Essential, Desirable, Competetive

It may be an April Fool, but this week’s Spectator contains an advertisement for the position of Director of the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists, to run its headquarters in Brussels. "Some knowledge of politics, including EU politics, is essential. Campaigning and media experience is desirable. Competitive salary." And, er, that seems to be about it. So, applications and CVs by 18th April to sec-gen@aecr.eu.

Tell them that, like much of the Group, you support generous welfare provisions, public services in the public sector, universal healthcare provided by the State, workers’ rights, and the public ownership of important companies.

Tell them that, like much of the Group, you support the safeguarding or restoration of family life in general and paternal authority in particular by the safeguarding or restoration of high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment such as coal-mining.

Tell them that, like much of the Group, you support measures for the payment of mothers to stay at home with their children, for adoption and against abortion, for palliative care and against the euthanasia opposed by Gordon Brown, for the traditional marriage supported by Barack Obama (or, at the very least, against compelling anyone to conduct deviations from it), against sex and violence in the media, against State toleration of drugs and prostitution, against unrestricted Sunday trading, and against supermarkets opening on what are supposed to be public holidays for everyone including shop workers.

Tell them that you stand in the tradition of the Labour MPs who mostly voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. Who all voted against Thatcher’s Single European Act. Who voted against Major’s Maastricht Treaty in far greater numbers than the Tories, including the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. And who all, together with every Lib Dem MP, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies every year between 1979 and 1997.

Tell them that you stand in the tradition of the trade unionists who have spent decades defending the secure, high-waged, high-skilled, high-status jobs of the working class.

Tell them that you will not allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

Tell them that you recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use to the necessary level the spoken and written form of the national language of the given member-state, which in the United Kingdom means English.

Tell them that you stand in the tradition of the Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce. The tradition of the Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling. The tradition of those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership. And the tradition the trade unionists who battled to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment, frequently marching behind banners that depicted Biblical scenes and characters.

And tell them that you have deep roots in the former mining communities, in the women’s suffrage movement, in the 1945 General Election victory, and elsewhere, making you unsullied by the weird cult of Winston Churchill, so that instead you can and do condemn his carve-up of Europe with Stalin, just as you condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire.

Good luck.