Michael Gove’s Balls

Michael Gove seems to have set himself up as Ed Balls’s campaign manager in the Labour Leadership Election.

But he begins by suggesting that Tories of the Late Major Period prevented the replacement of regimental cap badges with the EU insignia, and fell over themselves to denounce the scrapping of the Royal Yacht.

In fact, however, it is strictly in spite of the Tories that there remains even such regimental system as there still is. And we all know which party signed the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. By contrast, the Attlee Government refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state” which “the Durham miners would never wear”. Gaitskell rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth.

Most Labour MPs (and one Liberal) voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. The Parliamentary Labour Party unanimously opposed Thatcher’s Single European Act. 66 Labour MPs, three times as many as on the Tory side, voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so.

Every Labour (and Liberal Democrat) MP, without exception, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997. Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution. Based on its geographical distribution, half of the UKIP vote must be Old Labour or Old Liberal rather than Old Tory, although quite why they support the party of Mr Rail Privatisation, David Campbell Bannerman, is another matter – someone should tell them.

And so on, and on, and on.

As for the Royal Yacht, apart from John Redwood’s pretended outrage even though he had supported the scrapping in Cabinet, the only significant opposition came from the same Peter Shore whose voice had also been the most notable one to support Canadian against Spanish fishermen specifically because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State.

Shore stood in the tradition of the trade unionists and activists who dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. Of the delivery of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony. Of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party, founded out of the trade union movement specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers. And of so very much else besides.

No wonder, then, that Shore’s erstwhile agent was a candidate in London at the recent European Elections. On the list of No2EU – Yes To Democracy. Even the vaguest equivalent of which from within the Tory subculture is … well, what, exactly? UKIP, with its minimum fifty per cent Old Labour or Old Liberal vote? If half or more of its voters knew where it was really coming from, then they wouldn’t vote for it. Whereas all those whom the media blackout permitted to know where No2EU – Yes To Democracy was coming from voted for it precisely because of that knowledge, not in spite of it.