Labour’s Euro problem

Dan Hodges in his new home at the Telegraph:

[Cameron's] brilliant failure in Brussels also represents a bitter blow to Ed Miliband and the Labour party. Over the past few months Miliband, Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls have rightly been manoeuvring themselves into a position of greater Euroscepticism, from which they hoped to exploit growing Tory divisions on Europe. But they moved too late.

Cameron has again outflanked Labour, who are now left in a European no man’s land. Despite Ed Milband’s condemnation of the Prime Minister’s handling of the negotiations, he has already confirmed he wouldn’t have signed the treaty either. Cameron has the clarity of prefect isolation. Miliband’s efforts to place himself pragmatically equidistant between Britain and the continent have left him stranded in the middle of the English channel.

Hodges is a famous Ed-hater, but on this I think he’s probably right. How can you criticise Cameron for his hardnosed determination to ‘protect’ the City from new EU regulations, when Ed Balls recently slammed Cameron for failing to ‘protect’ Britain from having to make increased contributions to the IMF to cover the Euro crisis?

Given that the splits within the Coalition are more than damaging enough for Cameron, Labour should probably aim to move the conversation away from the Eurozone and back towards the miserable economic picture here as quickly as possible. There’s frankly no gain for Labour in discussing what is (in the public’s view at least) primarily a story of excessive debt, when they’re starting to make some progress arguing that the UK economic story is primarily one of excessive debt reduction.

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