But if money can't buy you votes then what can? Grand ideas bold vision? Clearly not - for the less

But if money can't buy you votes, then what can? Grand ideas, bold vision? Clearly not - for the less Tony Blair promises to do, the more people promise to vote for him. Honesty, perhaps? But telling the truth, in politics, is now known as "making a gaffe". The election will be won by the party we decide Britain will be safest with. Safety has become the golden virtue of our time; the big stories are safety scares - how safe are our steaks? our streets? - and even the debate about drugs, once a question of liberty, is now a wrangle over the safety of this or that stimulant. Street slang, always a useful guide, no longer says something is OK, cool, or even sorted; instead it describes it as "safe". As we near the end of a millennium, time is clearly much on our minds.

A passion for safety is nothing more than the strange desire to live for ever. We no longer seem to much mind what kind of life we live, or what kind of world we have, just as long as we can hang around in it.. German unemployment reaches the highest level since Hitler came to power! The French far right is poised, in a mayoral election in the south, to win its first clear electoral majority! John Major and Malcolm Rifkind announce plans to export their political philosophy direct to the electorates of Europe! It has been, on first sight, a week to delight Eurosceptics and abash Europhiles. The drive to a single currency is partly to blame for the German jobless figures; the Front National's message in Vitrolles, near Marseille, is anti-immigrant and anti-establishment, but also anti-European; Mr Rifkind intends to inform the Europeans that their leaders are secretly dragging them into a social democratic superstate. The political jigsaw of Europe is, however, a rich and wonderful affair. It contains many more pieces than these; and pieces that seem to belong to several jigsaws. A couple of months ago it was axiomatic that France, of the likely core EMU members, would have the most difficulty making the grade, politically and economically.

Unemployment was high; growth stuttering; opponents of economic reform were threatening a second winter of discontent on the streets.Now French employment is up; growth projections buoyant; and the threat of direct action against the government has faded. All seems set fair for France to qualify for EMU by next year's spring deadline without further pain. More than 60 per cent of the French people say they favour giving up the franc for the euro.And yet France remains in a psychotically depressed mood. The French fear their very identity is threatened by globalism, free-marketism, immigration, a sense that the qualities of Frenchness are not appreciated, or likely to succeed, in the modern world. A recent successful book by Jean-Claude Barreau is entitled France: Will It Disappear?.Such a mood, compounded by revelations of corruption in the political establishment, is ripe for exploitation by the Front National in next year's parliamentary elections. But other French instincts - an old humanitarian instinct, a newer European instinct - remain deeply embedded in the national psyche.It was equally axiomatic until recently that the euro was a kind of German plot: the deutschmark writ large.

It was Germany that was the toughest in insisting on near-rigid observance of the Maastricht guidelines. German public spending was pushed down to show other countries the way. Now unemployment has boomed, threatening to push public spending up again. Germany seems to be trapped in a vicious spiral, just when France had stumbled into a virtuous one. More than 60 per cent of Germans oppose ditching the deutschmark for the euro.And yet the polls suggest that Germans are resigned to EMU. As one senior official says: "Germans expect their political leaders to lead and if they are led into the euro, they will accept it without too much complaint." Maybe. In the meantime, the domestic pain will make politicians and officials even more bombastic in defending the sanctity of their interpretation of the Maastricht rules.And what of Britain? It might seem a rather good time for Messrs Major and Rifkind to start lecturing European electorates on the dangers of dirigiste, social democratic super-states Actually, nothing could be more absurd.

If anti-EU feeling exists in France and Germany it is rooted in a fear that Europe has become too infected with Anglo-Saxon economic super-liberalism. France is having psychological difficulty coping with the single market, let alone the single currency. In Germany the tight monetary and budgetary policies forced by Maastricht are compared to the Thatcherite policies of the early 1980s. There is a widespread fear on the Continent that the EU risks dismantling social democracy, or welfare capitalism, not promoting it, that the EU has, in a sense, become too British already. Mr Rifkind's threat to take the Euroscep- tic message abroad was not aimed at the continental public. Like much of the debate about Europe in Britain, it was about British politics, rather than European realities.Robin Cook, shadow foreign affairs spokesman, broke that mold recently He said something sensible about EMU. To summarise his remarks: Britain is unlikely to be in the single currency from the beginning; no one can be sure if EMU will work; it might be a disaster; but if it does work it will be difficult for Britain to stay out This was portrayed as a great political gaffe.