Return Of The Rebels?

What Tory Eurosceptics? Cash-strapped UKIP, desperate to avoid contesting seats unnecessarily, could only find five, all of them sitting MPs, and for some reason four of them in West Yorkshire.

In any case, Lisbon is self-amending, so there need never be another treaty. Nor should there be a referendum on it, anyway. Instead, there should be a Government which refuses to sign it, knowing that it faced a Parliament which would refuse to enact it into domestic legislation. There is no point looking to the Tories for that.

Rather, it was the Attlee Government refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state” “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. The 66 Labour MPs who voted against Maastricht outnumbered its Tory opponents by three to one, and included, 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; only in the very last days of the Major Government did the tiniest handful of Tories join them.

Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution, and the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia has just delivered the first great electoral blow against the euro.

Half of the UKIP vote, based on its geographical distribution, must be Old Labour or Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. The No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections included Peter Shore’s erstwhile agent, the leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers, and the immediate past Leader of the Liberal Party.

We now need a new formation which gives contemporary effect to that heritage, and which looks to those last and similar aspects rather than to the ones that have been carried over into TUSC, the latest in a series of opportunities to be missed by allowing the sectarian Hard Left, for which hardly anyone has ever had the slightest desire to vote or ever will have, to take over and to displace everyone else.