The Other Side Now

John Smith, one of the Labour rebels whose votes behind Roy Jenkins had passed Heath's European Communities Bill, was instinctively in favour of the Maastricht Treaty, as was the clear majority of Labour MPs, although a far higher number of them than of the more numerous Conservatives broke ranks to vote against it. No Labour MP defied the instruction to abstain and voted in favour, while the only resignation from either front bench in opposition to Maastricht was that of Bryan Gould, whom Smith had beaten for Labour Leader.

However, Smith cheerfully deployed every trick in the book during Maastricht's passage through Parliament. That's called Opposition. Furthermore, by the end, he was by all accounts more and more convinced by his own initially quite opportunistic arguments. Smith's Deputy, Margaret Beckett, had first been elected by defeating a Labour MP who had been deselected for siding, like Smith, with Jenkins; her views had, and have, barely changed in the intervening decades. But Maastricht was not really what he had felt that he had been voting for twenty years before. We shall return to that one.

Gordon Brown never had very much time for the EU, and office gave him less and less. He had inherited the Lisbon Treaty process from Tony Blair, but he pointedly did not turn up to the main signing event, and his attitude was "thus far and no further". Lisbon was not the treaty that he would have negotiated. In fact, he might not have negotiated any. Brown's "thus far and no further" and Smith's "this is not what I voted for initially" may be right or wrong in themselves, but they are entirely tenable and consistent, and they are not without contemporary resonance. Both in relation to the EU and in relation to another cause in which Smith had made his name in the 1970s, but for which Brown was also once an enthusiast, namely that of Scottish and Welsh devolution.

Lisbon is self-amending, so another EU row in unlikely to blow up in this Parliament, although you never know, and in any case there is still work to be done by a Leader of the Opposition acting ruthlessly as such, particularly over the adoption of the Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, and over the restoration of the annual votes on the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, with everything that that restoration would entail.

Having given up on AV for purposes of pure oppositionalism, it would be very easy for Labour to give up on further Scottish and Welsh devolution, something strongly opposed behind, and sometimes in front of, the scenes by its own Scottish and Welsh MPs. John Smith only never went off it because he never lived to. Gordon Brown certainly did live to. Ed Miliband is a chip of the latter old block as surely on this as on the EU and on most other things. It would be entirely consistent and honourable for the party that legislated for the present arrangements to say that that had been what it meant, and that the matter should be left there. On that basis, there is a Maastricht-style alliance to be built with the backbench Conservative Right, which now as then is variously defined but undoubtedly disaffected. That's called Opposition.

Meanwhile, what of the Lib Dems? They were EU-enthusiasts when they saw no hope of office at Westminster. But those days are gone, and everything about the EU - a legislature which meets in secret, for heaven's sake - is contrary to everything for which they stand. That is sharply true of the CAP and the CFP, and the CFP hits several centres of Lib Dem support particularly hard. It was also the absence of the hope of office at Westminster, combined with the positive expectation of it at Holyrood and Cardiff, that made the Lib Dems enthusiasts for devolution. But they are now in office at Westminster while no longer in office either at Holyrood or (for quite some time these days) at Cardiff. Lib Dem support is concentrated in areas where devolution has never been terribly popular, and which now feel thoroughly neglected under it. The Lib Dems are not doing very well at all in Wales.

As local communitarian populists and as battlers for single issues, Lib Dems are interested in institutions that deliver the goods, not in those which do not. Both on the EU and on further devolution, they, too, can say with entirely straight faces that having supported the creation of what currently exists does not necessarily compel support for anything further. At least on their back benches, they very well might say that publicly, as they already do privately. Mike Hancock has already broken ranks over the EU, and no less than Danny Alexander over devolution. Especially if they are given opportunities to do so. By the Leader of the Opposition.