For the first half of my 30-odd years of Labour Party membership the Labour Party was

For the first half of my 30-odd years of Labour Party membership, the Labour Party was a bit of a joke in Europe. It took the leadership of Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and the Labour pro-European reformers to turn this around. An office in Brussels is no substitute for active networking and interventions in national capitals.The third development is the most tricky. Few British trade unions or business groups have a fully-staffed, multi-lingual European department, able to network effectively across Europe. British cardinals might talk to their Bavarian and Italian brothers and ask them to see how CAP reform might help the world’s poor in line with church teaching. His ideas should be taken up.The second development is to encourage British NGOs, business groups, trade unions and even churches to put their arguments to their sister organisations in the rest of Europe.

It is no use Oxfam producing an elegant report calling for CAP reform to help the world’s poor if no one in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece is going to read it. Government could help with setting up a European policy foundation to pay for translation and conferences so that progressive British ideas on EU reform could reach a continental audience. Sir Digby Jones of the CBI has written an important pamphlet for the Foreign Policy Centre urging MPs to become more involved in EU policy-making. Making speeches in English in England and expecting anyone in Athens or Amsterdam to take note is naive. Until we shape a British political class that is at ease in debates in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Warsaw and so on, we will not change policy in the direction we want.

Here Whitehall, with its inbuilt nervousness of anything that smacks of political engagement, fails to promote the policy interests of Britain, which require intense political networking to make friends and influence the policy-makers of Europe.As in Britain, it is national politicians and national parties that decide policy in other EU member states. In the corridors and meeting rooms of Brussels, they find words to build a bridge of sighs between apparently impossible positions over which ministers can walk serenely.But decisions in Europe are shaped in Europe’s capitals and by national political classes. The UK has the most admired and professional diplomats working on EU affairs. This is an art that Britain has not yet learnt.Three developments could alter this. The first is to accept that, in EU affairs, diplomacy is not enough.

Yet this cause is not advanced by everyone in London agreeing with everyone else in London. Europe is a political process, and to change EU policy it is necessary to think and engage politically. The speeches denouncing the CAP are as predictable today as they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Tories and Trots, Oxfam and the CBI, Labour and Liberal-Democrats can all purr in contented agreement that on the CAP pro-Europeans and anti-EU zealots are in unison.The CAP is outrageously protectionist, although not as hostile to the Third World as the protectionist agro-policies of the United States or Japan But the CAP should go. Quelle surprise! The French want our money back and we want their cows to stand on their own four udders instead of licking up lashings of CAP lolly from the poor old British taxpayer.

Foghorns boom across the Channel and handbags at dawn loom.
Yet absolutely nothing new is being said. But there will be no consent for enlargement to the Balkans, Turkey, and beyond, unless we address the problems of the “losers” back home. All politics is local, ultimately even the geopolitics of enlargement.. I believe in enlargement as a means of extending democracy, human rights and our values to a wider Europe. If economic reform is to be acceptable politically, the losers have to be cushioned and equipped to adjust to change.And addressing the needs of the “losers” in Europe is essential if Europe is to proceed with enlargement. Poor families across Europe benefit from cheap Chinese T-shirts, but it is the textile workers standing to lose their jobs who, understandably, are most vocal. What we have to show now, in our policies, is as much concern for the losers as for the winners.The basic political problem with open market and economic reform is that the benefits are spread out, while the costs are concentrated.