Speak Up

Anne McElvoy and I went to the same school, but if we were the only two such people whom you had ever met...

You may even be able to buy the Evening Standard in Buckingham, so let this interview with Sally Bercow go out as a clarion call to everyone in the Speaker's constituency who is appalled that the old student sectarian Marxists of New Labour have installed the old Secretary of the Race and Repatriation Committee of the Monday Club, and called that, like so many other such arrangements, "the centre ground". Clearly, his marriage is an example of that same pernicious alliance, by which we are now governed without challenge.

Well, there are challenges, here and there. As much as anything else, the election of Nigel Farage would send the signal that UKIP was better off, not as a Tory pressure group lighting candles before icons of Margaret "Single European Act" Thatcher, but as a coalition of Old Tories, Old Labourites and Old Liberals who agreed, not just about the EU, but also about the threats to our sovereignty from America, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and global capital, so that it opposed the neoconservative wars abroad, and therefore also the neoconservative war against liberty at home. And as a movement as much in favour of grammar schools as in favour of British independence.

Thus would that election contribute, directly or indirectly, to the re-emergence of parliamentary representation in the tradition of the Attlee Government's refusal 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". Of Gaitskell's rejection of European federalism as "the end of a thousand years of history" and liable to destroy the Commonwealth. Of the votes of most Labour MPs, and one Liberal, against Heath's Treaty of Rome. Of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s unanimous opposition to Thatcher's Single European Act. Of the 66 Labour MPs who voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so, while Nick Harvey also voted against and Simon Hughes abstained. And of the votes of every Labour and Liberal Democrat MP, without exception, against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

Parliamentary representation in the tradition of that half of the French Socialist Party which successfully opposed the EU Constitution. Of that half of the UKIP vote which, based on its geographical distribution, must be Old Labour or Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. And of the No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections, which in London included Peter Shore's erstwhile agent, and which in the North West included the immediate past Leader of the Liberal Party.

And parliamentary representation no less in the tradition of Ministerial defence of the grammar schools by "Red Ellen" Wilkinson of the Jarrow Crusade, and by George Tomlinson. Of their academic defence by Sidney Webb and R H Tawney. Of their vigorous practical defence by Labour councillors and activists around the country, not least while Thatcher, as Education Secretary, was closing so many that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. Of their protection in Kent by a campaign long spearheaded by Eric Hammond. Of their restoration by popular demand, as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, in what is still the very left-wing former East Germany. And of their successful popular defence in the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Buckingham, speak for the nation.