Thank You Very Much

Simon Hughes, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, has this evening informed the Any Questions audience that his party had never been in favour of joining the euro at the given time rather than merely in principle, and that "We are a lot better off with our own currency, thank you very much." But then, he abstained on Maastricht, while Sir Nick Harvey, as he now is, went so far as to vote against it.

I am not convinced that most Lib Dems are all that pro-EU at all. I have a strong suspicion that they are more like the characters in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. One by one, each of the members of an anarchist cell turns out to be an undercover policeman.

Vicious campaigners though they undeniably are, there really are Lib Dems, doubtless clear majorities of their members and voters, and probably even of their MPs and Peers, who believe profoundly in the election, appropriate or otherwise, of pretty much everything that exercises any sort of power.

In absolute openness and freedom of information, prudent or otherwise. In the highest possible degree, sensible or otherwise, of decentralisation and localism. In the heritage of uncompromising opposition to political extremism everywhere from Moscow to Pretoria abroad, and from the Communist Party to the Monday Club at home.

In (unlike me) the tradition of anti-protectionism against everyone from nineteenth-century agricultural Tories to 1970s industrial trade unionists. In the rural Radicalism that has always stood against the pouring of lucre into the pockets of the landlords. And in the interests of the arc of Lib Dem fishing seats from Cornwall via North Norfolk, Berwick, and North East Fife, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Mild to strong Eurosceptics, including a goodly number of the latter, probably keep quiet within the Lib Dems because they assume that they are a tiny minority. But I bet that they are not. In fact, I bet that they are not really a minority at all. And now, they have to make legislative and executive decisions.

Ed Davey is in the Cabinet, while the similarly non-Eurofanatical David Heath and Norman Lamb are on the cusp of it, with Alistair Carmichael as the party's Chief and the Government's Deputy Chief Whip. Heath, as Deputy Leader of the House, also has an important role in progressing business.

The Party President, Tim Farron, is very much of the same mind as Simon Hughes, on this as on most other things. Longstanding readers will be aware of my view that David Laws belongs in the same prison as anyone who had stolen that much in Housing Benefit. But the fact remains that he is not.

And Vince Cable has proposed an industrial strategy wholly incompatible with the Eurofederalist project, as in fact any industrial strategy is; it has only taken the SDP 30 years to catch up with the Labour right-wingers, for want of a better term, whom they left behind.