Dave’s EU deceit is staring us in the face – and we still miss it

IRECENTLY visited a ‘head shop’, one of many totally legal establishments now flourishing on British high streets, where users of officially illegal drugs may buy the equipment they need to enjoy their criminal habit. I didn’t buy anything. But one of the items on sale was a wall-clock, especially designed to be used to store drugs. ‘Hide your stash in plain sight!’ said the little poster next to it.

It is good advice. If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.

This is what the Prime Minister has done with his supposed promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union.

The dishonest trick at the heart of the offer is so blazingly obvious that nobody notices it.

Let me explain. If Mr Cameron really believed that he would win a parliamentary majority on May 7, he would not make this promise.

He loves the EU so much that he has said that he wants to extend it to the Ural mountains. He absolutely does not want this country to leave it.

BUT because Mr Cameron knows perfectly well that he will not win such a majority, and that no possible coalition partner or ally would support such a referendum, he feels safe to make a pledge that will never be redeemed.

The purpose of the pledge is to win back some of those voters he and his Blairite friends have long derided as fruitcakes and closet racists. He despises them, but he wants their support to ensure that the Tories are the largest party, and that he stays in office.

It would be disastrous for him if they all took him too literally. He needs some of them, but not all of them.

This is perhaps why the Tory Party’s campaign is so crude, narrow and awful, almost designed to repel thinking and decent people.

The interesting thing about all this is that it is so blatant, yet nobody seems to notice it, just as they don’t notice the perilous state of our economy (another disastrous balance of payments deficit was announced last week). And just as it is obvious that, while we are supposed to have ‘tough’ and ‘draconian’ laws on drugs, shops which help people take drugs thrive all over the country. I sometimes wonder if, one dark and tearstained morning, all these many lies will be brutally exposed in one dreadful awakening.