All At Sea

The highly meaningful policy of withdrawal from the Common Fisheries Policy was proposed by David Davis while he was standing for the Conservative Party Leadership, but it was duly ignored by the Blairite and/or toffish media in preference for the toffish Heir to Blair's meaningless blather about where and with whom Conservative MEPs would be sitting.

Every year for 18 years, Labour, the Lib Dems and the latter's predecessors voted unanimously against the CFP on the floor of the Commons, joined in the very last days of the Major Government by the tiniest handful of Tories. Perhaps it is time for Ed Miliband to seek to restore those annual votes? Then again, the media are determined not to report the fact that there are now even fewer Eurosceptical Tory MPs than there were in the Major years, and there were barely any even then.

And most of the media still bearing any sort of sentimental allegiance to Labour, the Lib Dems or the memory of the latter's predecessors is determined to conform to the stereotype of people who, as surely as they gorge themselves on battery-produced poultry while screeching against shooting and against the hunting that alone makes free range poultry possible in practice, will not hear a word against the CFP while lifting their skirts in horror at the thought of whaling. Just what, exactly, is so horribly wrong with whaling? And why, at a push, is it more or less all right for scientific research, but never, ever for food?