THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE - 2

The Independent has an excellent interview with Dany Cohn-Bendit here in which the now 60-year-old former student revolutionary makes some telling points about the French European constitution referendum:

A French "no" will be the beginning of a period of confusion, or recrimination, of gradual unwinding of what we have already achieved in Europe. I fear that, for once, the right-wing press in Britain is right. A French "no" would be the prelude to an attempt to impose a purely economic vision of Europe, a market vision. Murdoch would jump for joy.

On the French left's no campaign he is withering:

No one has dared to tell them that we live in a world of market forces. That does not mean that you have to accept the extreme religion of Thatcherism or even Blairism. Market forces can be married with social responsibility, a social market. That's still not an argument that you can make with a large part of the left in France. They believe that you can still run France as if it were the 1960s.

The same is true of the British Labour anti-Europeans who have signed up for the no campaign here, who are without exception sentimentalist nationalists who believe in the better yesterday of social democracy in one country, Tony Benn, Peter Shore and the Alternative Economic Strategy.