Tories make nice with Europe, but is it genuine?

When William Hague starts making nice with Europe, you know the Tories are getting very worried about their falling poll numbers. Over the past week the Conservatives have been bending over backward to rebut an increasingly successful line of attack by Labour that accuses them of being isolationist.

Yesterday in a speech in London the Conservative's shadow foreign secretary William Hague sounded a very different tone than he was just a few months ago. He insisted that the Tories would play a "leading role" in the EU if they were elected to power in May. Calling the EU “an institution of enormous importance to the United Kingdom and its foreign policy,” he said that the Conservatives’ intention was to be active in Brussels, “energetically engaging with our partners.” It was, to say the least, quite an about-face from the barely veiled contempt the Tories have displayed for the EU as they rode higher and higher in the polls over the past two years.

The speech clearly had two intended audiences. One was an increasingly skeptical British public who have begun to doubt whether the Tories have really changed from theconfused and conflicted party they were in the 1990’s. The other audience was fellow European leaders, particularly Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, who have been enraged by the Tories’ behavior over the past two years. To say the least, David Cameron’s outspoken criticism of the Lisbon reform treaty did not go over well on the continent. But it was Cameron’s decision last year to remove the Tories from the pan-European conservative party (EPP) in the European parliament to form a new anti-EU party with hard right Eastern European parties which really provoked the ire of the Tories' centre-reight European counterparts. Merkel’s Christian Democrats have reportedly suspended meetings with the British Conservatives since that decision.

A tea party for Britain?

This week, Tory Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan was on Fox News in America, where he is frequently found, and talked about his efforts to bring the anti-government “tea party” movement to the UK.

The idea that this rag-tag movement of disaffected, gun-toting right-wingers with funny hats could ever catch on in the United Kingdom is a stretch. I probably couldn’t think of a more un-British phenomenon. But, given the rising anti-EU rhetoric in this country, is it inconceivable to see Hannan's vision become a reality here?

Who knows how many people actually turned up to Hannan’s little gathering, I certainly didn’t hear anything about it in the British media (a quick check suggests about 100 people showed up). But though he may be on the fringe of British politics and is an unwanted thorn in the side of Tory leader David Cameron, it is important to remember Hannan is still a Tory politician. His brand of populist, anti-government rhetoric is just an extreme representation of a strain of thought that is active and growing in the Conservative Party.

UK Enraged by US Healthcare Portrayal

The US healthcare debate came to the UK in a very explosive way yesterday, when video of a British politician slagging off the NHS spread across the internets like wildfire. It was the twitterati who first started spreading the word, creating tags like #welovetheNHS to defend the NHS from this particular Tory politician, who happens to be a member of the European Parliament. My previous blog post on this subject has made the rounds pretty heavily on that tag actually.

The US media tour by Conservative MEP Dan Hannan has created a huge headache for Conservative leader David Cameron, who was scrambling yesterday to assert his love for the NHS and describe Dan Hannan as a fringe politician with "extreme views". The message is clear: the British National Health Service is a cherished institution in the UK, and politicians left or right criticise it at their peril. Whether this sort of "love it or leave it" mentality is helpful is debatable, but one thing is clear - any Briton can tell you that Dan Hannan's portrayal of the NHS doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to reality.



His description of the NHS, seen in this video above from Fox News, is so outrageously made-up that the Labour party - long trailing in the polls and virtually guaranteed to lose the next election - has pounced on it to show that the Conservative party can't be trusted with the NHS because they intend to make drastic cuts (Blair used the same argument in '97). The political headache for Cameron grew to such a fever pitch yesterday that some analysts were predicting that Cameron might sack Hannan from the partyand hence he would be out of the European Parliament). I know plenty in Brussels who would be relieved at this prospect, as Hannan has a long history of causing trouble in Strasbourg. But we'll see if the pressure remains through the weekend.

Of course as I pointed out in my previous healthcare blog post, the fact that the US media is focusing on the NHS at all doesn't make any sense. The healthcare plan being proposed by Obama and the US congress is not a single-payer system as exists in the UK Canada or France, but rather a hybrid multi-payer system as exists in Germany. Germany has a universal multi-payer system with two main types of health insurance: the public fund and private funds. Everyone is mandated to have healthcare, which is provided by the public fund to people below a set income level for a low rate. So, the wealthy can pay for exceptional private health coverage if they want to, or they can pay a small amount for the state insurance (many opt to do this). The end result is that everyone is covered and Germany spends 10% of GDP on health care, compared to 16% in the US. Obviously Germany would be the better example for the US media to use, yet the country, to my knowledge, has never been once by the US mainstream media.

This whole US "debate" (if you can call it that) has just been downright painful to watch, and has reminded me just how lucky I am to live in Europe. What's really unfortunate is that the hysteria and lies in the US are drowning out any actual debate on this bill - which will create one of two results. A bill will be passed without that perhaps lacks restraining measures that would have been helpful to it, or no bill will be passed which will represent the triumph of the mob, the victory of misinformation over reason. It's really a very sad thing to watch.

As for the British, perhaps watching the way this whole thing is unfolding in the US will make them feel a little more European. After all, this is one of those crucial ways in which the UK is much closer to the continent than to America. And the British should be grateful for it.