Brexit by MacShane Denis;

Author:MacShane, Denis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1951288
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2015-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

9

WILLIAM HAGUE AND DAVID CAMERON HELP CREATE UKIP

Politics is about transforming a nation into something different – economically vibrant for the right, more socially just for the left. However, as politicians embark on a process by which they seek to transform their country they sometimes find that the policies they espouse start to transform them. When William Hague became leader of the Conservative Party and began to indulge the increasingly Eurosceptic views of the rump of MPs who survived the Labour landslide of 1997, he could not have imagined that within less than two decades this process would have turned his party into a solidly Eurosceptic political organism.

Nor could it have been his intention that as he sought to harass Tony Blair’s pro-European line more and more voters would come to believe in such politics and turn to a new party, Ukip, and a new political leader, Nigel Farage, who seemed more authentic and sincere in following William Hague’s Euroscepticism to its logical end – an exit from the EU. The Conservatives since 1997 have undoubtedly helped transform Britain into a more Eurosceptic nation. But at the same time they have transformed British politics by opening the space to new political forces which in turn transform the Conservatives into a party which sees the EU as a problem that is unlikely to be solved.

Thursday, 27 January 2000

On BBC I am all over the place with Bill Cash [leader of the Eurosceptic Tories]. He is actually becoming a moderate within the Conservative Party, which has been taken over by hard-faced men who know only one thing – that they really hate Europe.

David Cameron is in a steady line of anti-European Conservative Party leaders since 1997. Each has contributed in his own way to creating today’s culture of hostility to Europe. After John Major’s defeat, William Hague led the Conservatives firmly into the Eurosceptic camp. Hague was the leader of the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2001 and foreign secretary between May 2010 and July 2014, when he announced that he would leave politics. William Hague is a fascinating study of failure in politics. That may read counterintuitively, as he has risen to the leadership of his party and held the high office of foreign secretary for four years. But he could not lead the Conservatives to victory and his stewardship of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been marked by increasing British loss of influence globally and a serious alienation of the UK from Europe and a distancing from the United States. Having helped create the deeply Europe-hostile Conservative Party of the twenty-first century, William Hague is standing down as a Conservative MP just as his party faces the crucial test of retaining power and the historic issue of deciding whether to lead Britain out of Europe or fight with principle and purpose to keep it in the EU.

Unlike most in David Cameron’s cabinet, who come from wealthy backgrounds in the richest region of Britain – London and the Home Counties

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