EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

Conservatives and Europe: led by the noes once again

The problem for Mr Cameron is that he leads a eurosceptic party in a coalition government which has chosen to freeze the issue

What is the reason for David Cameron's decision to float the possibility of a British referendum on Europe once more? Is it because Britain faces an existential or constitutional turning point in its membership of the European Union right here, right now, which cannot be resolved by any other means, and on which the government has a clear position? That, after all, has long been the basis on which the use of a referendum has been put forward by those who advocate them. But the case for that kind of claim, not easy at the best of times, is at this time utterly premature.

Beyond question, these are tumultuous, damaging and, almost certainly, game-changing times in the EU, with the single currency in crisis at the same time as Europe's banks and bondholders continue to pay the price of years of unchecked credit. Self-evidently, the eurozone crisis is driving the 17 states who use the single currency towards much tighter collective fiscal controls and perhaps eventual fiscal union. Certainly, were that to happen, the constitutional implications for those states would be profound. They would be the kind of thing which the advocates of referendums have in mind when they propose this departure from representative parliamentary government. But none of this has actually happened yet. The process of change is a continuing one. The end-product in constitutional terms is not yet known or knowable. And it has no direct and immediate implications for Britain, though probably some informal ones, since we are not in the eurozone anyway.

Maybe there would nevertheless be a case for what Mr Cameron suggests if the EU was attempting to push forward some other set of plans in some other area of policy which, if implemented, would strike deeply and lastingly into the nature of relations between Britain, as a sovereign member of the EU, and the union itself. Some major change in social policy perhaps, or on banking reform, or the workings of financial markets, or even on migration policy? There is no sign of that either – though if there were, most voters here might actually prefer the European proposal to one put forward by the UK government. The EU can undoubtedly be a deeply frustrating union, but it is not comprised of people or states which wilfully want to shake the structures to their foundations, at this of all times.

So Mr Cameron's article in the Sunday Telegraph, which hinted at the possibility of a UK referendum on Europe about something sometime, should be seen for what it really is. It is a response to a party and government management issue. The real problem for Mr Cameron is that he leads a eurosceptic party in a coalition government which has chosen to freeze the issue. And that at least 100 of his MPs do not trust him on Europe. And that Conservative strategists are running scared of Ukip. And that the more pragmatic Tory ministers on this issue, like Mr Cameron and the foreign secretary William Hague, would prefer to manage Tory euroscepticism rather than letting it have its head or confronting it. And that those who imagine themselves as Mr Cameron's successors – George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and Michael Gove – all want to burnish their eurosceptic credentials at a time when Europe is far down the public's list of pressing issues when compared with the economy, social policy and public spending.

This is not the first time that the Tory party has tried to appease its fanatics about Europe in an effort to resolve its dilemmas and failings. It will not be the last. The autumn conference will be abuzz over Europe. The shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander is right to warn on Monday that serious debate about Europe – and, we would add, about the place of referendums in our politics – risks being overwhelmed by Tory and rightwing media hysteria. But is Labour so much more virtuous on this issue? Or the Liberal Democrats? There is a great need in many countries, including ours, for fresh, wise thinking on Europe. Auctioning phoney referendums on the never-never may not be the best way to encourage it but the worst.

Space exploration: staring into the dark

The Euclid project, now given the green light, aims to address the biggest question of all: what is the universe made of?

The European Space Agency – of which, for the time being, the UK remains a fully engaged member – has quietly cleared for takeoff a space mission to address the biggest question of all: what is the universe made of? Galaxies, stars, black holes, asteroids, planets and people together add up only to a trifling 4% of all that there is: the remaining 96% is mysterious and very dark. The agency's Euclid is an optical and infrared space telescope that will be launched in 2020, to spend six years a million miles beyond Earth, measuring with subtle techniques and exquisite precision the geometry, distribution and acceleration of billions of galaxies across distances that extend 10bn years back in time.

Modern observational science began when Galileo turned a rudimentary pair of lenses on the moon and Jupiter. The paradox is that each great advance since then has successively also exposed even bigger questions about the firmament above and the emptiness around us. It was only in the 1960s that radio astronomers confirmed that spacetime, radiation and atomic matter all had their origins in a big bang less than 20bn years ago. But even before this, observers had begun to puzzle about the behaviour of the galaxies: none of them seemed to have anything like the gravitational mass implied by their shape and structure.

That was the point at which physicists began to propose a mysterious component of the universe called dark matter. This strange stuff does not shine or glow, does not bounce off anything or announce its existence in any recognised way. Nevertheless it has gravitational mass that glues an estimated 200bn galaxies, each of perhaps 200bn stars, into cohesive and enduring structures. And, clearly, it far outweighs all visible matter. Only 14 years ago, physicists contemplating the most distant galactic supernovae made the Nobel prizewinning discovery that these distant brightnesses were receding at an ever-faster rate, when the logic of gravitational theory suggested they should be slowing down. It was as if some kind of antigravity, detectable only at vast distances, and accounting for an estimated 73% of the total mass-energy of the cosmos, had taken charge, and would eventually disperse all other galaxies beyond the universal horizon, condemning any survivors in a far-distant future to an eternity of frozen blackness.

The Euclid project is a partnership of 1,000 scientists from 100 institutes. Their instruments will make the most meticulous measurements of galactic behaviour, on the principle that riddles that have been revealed by careful examination may logically be solved by even more careful examination. What's the betting, though, that even if it does deliver a compelling answer, Euclid will also unveil an even more astonishing set of questions?

In praise of … Olivia de Havilland

It is a pleasure to discover that, for de Havilland and a few other Manderley and Tara veterans, tomorrow is still another day

A careless reader of the obituaries of the actress Ann Rutherford, who died last month aged 94, might have supposed her the final survivor of the cast of the 1939 film classic Gone With the Wind, in which Miss Rutherford played Scarlett O'Hara's sister Carreen. Happily, however, several of the movie's other stars are still alive 73 years on, as the striking presence on the Guardian's list of weekend birthdays of Olivia de Havilland, who played Melanie Hamilton and who was 96 on Sunday, confirms. Miss de Havilland's longevity is remarkable in other ways too, since her equally distinguished sister Joan Fontaine, star of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 Rebecca, is also still alive at 94. To claim that a famous feud between the two sisters may have helped fuel their mutual survival would be speculation, but it is a pleasure to discover that, for the de Havilland sisters and for a few other select Manderley and Tara veterans, tomorrow is indeed still another day.