander."
"Opponents of a referendum complain that people will not vote on the details of the document. Instead they will just express a general feeling about “Europe”. Fine – the opportunity is long overdue. The last time the British held a vote on Europe was in 1975, when it was still called the Common Market. In the intervening years, the market has turned into a union and it has become more and more obvious that Europe is a “political project”. If a referendum provides a long-awaited chance to express an opinion on “the project” as a whole, then so much the better(...)
"The real European crisis would be a crisis of morale for the most ardent believers in political union, for whom the treaty is yet another small step along the road that began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The rejection of the constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands was a huge blow to these people. But they have recovered their nerve and are now advancing more cautiously, with the constitution repackaged as a reform treaty. This is arrogant and dishonest and deserves a rebuke.
"Supporters of the treaty warn that its rejection would plunge the EU into a fresh round of navel-gazing. It would be impossible to get on with business. But this is special pleading. The history of the past 20 years suggests the opposite: each fresh round of institutional reform has been swiftly followed by another, as supporters of political union build on their advances. If a British rejection of the treaty finally drove home the message that the road to political union is blocked, that might even persuade other Europeans to find more useful ways to work together."
