"Up and coming" MPs fawned over by the Today programme, but of whom no normal person had ever heard, were bleating on about "a free trade area", with at least one even claiming that there was no talk of ever-closer union at the time of accession in 1973 or the referendum in 1975!
Yes, I know that they are my vintage, born in the 1970s, unable to remember these things and in many cases, like mine, not on this earth at the time. But that is not an excuse. Were they playing to the gallery? Or are they really that ignorant?
And when is the BBC going to give one moment of coverage to those, now as ever far more numerous than any discernible Eurosceptical presence on the opposite benches, who maintain the tradition of Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay, Peter Shore, David Stoddart, Bryan Gould, and at least on this issue Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle and Judith Hart?
You know, the people who were saying as long ago as the 1950s that the whole thing was not merely a free trade area (which, to be fair, its proponents never, ever said that it was) and was based on the principle of ever-closer union, as set out in the first line of the Preamble to the Treaty of Rome?
The establishment of the supremacy of EU over British law in Heath's European Communities Act, approved by the 1975 referendum, is a textbook definition of a federal state, precisely as the figures listed above pointed out both during its parliamentary progress and during the referendum campaign.
Or is it just easier to laugh at stupid Tories?
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