Fides Invicta Triumphat

Good for David Drew. Co-operative as well as Labour MP for Gloucester. Stalwart of the Christian Socialist Movement. Eurosceptic. And, on that last point, apparently the beneficiary of an electoral pact whereby UKIP will not contest his highly marginal seat.

Based on its geographical distribution, half of the UKIP vote for Strasbourg must be Old Labour or (especially in the West Country) Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. The No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections included Peter Shore's erstwhile agent, leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers, and the immediate past Leader of the Liberal Party. Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution.

Well, of course.

It was the Attlee Government that 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”. It was Gaitskell who rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth. It was most Labour MPs, and one Liberal, who voted against Heath's Treaty of Rome.

It was the Parliamentary Labour Party that unanimously opposed Thatcher's Single European Act. It was 66 Labour MPs, three times as many as in the then majority party, who voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. It was every Labour and Liberal Democrat MP, without exception, who voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997 (whatever happened to those annual votes?).

And it was the 1997 General Election, replacing Kenneth Clarke with Gordon Brown, that prevented Britain from becoming either Greece or, in relation to Greece, Germany. Monetary union was only ever a means to political union. Likewise, political union is impossible without monetary union. The collapse of monetary union is the collapse of political union. Give thanks that this country is no part of monetary union. And remember how, why, by whom, and against whom.