Miliband's ad lib

[Sunite]

Miliband's ad lib

    * Mark Mardell
    * 16 Nov 07, 10:51 AM

Iraq in the EU? Perhaps I should have said Israel. Why is the EU like Voltaire's God? And what happened to the latest proposal for a new European charter? Read on.

Yesterday was one of those days. Covering the Miliband speech should have been a doddle but first my phone wouldn’t charge, then no internet connection would work, then our equipment blew up before we were about to go on Radio 4's PM programme, so while trying unsuccessfully to correct that, I missed an interview with the foreign secretary and then our piece got dropped from the Ten O'Clock News because a better story came along. And back at base it was proving impossible to put comments up on this blog, for which I apologise. Still we did manage to get on radio bulletins, BBC World and News 24.

Enough of my insignificant woes, but it was a pity because it was a rather interesting speech in a number of ways. First Miliband is one of the few front rank British politicians who really believes in promoting the case for the European union. Talking about expanding defence capability and doing it in Bruges where Mrs Thatcher made her famous speech was a deliberate red rag to a bull.

Miliband's red rag in Bruges

Although he must have disappointed the former Belgian prime minister, vetoed by Britain as president of the commission, Jean Luc Dehaene, who said he was looking forward to hearing the British government’s argument in favour of the Lisbon treaty.

The foreign secretary was however tackling eurosceptics on their own territory. As he pointed out, drawing a titter from the audience, “Bruges” to most British political animals means a leading Eurosceptic think tank. Read their take on the speech here.

Most of the media focused on his ideas for greater European military cooperation: it was interesting and fits a certain “news template” that gets the words “European Army” into the headlines (for some reason Nato never gets called EuroAmerican Army). Interestingly the foreign secretary didn’t talk about a new “European defence charter” and a formal review of EU military capabilities. I suspect that someone pointed out that another EU charter sounded a bit like the institutional navel-gazing Mr Miliband was keen to condemn.

That’s what he took out. This is what he put in, by way of an ad lib. Mr Milband said because of the threats facing the world “If the EU didn’t exist we would have to invent it" (what Voltaire said of God).

This is controversial in some quarters but I wonder how many politicians would agree with what he went on to say? Note-taking was near impossible in the dark of the auditorium, but the gist of it was that the EU has to have a an appointed (that is unelected) commission at its centre to represent the interests of Europe as a whole, rather than the nation states. Hardly controversial in Brussels but I suspect in an ideal world many British politicians would only re-invent the EU with a much curtailed commission.

But the “did he really say that?” part of the speech remained his suggestion that one day North Africa and the Middle East might join the EU. I just don’t agree with Rory Mitchell's reading of the speech: he clearly talks of a free trade area “in line with the single market not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it”.

But just to be sure, a colleague asked him about this in an interview. I haven’t got the tape in front of me, but his reply was on the lines that it was obeying EU rules, not geography, that mattered; who could say what the situation would be in 2030; and it was important not to put up barriers. When pressed again he said that he knew there was a debate in Israel about closer ties with the EU and even membership and repeated that it was important not to put up artificial barriers.

On the surface this is a pretty outré suggestion. It will confirm the view of those who hanker after a closer union that enlargement is a British plot. A plot to so dilute the Union that it becomes little more than a club of states that share roughly the same sort of values. Indeed according to Mr Miliband’s non-geographical criteria I can’t see any reason why Japan and Australia and South Africa shouldn’t be eligible right now. Perhaps this is a plan for a putative world government.

But I suspect it's more to do with classic negotiating technique, a deliberate over-bidding. In December President Sarkozy will get his “group of the wise” to look at the EU in 2030 and make it quite clear he wants them to rule out Turkish membership. The French president knows that many feel that Eastern Europe was rather indigestible and after Croatia the door should be closed on not just Turkey but the western Balkans.

Mr Miliband is planting his flag firmly on diametrically opposite ground. Let battle commence. An alternative vision of European defence? An attack on protectionism? Defence of enlargement? This speech was aimed at an audience not in Bruges, not in Brussels, not in London,