Tuesday 7 April 2015

Threatens Chaos

Few things could be less welcome than the rousing of Tony Blair from his coffin.

When Ed Miliband wins, then Blair wants the credit, thus to demand his choice of policies, of seats and other sinecures for courtiers, and of lucrative little numbers for himself. He needs to be told to clear off.

Blair won three uncontested General Elections, the first two of which would have been won by absolutely any Labour Leader.

Even people who regret the 1997 result have to explain why they would therefore have wished John Major to have remained Prime Minister, as they also have to do if they wish to rejoice in the result in 1992.

Anyone who can remember the 1992 Parliament need only consider the utterly preposterous proposition that Major might have won in 1997 to see that there was never anything remotely necessary about Blair.

Victory, and that on the same scale, would have been inevitable for Neil Kinnock or for Roy Hattersley, for John Smith or for Bryan Gould, for John Prescott or for Margaret Beckett, and most certainly for Gordon Brown.

In 2005, any credible Opposition would have beaten Blair. But no credible Opposition presented itself.

All lists of Blair's achievements confine themselves to his first term. His second term was catastrophic. He failed to complete his third term.

He would usefully have been a one-term Prime Minister. He would more usefully never have been Prime Minister at all. There was no shortage of available alternatives.

What, then, of his latest intervention, this time warning against any referendum on EU membership, and against the possibility of withdrawal?

Simple membership of the EU is almost a complete political irrelevance. That was not the case when Labour opposed accession, or held the only ever referendum on the subject, or went into the 1983 Election on a commitment to withdrawal, or opposed Thatcher's Single European Act.

Anyone who, being old enough, failed to vote Labour in 1970, or failed to do so on either occasion in 1974, or failed to vote No in 1975, or failed to vote Labour in 1983, or as a very last chance failed to vote Labour in 1987, has no moral right to complain about any subsequent development of the EU. It was all made perfectly clear to them, over and over again.

Three times as many Labour as Conservative MPs, 66 to 22, voted against the legislation giving effect to the Maastricht Treaty, despite the far greater number of Conservative than Labour MPs at the time, while a mere five Labour MPs defied the three-line whip to abstain by voting in favour of the wretched thing. Bryan Gould was the only person to resign from either front in order to vote against it. No one did so in order to vote in favour in it.

When the Conservative Whip was withdrawn from a mere eight MPs for merely abstaining on a vote to increase the British contribution to the EU Budget, 44 Labour MPs again defied a three-line whip to abstain by voting against it, this time without a single Labour vote in favour.

But the Conservative rebels were such ridiculous people that they simply made better television. That has remained the case, now a good 20 years later. Who wants to listen to some sober Labour MP talking about Keynesianism when you could have Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nadine Dorries on for a laugh? Or, for that matter, Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless or Nigel Farage?

Nevertheless, a de facto referendum on accession to the then-proposed European Single Currency was held in 1997, when the result of the General Election made Gordon Brown Chancellor of the Exchequer instead of Kenneth Clarke, thus sparing us the fate of Italy or Greece. For the EU's current vicious austerity programme is fully in keeping with everything for which it has always stood.

Which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save? If we needed the EU for the employment law that, since we do not have it, the EU is obviously powerless to deliver, then there would be no point or purpose to the British Labour Movement.

Far from preventing wars, the EU has done nothing to prevent numerous on the part of, at some point, most of its member-states, not least this member-state. It was a key player in, and it has been a major beneficiary of, the destruction of Yugoslavia.

The EU is now a key player in, and it seeks to be a major beneficiary of, the war in Ukraine, which is the worst on the European Continent since 1945, and which is a direct consequence of the EU's expansionist desire to prise a vital buffer state out of neutrality and into the NATO from which the EU is practically indistinguishable.

Beyond opposition to any participation in that war, and beyond opposition to even so much as the initiation of any others like it, the main cause is now opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

TTIP perfectly embodies everything that the Eurofederalist project has always been about. It gives incomparable explanation to the fact that, whereas the Left has opposed that project since the 1940s, next to no one on the British Right, including Margaret Thatcher, was anything less than wildly enthusiastic about it until the perceived need arose to oppose John Major on absolutely any available ground for his daring to be Prime Minister while not Margaret Thatcher.

To this day, someone like John Redwood, the intellectual guiding light who had wanted Teresa Gorman and Tony Marlow in his Cabinet, could not tell you anything in particular about the EU to which he was opposed.

He could have written TTIP, just as the framers of the Treaty of Rome, of Thatcher's Single European Act or of Major's Maastricht Treaty, for which Redwood voted, could have done.

TTIP offers the culmination, at least to date, of the entire dream. Attempts to claim that that dream was ever about anything else are the stuff of borderline, if borderline, insanity. But if you will not even fight for the NHS, then you are not in any culturally meaningful sense British at all.

Beyond fighting TTIP every step of the way, Labour needs to commit itself, not to a referendum the result of which, as of all such, would be determined in the month leading up to it by the BBC, exactly as happened in 1975, but to primary legislation by, in and through the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

First, the restoration of the supremacy of United Kingdom over European Union law, and the use of that provision to give effect, both to explicit Labour policy by repatriating industrial and regional policy (whereas the Conservatives are not committed to any specific repatriation), and to what is at least implicit Labour policy by repatriating agricultural policy and by reclaiming our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law: 200 miles, or to the median line.

Secondly, the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them.

Thirdly, the requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard.

Fourthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament.

Fifthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs who had been certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons.

Thus, we should no longer be subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of people who believed the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and of Dutch ultra-Calvinists who would not have women candidates.

And sixthly, the giving of effect to the express will of the House of Commons, for which every Labour MP voted, that the British contribution to the EU Budget be reduced in real terms.

There is no need of a referendum. Primary legislation by, in and through the Parliament of the United Kingdom would be sufficient to restore, precisely by reasserting and by exercising, that national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom which is, with municipalism, the only means to social democracy in the territory that it covers, the democracy in social democracy.

Only social democracy, and not least the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, is capable of safeguarding that sovereignty, national and parliamentary, and that democracy, parliamentary and municipal.

By saying that there would be a referendum on membership if there were any proposal to transfer further powers to the EU, Ed Miliband has as good as certainly established that there would be nothing so much as the suggestion of any such transfer while he was Prime Minister. Since Michael Foot, no major Party Leader has ever before said that, or anything remotely approaching it.

Even only 20 per cent of UKIP supporters see a referendum on EU membership as important. David Cameron's commitment is to hold one only after his imaginary renegotiation, itself following his inconceivable General Election victory.

He and Miliband are both saying no to one. It is just that one of them is doing so on the basis that there would be no further transfer of powers.

Cameron is not saying that: a renegotiation could result in anything. But there is not going to be one, because he is not going to be in office. Miliband is going to be in office.

Meaning that there is going to no further transfer of powers from the United Kingdom to the European Union. With that guarantee in place, the important thing is to bring about the transfer of powers from the European Union to the United Kingdom.

Parliament could and should do that, entirely by its own means and entirely on its own authority. The technicality of EU membership is neither here nor there.

1 comment:

  1. This legislation would be proposed if you were in the next Parliament. I wish you were a candidate, I wish you were an MP, I wish you were our MP. That Geordie Shore reject has a lot to answer for. He'll never be an MP either, but you deserve more vengeance than that.

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