It's not all Balls

The ploy by Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander to call for Dave Cameron to secure real cuts in the EU budget is a way of setting an elephant trap for the prime minister. They know if they were in office they would have great difficulty in securing such cuts given the stance of other member states. But it will give them another chance to score a few political points by portraying the Government as weak and incompetent, as well as increasing disarray on the Conservative benches.

So it's a smart tactical move. But once we get away from the partisan point scoring, they do have something interesting and important to say in their Times article. They point out that for all the fuss about Brussels bureaucrats, administration only takes up 6 per cent of the EU budget. £45 billion is sucked up by the CAP at a net cost to the UK of £1 billion a year (although we do get a budget rebate).

They argue, 'Although the butter mountains of the past are long gone, the need for reform is no less urgent. The CAP is an obstacle to international trade liberalisation, creates too few jobs and introduces distortions so that there is not a level playing field. The EU cannot afford this waste.'

They maintain. 'further reform of the CAP must not just be discussed but implemented.' If only. I think there will be some real cuts, but they will be mainly at expense of Pillar 2 expenditure which helps the environment and the rural economy. The blanket subsidies of Pillar 1 (the Single Farm Payment) will remain largely untouched.

There are a number of net beneficiaries of the CAP who will defend it to the last hedge row. But there is more to it than that. France gets less than it used to from the CAP, but for the French it is more than a question of the financial benefits, important though those are. It is also about a vision of Europe in which agriculture plays a central if often symbolic role. It is about a statist mode of government in which intervention in the market is seen as beneficial in the name of food security. Even though some are questioning whether France can continue to afford to allow 56 per cent of its GDP to be spent by the government, those attitudes are not going to change any time soon.

Interesting that Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, thinks that Britain should contemplate leaving the EU: Stuart . Admittedly, she has been moving in a Eurosceptic direction for eight years or so and is now something of a maverick on the Labour benches. But she was born in Germany and is a particularly thoughtful MP. What she says needs to be taken seriously.

Where her argument is perhaps weakest is in relation to the possibility of a two-tier EU, although I think she is correct in her judgment that a negotiation would not deliver that much in terms of a repatriation of powers (certainly not an exit from the CAP). This is not one of the usual supspects and it may be an early indication of a real shift in the political climate.