As long as Labour’s leaders run scared of the Euroscepticism of the voters, we cannot be surprised if Ukip prospers
If the Great Crash taught the British anything, it should be that survival as an isolated island off the coast of Europe, with a quirky specialism in princes, tea and queuing, is impossible. Our destiny, if we are not to become Europe’s Detroit, is at the heart of a European federation, which speaks our language, buys our goods, and employs our workers. The vast, unimaginable power of global capitalism means that no nation can prosper alone, adrift like a lifeboat on the ocean. The British are Europeans, or we are bust.
Even with a union of 28 states and 500 million people, trading as a single market with a single currency at its core, the European Union only represents seven per cent of the world’s population, and a fifth of the world’s GDP. It is big. But it is not any bigger than it needs to be in the face of the mighty rise of India, China and the rest.
Britain’s relationship with the postwar European project is driven by our own diminution, decade by decade, as a global superpower. A generation who fought in the second world war for an empire and a king was not best pleased to be ceding power to the Germans and French. Their descendants have proved just as sceptical. This month it is possible that the United Kingdom Independence party will win more seats in the European parliament on the back of a virulent election campaign.
The Labour party’s attitude towards the European project has been no less frigid. Hostility towards Europe has resided on the right as well as the left of the party. In Hugh Gaitskell’s 1962 speech on the common market he pleaded for a rational debate that ‘should not be decided because, on the one hand, we like Italian girls, or, on the other, we think we have been fleeced in Italian hotels’. He concluded that Britain as a province of a federal Europe would mean the end of a thousand years of history. Tony Benn’s position was the same: ‘the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation.’ Historians will note it was a Labour government, irrespective of the internal psycho-drama, which refused to join the euro.
The turning point for Labour was Jacques Delors’ speech at the 1988 TUC conference in Bournemouth. He argued that economic union must be matched by social union: it was ‘necessary to improve workers’ living and working conditions, and to provide better protection for their health and safety at work,’ he argued. Delegates, with a little encouragement from their general secretaries, rose to their feet and applauded.
Delors was answered, a few weeks later, by Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech at the College of Europe which cemented the Tories as an anti-European force. The speech argued that Britain’s connections to Europe – the concept of ‘Christendom’, the graves of the Flanders war dead, the English language – should be celebrated. But the gist was: if you think I have spent a decade rolling back the frontiers of the state and crushing the unions to see you lot impose them from Brussels, you can think again.
And therein lie the poles of today’s argument: a pseudo-historical appeal to a thousand years of nationhood, or a practical appeal to protect people’s standards of living. It is obvious which side Ed Miliband’s Labour party must be on.
Labour members of the European parliament have fought for reforms to the banking sector to build stability; to tackle abuses like the LIBOR scandal; to criminalise abuse in the financial sector; to regulate speculation in basic commodities like food; to give consumers more safety when they deposit their money in banks. The party’s MEPs have fought to end the scandal of roaming charges on mobile phones; to tackle fake goods and online rip-offs; to end exorbitant credit card fees. They have supported the isolation of Colombia over its human rights record; protected bees from deadly pesticides; introduced better food labelling to prevent horsemeat being sold as beef; banned ‘sweet cigarettes’ which start children smoking; stopped undersized fish being thrown back into the sea; and protected women against domestic violence. Most laws do not come from Brussels. But many of the ones which make us wealthier and happier do.
On the big economic issues, and the small but significant social ones, Labour in Europe has been a force for good. The EU is a success story. So why is Labour’s campaign for the European parliament positioned as a referendum on the coalition government, and areas such as the NHS which have nothing to do with the EU? Why such reluctance to make the case for Britain in Europe?
As long as Labour’s leaders run scared of the Euroscepticism of the voters, instead of tackling it, then we cannot be surprised if Ukip prospers. If Ukip wins the European elections and sends a troupe of tweedy loons to Strasbourg it will not be because Nigel Farage is a tactical genius. The blame will lie closer to home.
———————————
In March, Ed Miliband made it clear that there would as good as certainly be nothing so much as the suggestion of any further transfer of powers to the EU while he is Prime Minister. Since Michael Foot, no major Party Leader had ever before said that, or anything remotely approaching it.
Consistently, all of two per cent of people place the EU at the top of their list of priorities. Even only 20 per cent of UKIP supporters see a referendum on EU membership as important. 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.
The main cause now is opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which perfectly embodies everything that the Eurofederalist project has always been about, and which 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 the Cabinet, could not tell you anything in particular about the EU to which he was opposed. He could have written the TTIP, just as the framers of the Treaty of Rome, of Thatcher’s Single European Act or of Major’s Maastricht Treaty, against which Redwood did not vote, could have done.
It 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.
Which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save? Well, there you are, then.
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.
Beyond fighting the 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 in and through the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
First, the restoration of the supremacy of United Kingdom over EU law, and its use 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 certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons, with the provision that no MEP who was a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or of anything that the Speaker or the House deemed comparable, would be eligible to be so certified.
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, or 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.
Europe is small beer for UK. I f we want to re-invent the business-wheel we Brits should make more progress with the Chinese by offering them a million, or so, able-bodied men and women [currently unemployed in UK] to assist in building their China-Chunnel from China via Alaska-Canada to USA — in return for another 100 years’ lease on Hong Kong.
Stranger things have happened in the world of big business over the last few hundred years. (Alaska sold for $1 an acre to USA now Russians want it back! Ha, you could’t make it up)
Being radical doesn’t mean we have to flog our souls with the bargain – politicians these days lack the pioneering spirit and sense of adventure and are rapidly becoming quite boring.
Europe is small beer.
Little wonder the likes of AIfE,BNP,EDL,Ukip attracting support – they are hitting the right notes for a fair % of voters – and they speak their minds – well, those that have minds.
The Drab-Grey-Suits at Lab/Con?Libdem HQs need a new wardrobe.
Did I say? Europe is small beer, concentrate on USA and China for exports.
… and unleash those two brilliant royal Ambassadors we have kicking their heels on the World as business Special Envoys: Chas & Andy are well under-utilised and are well respectd and it wouldn’t hurt them to get their hands dirty to raise a few bob for their KIngdom, would it?
Seriously folks, the buck has got to stop somewhere and now is the time for all good men [and women] to come to the aid of the [LABOUR] Party.
Your Country needs you – like never before.
Or consign UKplc to the the historical rubbish bin of failed enterprise.
No question, it’s an advantage to trade with Europe. But the price currently charged…of total political union…is far too high. Fortunately, if we are brave, sensible and determined, we can almost certainly achieve the one without the other…which is what we voted for, after all.