Calling the referendum “a device of demagogues and dictators” was Thatcher’s only ever favourable quotation of a Labour Prime Minister. Yet to those who worship at Thatcher’s altar while wholly ignoring her record on this and so much else, the demand for that deeply flawed and wholly foreign device has become a nervous tick. They honestly cannot see how Pythonesque it is to demand a referendum in the cause of defending parliamentary sovereignty. A Treaty of Union (or, if we go back far enough, Reunion) among the states of the Eurozone, the core of which was Charlemagne’s Empire, need not concern us. With or without it, we need legislation with five simple clauses.
First, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and its use to repatriate agricultural policy and to restore our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law. Secondly, the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them. Thirdly, the requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. Fourthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons.
And fifthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons. Thus, we would no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, or Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates. Soon to be joined by Turkey’s Islamists, secular ultranationalists, and violent Kurdish Marxist separatists.
The appropriate person to move this is the Leader of the Labour Party, with a Labour three-line whip in favour of it and the public warning that the Whip would be withdrawn from any remaining Blairite ultra who failed to comply. The Liberal Democrats set great store by decentralisation, transparency and democracy, and they represent many areas badly affected by the Common Fisheries Policy. The Liberals were staunch free traders who were as opposed the Soviet Bloc as they were to Far Right regimes in Latin America and Southern Africa, while the SDP’s reasons for secession from Labour included both calls for protectionism and the rise of antidemocratic extremism. (Both the Liberal Party and, on a much smaller scale, the SDP still exist, and both are now highly critical of the EU.)
The SDLP takes the Labour Whip, the Alliance Party is allied to the Lib Dems, the Greens are staunchly anti-EU, so is the DUP, and the one other Unionist is close to Labour. The SNP and Plaid Cymru can hardly believe in independence for Scotland, greater autonomy for Wales, yet vote against the return to Westminster of the powers that they wish to transfer thence to Edinburgh or Cardiff; the SNP also has the fishing issue to consider. Even any remaining Conservatives who wanted to certify the European People’s Party as politically acceptable might be brought on board.
Leaving those fabled creatures, backbench Tory Eurosceptics. It is high time that their bluff was called. This is how to do it.
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Ed became the leader of British Euroscepticism at PMQs today but this country's disgraceful media stuck to the script: Labour want to join the euro, the Tories are all dedicated sceptics, that includes Cameron, Ed's position is on the brink of collapse. I'll take any of them seriously when something like this post appears in any of them. How much is the billionaire Tony Blair paying them?
ReplyDeleteYou call to mind the emergence of the Country Party against the Court Party. Although I know that you are not a fan of the 1688 Revolution, you even call that to mind. Who are the Immortal Seven today, reaching across party lines to bring down the old regime by no matter how dramatic means?
ReplyDeleteWho, indeed, will complete the circle?
ReplyDeleteThe campaign against the slave trade, the Radical and Tory action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars: all of these had their roots in Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688.
Within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly radical consequences.
Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.
Didn't the country party ultimately fail? Though Lindsay makes an interesting argument that they succeeded in a way with the creation of the United States.
ReplyDeleteLooking in from clear outside the continent, it seems to me that there is a pretty logical case for a Franco-German-Benelux-Italian federation. Its pretty cohesive geographical and economic area, and the separate states that emerged after the original Treaty of Verdun have strongly intertwined histories. Plus the actual ECM/ EC/ EU has been most successful with thest countries. It turned out that the solution to both Germany's and France's strategic problems was for the two countries to ally with each other.
And if something like this emerged, why couldn't Britain have friendly relations and a free trade treaty with this entity? The tradition of British (well English) hostility towards the leading continental power is not written in stone, the English monarchy was allied to the Hapsburg conglomerate before Henry VIII's break with the Papacy.
I think Europe will get to something like this, but its going to be a long, tortuous road.
The tradition in all three of the Three Kingdoms has been of pronounced aversion to the idea that there should be one dominant Continental power at all.
ReplyDeleteThe question is whether Euroland as a fiscal union, and thus effectively as a state, will be German-dominated or Germany (and, for that matter, France) constrained.
Those of us who always held that participation in a European federal state would be, and largely was, the unacceptable constraint of Britain ought really to incline to the latter view.
A trade agreement with it? I expect so. A free trade agreement with it? I fear so.
Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and now Liberal Democrats: the latest defining Whig takeover of the Tory machine stands in a tradition stretching that far back.
The Country Whigs began the dislocation of the Tories from the Stuart cause, and thus, for all the later Tory expressions of crudescent doubts about the full validity of the Hanoverian State and of its Whig ideology (Wilberforce and slavery, Shaftesbury and child labour, Disraeli's doubling of the franchise), began the dislocation of the Tories from the most literally radical point of dissent from that validity.