Landing The Catch

The SNP should put down a Commons motion or amendment at the earliest opportunity invoking the provision of the 1972 European Communities Act that a resolution of that House would still trump the supremacy of European Community law, and specifically applying that provision in order to restore the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights in accordance with international law: 200 miles, or to the median line.

Year on year between 1979 and 1997, every Labour MP voted against confirmation of the Common Fisheries Policy, as did every Lib Dem or member of the predecessor parties. So did every MP from Northern Ireland, and so did the members of Plaid Cymru. Whatever happened to those annual votes? And whereas withdrawal from the CFP was Conservative Party policy under Iain Duncan Smith, it was one of the first casualties of the Michael Howard media coup that those same rolling news channels now wish to repeat against Ed Miliband, also with a view to nipping Euroscepticism in the bud.

David Davis made the highly meaningful promise to restore that commitment, but was completely ignored in favour of David Cameron's wholly meaningless blather about where in the chamber of the European Parliament his party's MEPs were going to sit. If 81 Conservatives, including two PPSes and the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, could be found to break a three-line whip in order to vote in favour of something as vague and ineffectual as the referendum motion, then how many more ought to be prepared to vote in favour of something as specific and effective as this?

Making it all the more useful that it should be an SNP rather than a Labour initiative, since the Conservative Party is now so lacklustre in Scotland, and now contains so many sympathisers with English independence, that its MPs would no longer regard the SNP as enemies or even opponents.

Alex Salmond, even if through whoever it is that are your proxies at Westminster, over to you.