Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

How did it feel?

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of arguably the most influential record of all time, New Order's Blue Monday - known to Factory Records afiocionados simply as FAC73.

How did it feel for me when I first heard this, while sat in the 2nd floor student union bar at UCL in the spring of '83 while its pulsating bass and barely comprehensible lyrics rang out in the disco area next door? The honest answer is, absolutely terrified.

This was a record so unbearably trendy, so absolutely rooted in the dance culture that had at that time been colonised by the college's fashionable people, that it seemed to me to denote a world I could never enter. It took me a while before I overcame this instinctive aversion and added it to my record collection.

Feel free to add your own memories of the first time you heard Blue Monday in the comments. You might even care to speculate on whether the lyrics are about the death of Ian Curtis, the after-effects of cocaine, or the Falklands War, as this is something I've still not managed to work out.

Small earthquake, no-one injured

For me, the famous newspaper headline about sums up the state of the Lib Dems today following last night's rebellion over Europe. An awful lot of nonsense is being talked about Nick Clegg following the loss of three of his shadow spokesmen over the issue, but to my mind, it will do him no lasting damage and could even be seen as having strengthened the party's frontbench line-up.

I say "loss" of three spokesmen, but they are really no great loss to be honest. Justice spokesman David Heath, the most senior of the trio, is well-liked in the party, and has been a good servant to successive Lib Dem leaders, but he has hardly been setting the Thames on fire of late and giving his job to Chris Huhne has allowed Clegg to beef-up the portfolio of one of his party's few proven operators - an astute piece of political management if you ask me.

The resignations have also allowed Clegg to cut the size of his bloated Shadow Cabinet - the only reason it was the size it was being the fact that he inherited so much deadwood from Ming. This should really have been done three months ago when Clegg took over but better late than never.

The Tories, and some Lib Dem bloggers, are trying to turn this into some sort of leadership crisis for Clegg, with Huhne seemingly poised to take over the top job at last, but the idea that the party would change its leader a third time in as many years is so utterly fanciful as to be utter bollocks. Here's what I have written on Iain Dale.

At long last....

Just when you thought that the Brown Government was going to do absolutely nothing to address the English Question...up pops today's Telegraph with the revelation that that Prime Minister has ordered a review of the infamous Barnett Formula.

The figures on how the formula awards Scotland an extra £1,500 per head in public spending per year speak for themselves, but a good practical example of how this operates was recently uncovered by the Newcastle Journal which revealed that the £16bn Crossrail project would automatically mean an additional £1.6bn for Scotland - irrespective of whether it needed it.

I have to confess I had given up hope of anything being done about it this side of the general election. In a Journal Column last November, I argued that Labour's real opportunity to reform the formula came in 1999/2000 when the party was riding high politically and public expenditure as a whole was rising so sharply that the adjustment could effectively have been concealed. Now, the politics of the situation have changed utterly, with the SNP now very much in the ascendant, while public spending is no longer rising anything like as fast.

I can only imagine that Mr Brown has either become convinced that the formula is wrong in principle - a view that would be hard to reconcile with his treatment of the issue while at the Treasury - or that he has concluded that the rising level of English discontent over the issue outweighs the obvious political risks from north of the border.

March 6 update: There appears to be some doubt over whether the Telegraph story is actually true, but if so I wouldn't blame the newspaper for that. The Government has been speaking with a forked tongue over this issue for at least a decade. My hunch, for what it's worth, is that while there may be no changes planned to the BF as yet, something is rumbling in the Whitehall undergrowth.