Playing with fire

IT ALL felt rather odd. During their weekly parliamentary tussle on October 31st, Ed Miliband tore into David Cameron for refusing to commit to a cut in the European Union budget. Conservative MPs, though hostile towards Brussels, shifted uncomfortably on the government benches. Opposite, their normally pro-European Labour counterparts roared with delight.

Labourites were once Eurosceptic, suspicious of the EU’s capitalist hue. Tories were keener. But by the mid-1990s the parties had swapped positions. Social and employment protections emanating from Brussels helped endear Europe to Labour. The Conservatives turned against the project, fighting internally as they went. Today Mr Miliband finds it easy to rile them over Europe; he cynically used the EU budget debate to engineer the government’s first serious defeat in the House of Commons by joining with deeply Eurosceptic Tories. But the party that could well emerge from opposition to lead the next government has a Euro-headache of its own.

Mr Cameron, who wants to remain in the EU but repatriate many powers, is increasingly expected to commit himself to a referendum on the issue, probably to be held after the next general election in 2015. That might calm Eurosceptic backbenchers and hold off a threat from the United Kingdom Independence Party, which wants to withdraw from the union. But it would also force Labour to disclose its own position. Some influential figures believe the party should back a decisive in-or-out vote, perhaps even pre-emptively.

Will Straw of IPPR, a centre-left think-tank, explains the reasoning. A referendum in the next parliament is inevitable, he says. Labour cannot rely on the Eurosceptic Mr Cameron to make a strong case for membership. Labour must do so instead, and it needs a long campaign to develop its arguments.

Yet David Clark, a Miliband ally and former Foreign Office adviser, retorts that it would be “suicidal” of the party to plump for a referendum. He imagines a newly-elected Labour government holding a vote at the start of the 2015 parliament, losing control of the issue to Britain’s Eurosceptic press, and spending the following five years dealing with the political, diplomatic and economic fallout from a British exit. One nightmare involves Scotland leaving the United Kingdom to rejoin the EU, crippling Labour’s electoral prospects (the party depends on Caledonian votes).

Others point out that the Labour Party simply lacks campaign-winning fire. Few Labour prominents are passionate in their pro-Europeanism these days. And Lord Mandelson, a notable exception, reckons that in the current anti-EU climate, a referendum debate would descend into a “mean, scratchy, introspective fight”. Now is not the time, he concludes.

Unlike the prime minister, Mr Miliband leads a party broadly comfortable with the intellectual case for membership of Europe. But Labour’s supporters are hardly unified. Recent YouGov polling suggests that most British voters fall into one of three categories: optimistic internationalists, pragmatic moderates and pessimistic nationalists (in ascending order of hostility to the EU). Of the three main parties, only Labour’s voters are well-represented in all three categories.

And if the party leadership is not ideologically divided, its tactical rifts are real, and growing. They express Mr Miliband’s own reticence on Europe: he has given not one major speech on the topic. His shadow Europe minister professes that “it falls to Labour to keep making the pro-European case.” For all the fun of teasing the prime minister over the dispatch box, the party’s options are becoming deeply serious.