Ross Clark
last year’s manifesto was written that the labour markets in many other EU countries are in a dire state – Spain has an unemployment rate of 21 per cent.
In any case, if Cameron is trying to tell us that migrants are coming here because the rest of the EU is an economic basket case, why is he simultaneously trying to convince us that Britain would hurt economically if we left the EU? Surely, if the rest of Europe is performing so poorly it is a good reason for decoupling our economy from moribund Europe and seeking investment and trading opportunities elsewhere in the world where economic growth is so much stronger.
Cameron’s excuse simply doesn’t stand up. It is clear that he sanctioned the promise to reduce net migration to a few tens of thousands a year in the hope that it would attract a lot of votes from Ukip yet knowing that it could not be delivered. Maybe he was counting on not winning a majority, in which case the promise could be quietly dropped in a coalition agreement, or maybe he is so convinced by his ability to explain his way out of trouble that thought, he could get away with saying whatever he liked.
The irony is that in recent days David Cameron has been trying to make honesty the basis of his campaigning in the EU referendum. At the weekend he accused the Leave campaign of peddling three “untruths” – that Turkey is about to join the EU, that £350million a week goes to the EU and that there is going to be a European army. “If people, after serious thought and consideration, want to leave [the EU],” he said, “of course we must leave. But to leave based on three things that are not true would be a pretty desperate outcome.”
Many might argue that the Conservatives’ victory in last year’s general election was the one based on something that was not true – the idea that net migration could be reduced to a few tens of thousands while we remained members of the EU. That is a far bigger porky than any that have come from the Leave campaign.
How can David Cameron claim it is a lie to say that Turkey is on course to join the EU when his Government has been supporting Turkey’s case for membership?
He himself told the Turks in 2010 that he wanted to “pave the road from Ankara to Brussels”. Was he lying then or is he lying now?
DAVID Cameron has got himself into the position he is in because he has never grown out of the PR man he was before he was elected as an MP. He is not a political thinker in the way that Michael Gove or Steve Hilton are. It is no accident that no one ever uses the term “Cameronism” in the way that they used “Thatcherism” or “Blairism”. He has always drawn his political ideas from others while putting them together into a marketable package.
The whole EU referendum was, to him, a PR stunt. He hoped that he could win over Ukip voters and silence Eurosceptics in his party by promising a renegotiation of Britain’s terms of membership of the EU followed by the stamp of approval by the British people. Trouble is, he miscalculated that PR is a little more difficult in government than it was in the TV station where he used to work. His stunt has backfired on him horribly.
‘He has never grown out of being a PR man’