By Jim Murphy

All those positively motivated by the modern European project- as defined by the purposes and policies of the European Union- are invited to consider the following news items.

1. In early February 1998, The Independent runs a short news-story under the headline: Hostility to single currency falls. The prompt for the story is a new poll revealing that in the UK some 32% of people say "they would vote to join a single currency if a referendum were held tomorrow". Even though some 52% declare their intention to vote against a single currency, the tone of the piece is nonchalantly optimistic; this is the nadir, apparently, of overt opposition to monetary union in the last decade.
2. In November 1997, MORI conduct an opinion poll for the Sun. From an impressively sizeable sample of adults, we learn that some 42% of all those expressing an opinion affirm that, a referendum granted, they would vote to take Britain out of the European Union. In this poll, some 50% also say that they oppose British participation in a single currency.
3. In April 1997, during the General Election campaign, The Times gives details of a MORI survey on national attitudes to the EU. We learn that the country is badly split on the entire question of EU membership (40% in favour; 40% against) and that only 22% say that they would vote in favour of a single currency in a referendum.

As this article is being written, latest international survey figures from Eurobarometer find that only 36% of British people regard EU membership as a "good thing", compared to 48% in France; 53% in Spain and 78% in the Netherlands. Only 29% in the UK support a single currency and 59% are opposed. The Guardian casually observes that the figures serve to highlight "the momentous task facing Tony Blair if he tries selling the euro to the electorate in a referendum".

After all this time, the pro-EU pulse under the skin of British public opinion is, it has to be said, remarkably weak.

Such figures and findings have formed a familiar part of our national political furniture. In general, they bring delight as well as ammunition to the eurosceptic; they vex what we might call euro-progressive opinion in our commercial and political elites; and they give sport to outright euro-enthusiasts who spend much zeal "proving"- in an endless round of counter-poll and counter-analysis- that British public opinion is much more interesting / malleable / euro-veering that meets the eye of the beholder. This latter category is particularly and almost endearingly devoted to claiming that the market research tea-leaves have fallen into the shape of a circle of stars. In their rhetoric, the beast of euro-scepticism is always shortly to be crushed as the British public- our appetite for truthful information about Europe eventually met- swings round in favour of its proper European destiny.

At heart, this article is addressed to the person who, without fanaticism, believes in the proposition- explored and developed in more detail below- that our national prosperity turns on the general success of the European project, defined as it currently is by ever-closer political collaboration, monetary union, enlargement to the East, full completion of the single market, etc, etc. Such a person may well be quietly dismayed by the types of survey finding quoted above but, since the opinions concerned might be considered more tabloid than broadsheet, he/she may not worry about them too much. After all, Europe seems to move forward despite the drag of public opinion in the UK. Moreover, since the Conservatives were trounced in the General Election, perhaps the high tide of euroscepticism has passed and the new and popular Government, while filtering its rhetoric through the country's known europhobia, is now free quietly to pursue an essentially integrationist strategy. And a good thing too, that person might well think.

We argue here that this is a seductive, but fundamentally a lazy and dangerous mentality. The case for Europe cannot afford to hide itself behind Tony Blair's petticoat. That case ought to come out and confront the deepest problem it has always had: the problem of public opinion. This pamphlet will argue the following propositions:-

• that the case for the modern European project has to be comprehensively re-made in the UK; the current propaganda is not working and has not worked for decades
• that the case to be made for Europe cannot- in either general vision or specific content- be the same as it was twenty five years ago; ten years ago; or even five years ago
• that the case for Europe will meet its sorest test yet as monetary union is established on mainland Europe and as the day of a British referendum heaves relentlessly into view; the very business of a referendum means that public opinion cannot be out-run or out-manoeuvred for ever and to delay the impact of this truth and/or to continue with current practices is to court disaster.

The fact is that the "selling" of Europe to British citizens has been a marketing disaster of such proportions that were the EU a multinational company the responsible management would have been sacked years ago. But even though the survey figures quoted above (and there have been many more such polls over the years) represent an unmissably catastrophic failure of policy on behalf of all concerned, nothing seems to change. It is also the fact that, though few say it out loud and even fewer (within informed opinion) are ready to recognise it as a dominant truth, our political classes are effectively prisoners of public opinion whenever policy options within Europe are discussed and decided. They are forced, the pro-Europeans especially, into a rhetoric of, at worst, the shallowest chauvinism and, at best, the narrowest ambition. Public opinion is to the UK's future in Europe what the lady in the attic was to the Rochester household in Jane Eyre: something to be shunned, appeased and feared all at the same time.

It will be perhaps be argued that this paper is rooted in an essentially elitist proposition: that public opinion is there to be manipulated for its own good by those who know what is really best for it. Some will argue that public opinion understands the threats and opportunities in our EU relationships only too well and that polling data serve merely to confirm this. It is not a question, so this line of argument will run, of bad propaganda leading to bad results, but indifferent and sometimes downright damaging policies from the European Union leading to an inevitably poorly motivated electorate.

Two points would be made in reply to any such complaint.

Firstly, the transparent deficiencies in pro-EU propaganda in the UK have to be considered as a dynamic element within our national debate about European policy. Whatever negative instincts may once have driven the opinions of British people, they are compounded and even intensified by a very poor choice of promotional language and emphasis. How did it all so come to pass that during the last General Election, a former Cabinet Minister (David Mellor), could ask his readers in the Sun "Why should we trust Brussels with our pound when they have made a mess of so much?" and not be pelted with abuse for such populist drivel? Why is such a remark so easy to make? How did it all so come to pass that during the same campaign The Times could headline a leader with "Vote Goldsmith to evict Mellor!" and not see switchboards jammed by troubled readers asking if leader-writers could be allowed out a bit more. We have grown used to so much cheap rhetoric about Europe and counter arguments currently do not pack any popular punch.

Secondly, within its European policy, Britain is playing for very high stakes. What is at issue is whether today's EU can integrate quickly enough to guarantee stable growth in European productivity and sharper industrial competitiveness in order to underpin our collective position in global markets and ensure prosperity and jobs. If this is the goal, then this is no time for lazy politics, petty nationalism and bad propaganda. All of which, the referendum on the single currency still on the cards, we now have in abundance.

Later we will try to offer elements of a possible new consensus about how the modern European project might be sold to a stolidly under-motivated public opinion in the UK. But, since our case rests on the notion that so much of the propaganda of recent years is not working (indeed is positively damaging) then it behoves us to "prove" this in little more detail before we proceed.

Let's make the following fantasy: that we hold captive in a room all the organisations and campaigns (formal and informal, professional and amateur) devoted to promoting the EU as well as a generous presence of the ordinary "euro-progressive" individuals who are mentioned above; perhaps a couple of Government ministers slip unnoticed into the back row. Suddenly, the room falls completely dark and the following staccato imperatives are projected, one point at a time, onto a bright white screen.

If you are in favour of the modern project of the European Union and would like to see that project prosper in the collective consciousness of the UK, then:-

• stop fretting about democratic legitimacy; this is not a major problem
• stop trying to sell- item by item- the benefits of EU membership; there is precious little evidence that this works
• stop using tired arguments about the sometime purposes of the Treaty of Rome; the world has changed and so has the nature of the EU
• stop exulting in the culture of "successful" rebuttal; by the time you prove that British mushy peas are not after all to be turned yellow on the direct orders of Jacques Santer, popular goodwill and a more compelling kind of argument will already have been lost

Some in the audience gasp out loud; this is all so unreal, so unconventional, so un-pc.....! How could these proposals possibly be justified?

Let us take the points in order.

Democratic legitimacy. Back in 1992, the first Danish referendum result on the Maastricht Treaty looked like it was going to become a watershed in the EC's vexed pursuit of democratic credentials. The Guardian's coverage makes, as one example out of many, informative reading today. "The Danish Lutherans have jerked Europe back to sanity!", thundered the famous Euro-Parliamentarian, Dr. Ian Paisley. Equally famous and equally hyperbolic, Tony Benn told the House of Commons that the Danes had "struck a blow for people in every country in Europe".

Such reactions might be thought to be as predictable as they were triumphalist. But the reaction of pro-Europe voices was no less depressing to the argument of this paper. Shirley Williams gave a speech to a Charter 88 meeting, reported in The Guardian on 16th June. She began well enough:-

"The framers of Maastricht felt little obligation to explain or consult with the Community's citizens and that failure helps to explain the Danish referendum result".

However, the article went on boringly to recommend better technocracy within the EC's institutions: viz. more powers, for the European Parliament, an end to the "democratic deficit, more disclosure of discussions at the Council of Ministers, etc, etc,etc....as if the solution to Europe's sudden political arthritis lay exclusively in better internal processes. In fact, the sheer untutored volatility of a particular segment of European public opinion was all too blatantly the real heart of the matter (as the French referendum was shortly to prove). The effect of comments like this- and they were plentiful at the time- was actually to deepen disquiet within informed opinion about the whole European project while attempting to further seriously irrelevant agendas about the internal doings of the European Community. There is no evidence whatsoever- in spite of the best efforts of Brussels-based broadsheet journalists, then or since- that the fact that, for instance, Council of Ministers' meetings take place in private cuts any political ice with the electorate one way or another. The case for Europe over the years has been characterised by just this kind of intellectual narcissism, this solipsistic introspection, this oh-so-easily diverted focus: so much fiddling while the Treaty of Rome was burning.

More recently, the Royal Institute for International Affairs produced the report An Equal Partner: Britain's role in Changing Europe, the output of a special commission peopled by a number of well-known euro-enthusiasts. One has to wonder whether some parts of the text were properly weighed during proofing by the authors for their meaning and impact. Take this selection:-

"Few commentators doubt that the EU suffers from a legitimacy gap. A growing degree of hostility and indifference to membership of the EU is common among most (sic) EU countries.....The lack of a European demos places clear limits on the level of democracy that can be achieved at the EU level....The EU will not develop into a pan-European democracy in the foreseeable future".

This is not an argument; it's a neurosis. What is on display is just how deeply the attacks of euroscepticism have cut into the self-confidence of euro-progressive opinion. The allegedly undemocratic nature of EU institutions is thus ludicrously over-emphasised as a possible cause of weak public motivation for the EU project. It is also nonsensical, as An Equal Partner does as well, to lump together pan-European research findings to support the lack-of-legitimacy argument. As any scan of survey results will confirm, there are very wide differences in the spread of opinions about Europe from country to country. (This fact is also ignored- with highly damaging consequences for the validity of the policy recommendations- in the recent Demos pamphlet Europa: The search for a European identity, discussed further below). A brief selection of Eurobarometer figures (1996), actually quoted in An Equal Partner, makes the point easily enough. Those who say our country's membership of the European Union is "a good thing": Ireland- 76%; Netherlands- 74%; Portugal- 54%; Spain- 51%; Denmark- 44%; UK- 36%........ There is simply no uniform pan-European feeling within public opinion relating to the EU's lack of legitimacy, however defined. Euro-progressive analysis should stop looking at the world through the hazy myths that cover SW1.

Membership benefits. Recognising as it does that British/European public opinion is a problem to the EU project, An Equal Partner reaches disappointingly for two specific and oft-repeated solutions: "improving democratic structures and developing popular policies". The Demos pamphlet on European identity, mentioned above, takes a similar approach, prefixed with an affirmation of deep ideological gloom. "Across Europe, the EU's standing with its citizens has hit rock bottom (sic)...The EU is unpopular because the troubles stored up over 40 years of technocratic integration by a political elite are now catching up with it.....".

(This is not the first analysis to paint this picture of relentless and cumulative and transnational decline without any active sense of the dynamic evolution of the EU's purposes in the setting of vast socio-economic and commercial change in the last generation alone. Once again, a fundamentally eurosceptic proposition is taken as a given without any apparent forethought whatsoever. The language of the Demos pamphlet might instructively be juxtaposed with that used by John Redwood in his book Our Currency, Our Country; for example, "...at the turn of 1997, it became clear to many (sic) that Britain needed to renegotiate its deal in the European Community as a whole....Many (sic) people felt that the European Community had moved too far away from the original idea of the Common Market. Instead of more trade, we were getting more government. Instead of furthering our prosperity, many of the regulations and economic policies were actively impeding economic progress......" . It is indeed passing strange just how a language of emphatic and irresistible disappointment with the EU's long-run value can frequently link both eurosceptic and euro-progressive opinion. There is absolutely no objective reason why this should be so).

At first blush, what could be more obviously sensible than redirecting the EU's propaganda towards a greater focus on the policy benefits that all citizens can putatively enjoy from the success of European integration? This is what Demos suggests as the beginning of marketing wisdom for a beleaguered and unloved EU. The answer to the question is: quite a goodish number of other ideas because, seductive in its simplicity, this proposal a) does not make any real difference in practice b) has actually been tried for years anyway c) flies in the face of all we know of the psychology of branding and corporate identity and d) misses the critical need for a guiding mission for all modern EU propaganda. At the heart of the sell-the-benefits approach too lies a highly indolent reading of market research findings about today's Europe and the activities of the Union. The approach also carries a bogus feel of democratic respectability, viz "...the EU must be seen to concentrate on its citizens' priorities".

Consider, in a lateral reflection, the posture of some of our most successful companies. Think of BA, BP, Virgin, Marks&Spencer, Sainsbury......or of the global giants like Microsoft and Coca Cola and McDonalds. These are not in the main corporations which say to themselves: "if only our customers could know more of the benefits of our excellent individual products, then we would sell more- we must detain our customers long enough for the value of these benefits to be fully explained......". Any marketing director using this kind of language would be abruptly downsized- for this is simply not how companies use their corporate brand to buttress sales of their services. Such a brand is used precisely to simplify rather than to complicate core messages.

Many of us, for example, might well believe that BP is a successful, self-confident company with a strong sense of corporate self-interest which does not prevent it from maintaining a regular supply of petrol to our motorway outlets at a competitive cost. We know- more or less clearly, without thinking about it too much- both why BP exists and how it exists; branding and marketing activity, as pursued by BP management, is designed to reinforce such impressions. In its propaganda, BP does not normally talk about paraffins and olefins and their role in the efficiency of motor gasoline.

One can hear, as the point takes hold, the euro-enthusiast cry out in unison with the euro-progressive: But it's not the same! But why not? The EU is a corporate political brand just like the UN or the Labour Party or NATO or the SNP. To be successful, it has to stand for simple and clear purposes on the basis of a self-confident identity. In Britain, one understands something of the purposes of Richard Branson's individual companies through general notions of his commitment to customer service and exciting entrepreneurship. Our appreciation of the detail of what his companies are offering is coloured- is pre-ordained- accordingly.

Let's consider this point in the light of some selections from the Demos report. The argument begins well enough:-

"If people are going to support the single currency, they will do it because they support the EU and trust it to help them. This will not happen unless the EU seems relevant to their lives and is seen to deliver tangible benefits. It is therefore vital that information campaigns are carefully targeted and that they are combined with measures to ensure that the EU is seen to be acting on issues that are not regarded as technocratic (sic) ......... Europeans have a clear conception of which activities should be decided at which level. Opinion polls tell us that they count the environment, international crime and terrorism, common defence and military policy, common foreign policy and job creation as problems beyond the grasp of national governments which should be priorities for the EU...."

This is the intellectual equivalent of an electronics company, at some point in the 1980's, looking at survey data which tells it that electric typewriters are very popular with customers and concluding that its factories should produce, well, more electric typewriters. Successful companies start with a philosophy for their existence and produce and position goods accordingly in sharp respect for all that is taking place in the world around them. The European Commission office in London, for its part, produces documents with titles like Europe at a Glance- how the UK benefits from being in the European Union. A recent edition contains over 40 discrete policy items under the "benefit" category. In its own way informative, the whole report reeks of corporate self-doubt and a desperate desire to appease the cynic and the sceptic. Some quotes:-

One almost expects the text to read at one point: "DID YOU KNOW THAT... a European Commissioner recently saved a disabled pensioner from drowning while on his way to give all his salary and expenses to a hospital for sick Romanian children?"

Such as they are, all the detailed policy benefits that are due to the EU pack a PR punch only if they can all be connected to one great simple overarching all-defining purpose. Nothing in the EU's current propaganda suggest that such a purpose exists. But it does and we shall attempt to codify it below. In the meantime, if anyone thinks that the sell-the-benefits approach, as currently constituted, is making headway, then he or she is referred back to the survey data which opened this pamphlet. It's not hurting and it's not working. Sell-the-benefits becomes so much bad pap.

Tired arguments. These days, the speeches and articles produced by European Commission President Gaston Thorn go sadly unremembered. But visitors to good libraries- alas, there is no point in trying bookshops- might come across a piece M. Thorn published in 1982 in a selection entitled Europe's Economy in Crisis. The striking thing about M. Thorn's stated conviction that "Europe's economic problems are soluble only at a European level" was that hardly anyone in the anglo-saxon world believed any such thing at the time. Indeed for those long, languorous years between the appointment of Roy Jenkins to the Commission presidency and the launch of the 1992 programme, it is hard even for the euro-enthusiast to recall just what essential purposes defined the entire Community bureaucracy and all its doings. Towards the end of the 1980's one Ralf Dahrendorf wrote an article for the IEA in which he looked back wistfully down the years:-

"There was a long period of relative silence from Brussels, the dreadful 1970's with all its problems, and there were times when there was no objective for the European Community".

But maybe this is a little harsh. One could perhaps re-view those apparently purposeless years- during which so much public opinion about Europe began to congeal- as the period in which an original political objective of the Community / Union was being met, i.e. progressive, peaceful collaboration among Western European democracies within a framework of joint institutions. Here lay the motivation that drove Edward Heath and his Government (as well as much of the Opposition) into accession in the early 1970's. Whatever else was achieved, this was a generation when, truly, a great deal of historical enmity quietly died across a continent. Good thing too. But life moves on.

It is the argument of this paper that this era is ended ; that the Union has fundamentally differently purposes now; and that this fact should be absorbed into the Union's own description of itself and its activities.

In other words, there is virtually no political purpose now attending the activities of the European Union. Her raison d'etre should now be seen as exclusively economic and her entire propaganda apparatus, especially in the UK, should reflect this. The Union's basic purpose is to hasten the modernisation of our commercial practices in order that, in dramatically changed global circumstances, our collective productivity remains high. The significance of all individual EU policies should flow and be seen to flow from this truth. Other battles, dominant in their day, are all but done. Gaston Thorn's dictum is profoundly topical at last.

Let's moor this point in our minds as we reflect on how some serious commentators approach this question of Europe's political identity and meaning. So many seem to miss the point. Consider Hugo Young, writing in The Guardian on the 6th Jan. 1998. What matters, he argues, is whether Mr. Blair:-

"......can work a change in the assumptions, the deep givens, of British public thinking, which continues to shy away from the concept of 21st-century Britain being, unalterably, a European country......

......Until the Government is prepared fully to confront the excitement, and the enormity (sic), of 'Europe' being a political project, the national conversion stands little chance of being successful. Economic and monetary union is essentially about politics- a species of political integration, unknowable in detail but axiomatic in principle- and only secondarily about economics". (Italics added)

Much propaganda offered in support of the European Union is rendered defective by this deceptively learned, seriously unmodernised thinking. The European peace is secure; democracy has taken root across most of the continent; a sense of common purpose attends both the domestic and the international programmes of governments. The political project is ipso facto currently in place. Why persist in re-placing it? Why pack bags of old wet sand round the EU's legs?

In an otherwise engrossing pamphlet produced recently by Lionel Barber for the Centre for European Reform, the author is also determined to argue that the UK still has to learn to see the EU in political terms (and finally swallow an inevitable loss of sovereignty). In seeking to define the UK's optimal European posture, Barber suggests:-

"The necessary shift is as much psychological as anything else. It requires the British government to confront the issue which politicians have consistently evaded since Britain became a member of the EU, 25 years ago. That is, to accept that the Community, now the Union, is much more than a free trade zone and a single market. It is a collective political enterprise......"

But really "politicians" (always a lame object of blame) are not the bogey-persons here. The simple fact is that the uses of the collaborative European effort have altered as society and its needs have themselves progressed. We can blame people in the 1970's for wearing flared trousers and pink satin shirts. But let's at least accept that the world was different then. Pepsi Cola does not ask Val Doonican to advertise its fizzy drinks. Is it not a curiosity that the European Movement in the UK parades to this day the support it enjoys from Roy Jenkins and so many other stalwarts of earlier "political" battles about Europe- individuals that are to the current promotion of the Union all that, in britpop terms, Slade are to the Spice Girls? The case for Europe is mired in both old "politics" and even older personalities. No wonder it is doing so badly.  

The culture of rebuttal. Economic and monetary union represents a challenge to British society to pursue a culture of continuous modernisation in the context of a wider challenge to European society to find new and deeper economies of scale throughout our commerce. Others may express it differently and better, but this is surely a workable version of why the Union now exists. Many commentators like to add references to a specifically European way of life: that the project has to be about high employment, social inclusion, a commitment to standards in welfare, etc, etc. This is perfectly fair, but none of these attractive aims is guaranteed if the economy inhabiting the "European space" does not find and re-find its optimal efficiency.

Those who share all or just some of this analysis must find even informed debate about Europe within the UK a profoundly depressing experience.

For example, after the Maastricht Treaty was concluded, The Guardian published a book entitled "The New Europe". Many of the paper's leading journalists supplied chapters. We will not name the author of this choice selection:-

"The trouble with Eurocrats is that they do not see the world like you or I. Where we pick flowers, they gather non-edible vegetables; where we buy milk or nuts, they purchase mammary secretions or shell fruits.......".

More recently (Oct. 1997), The Independent ran a news story under the following headline: "And all because Les Euros (sic) hate Milk Tray". The story opened:-

"He may be suave, mysterious and acrobatic, but if the Milk Tray man wants to plant his nut clusters in the boudoirs of Europe, his calling card will have to be stamped with the words: 'Chocolate made with 5% vegetable fat'.

...Yesterday, it became finally clear why he has to dive from 200ft high cliffs in order to sneak boxes of chocs on board Mediterranean yachts after dark; because Euro-legislators have banned his goodies from the continent....."

Thus do so many of our liberal broadsheet intellectuals find tabloid amusement in the EU and all its policy-making inelegance. How vulnerable, how flimsy the whole grand European project can suddenly seem when the efforts of her bureaucrats are reduced to the absurd. Once again, euro-progressive opinion seems to have grown used to all this low-grade and unabating abuse. And no effective strategy for dealing with the corrosion of public support that it brings has yet been found.

Let's put this last point another way: current tactics are not working and should be abandoned. The European Commission Office in London- where the excellent staff would surely rather be doing something else with their time- gamely rebuts its way through all manner of policy distortions: No, the EU is not, in fact, planning to straighten British rhubarb; No, the EU is not banning soft cheese; No, the EU is not making British fishermen wear hairnets; No, Jacques Santer is not planning to sell young British girls into a new white slave trade. (Only the last of these has not actually appeared yet). Year in and year out, they rebut like fury- but, in practical effect, they have rebutted their way into a rut. Their efforts cumulatively reinforce the very impression that they are seeking to correct: that Europe does not really know what it is doing or why it is doing it. And the tone of abject point-by-point defensiveness sucks energy away from a much healthier endeavour- to wit, spinning, in a much more aggressively professional way, the EU's grand design into the media and into the individual stories they want to run. Rebuttal, as currently constituted, almost always involves a negative: No, we are not actually planning to do anything to threaten (some tabloid version of) the British way of life. This is taking the euro-progressive cause absolutely nowhere. There is just no evidence that, with a great battle with British public opinion still to be fought in a single currency referendum, the practice of automatic rebuttal is working. Why persevere?

Perhaps few now recall just how sharply the value of sterling fell on the morning after the French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Perhaps the result- 51.05% in favour, 48.95% against- is also forgotten. Such was the hostility among large sections of the normally pro-European French public (the turnout was 70%) that the Treaty was a heartbeat away from total derailment on that September day. And anyone who thinks that, a referendum called on the single currency, the same close-run-thing could not occur here in Britain is invited to recall the vicious hostility to the EU and all its works that so poisoned our last General Election campaign. Just one image: a miniature Tony Blair sitting on Helmut Kohl's lap. Just one headline: "The Sun says- 'Slap down this EU pipsqueak (Jacques Santer)'". There were plenty more.

Indeed New Labour won the election. But in a referendum, the focus will be exclusively on Europe and there will be no hiding behind other policies and promises. The tide of anti-European feeling that sludged through the General Election campaign was proof of just how ineffectual those bodies whose job it is to sell the modern European project can be when the firing starts. Why should euro-progressive opinion sleepwalk into the future and hope that a probably ever-popular Tony Blair carries the day at the referendum hustings. Why not resolve to attack the problem of public opinion once and for all?

The pro-EU forces in Britain are a diffuse army: professional and irregular, organised and casual, old and young. Under any circumstances, it would not be easy to fit them all into one disciplined programme of effort, supported by the necessary finance. All this pamphlet can do is make the following appeals to euro-progressive opinion everywhere:-

• Let the consensus now mature that the EU has one simple mission: to open our internal markets, make our economies competitive and thus drive Europe towards ever greater productivity in the interests of all. Let euro-progressives begin to argue that- whether under discussion is the Parental Leave Directive or changes to the fishing quota regime or the Working Time Directive or the regulation of our national air carriers- Europe has this sole compelling purpose and all individual policies, whether individually perfect or not, take their meaning from this aim. All organisations able to finance euro-propaganda should devote investment only to this kind of promotion and campaign.
• Let the official organs of the EU in Britain accept the need for root-and-branch reappraisal of the way all promotional budgets are spent; current propaganda is crippled by a) a desire not to offend and an almost Fabian gentility in argument and b) the conviction that all our citizens require is a passive explanation of the "facts", i.e. lists of obviously desirable "benefits" and soft rebuttals of shocking eurosceptic calumnies. British public survey results are just not moving quickly enough in a favourable direction for a good case to be made for the continuation of current practice. Perhaps there is at work in some quarters an underlying, defeatist mentality that public opinion will simply not change. This must be ejected and replaced with a strategy and a will to change things.
• Let all organisations established to campaign for the European project have the courage to review and recast the politics of what they do. Too much of the current effort is a) highly repetitious- the citizen will have heard it all before down the last two decades {if he or she has bothered to pay attention in the first place} b) damagingly and tendentiously self-serving- as if every policy idea that comes from Brussels is terrific {whether or not it serves the mission we try to codify above} and c) not winning mass recruits. Though it is a cliched commonplace in this kind of argument, the example of the switch from Old to New Labour is instructive here: stop using approaches to the electorate that are not delivering results- just stop!
• Let those with budgets pay for proper professional support for the promotion of the project. Let advertising agencies and market research companies be harnessed to the task of taking the mission to market, of adjusting propaganda to suit the range of commercial and electoral constituencies, of categorising "consumers" of the mission into different target groups and framing messages accordingly- all the things that would be done if an ambitious multinational was pursuing the most efficient corporate image and the best positioning for its individual brands. Let the campaign thus be characterised with ruthless professionalism- instead of naïve "information"-peddling.

During the last General Election campaign, Tony Blair wrote an article for The Sun about the EU and the possibilities of a single currency in which he said: "I know exactly what British people feel when they see the Queen's head on a £10 note.......". The remark implies a very acute awareness of just how unenthused so many are by the kind of change the modern European project will inevitably imply. With the stakes so high, it is time for someone to offer our political leadership a little more room for manoeuvre. No?

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