Yes To Democracy

I was a Labour activist for many years. But I have never voted Labour in a European Election. Stephen Hughes and I have mutual friends, not only through the Labour Party. Yet I cannot lend my vote to his advocacy of an EU in which national institutions disappeared, leaving only European and regional ones.

Therefore, I have voted for the Socialist Labour Party, youthfully hoping that those who were Old Labour Left would at least contain the sectarian fringe. But the SLP’s roots are more in the collapse of the Communist Party of Great Britain than in any flight from New Labour. It is greatly bound up with the Stalin Society, “To defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him.”

I have voted for Respect, fronted as it was by a pro-life Catholic and firm opponent of Scottish separatism who was never a member of any Hard Left faction during his time as a Labour MP. But George Galloway made himself a ridiculous figure on Celebrity Big Brother, and in so doing cost Respect the chance of a small number of MPs holding the balance of power in the present hung Parliament. Respect has made no discernable effort to break out of, so as to break free from, the Trots, the Stalinists and the Islamists.

And I have voted for No2EU – Yes to Democracy, due to the presence of Peter Shore’s old agent, leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers, and the immediate past Leader of the Liberal Party, rather than of those more obviously associated with Bob Crow. Had it received one tenth of the coverage lavished on the BNP, then who knows what might have happened? That media blackout was an enormous compliment to a full slate of candidates in every mainland region, the first example in living memory of support for a party other than Labour by any trade union as such, and endorsed by at least one recently retired Labour MP with no history in any other party, official or unofficial. The pre-election edition of Question Time had to be heavily edited because a member of the audience had dared to mention the unspeakable people who pointed out that EU directives were forcing the privatisation of our public services, that European Court rulings were oppressing trade unions and encouraging social dumping, and that the EU was forcing grossly iniquitous trade deals on developing countries.

Yet my politics are not those of the Socialist Party of England and Wales (previously the Militant Tendency), the Communist Party of Britain, Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity, the Alliance for Green Socialism, or Socialist Resistance. Any more than they were those of the Socialist Workers Party, the CPB again, or the Muslim Association of Britain. Any more than they were those of the CPGB and the Stalin Society.

My politics have their roots deep in those of the reviled Labour Movement that gave this country the Welfare State, municipal services, workers’ rights and full employment. Those roots are trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, and Social Catholic and Distributist, reaching back through Early Modernity and the Middle Ages to Classical Antiquity and the Bible. They are not so much anti-Marxist as simply non-Marxist, though contributing to a searing critique of that monstrous fallacy, as also of Jacobinism and Whiggery before that. My Euroscepticism is not least because I object to being subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates.

In June 2014, at least 14 British seats at Strasbourg will be up for grabs, since the 12 Liberal Democrats might as well spare themselves the humiliation, while the BNP is increasingly unlikely to exist at all. The press gang that gives a free pass to UKIP, peddling risible fantasies about Margaret Thatcher’s Euroscepticism or about the EU as a source of “Socialist” legislation, might finally have started reporting, not only UKIP’s farcical goings on, but also the fact that at least half of its vote must be Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal. Add together the Conservative and UKIP percentages there, or in either Midland region, or in any Northern region, or in London, or in Wales, and you would arrive at a ludicrously overlarge figure for the number of “natural Tories”.

In Northern Ireland, which elects three MEPs by means of the Single Transferrable Vote, the UUP and SDLP votes are very soft indeed these days. In Wales, a largely Labourite constituency of strong Unionists, often Catholics, has no one for whom to vote. The disenfranchised constituency of that kind is Scotland is smaller, but it is no less Old Labour and it is very Catholic indeed. There are similar considerations in every English region, especially the black churches in London and the totally neglected potential successors of English rural radicalism everywhere else.

Two candidates per mainland region and one in Northern Ireland? If we can be bothered to make the effort. Also true of funding. But we need to start now. Newer forms of media are more advanced than they were in 2009, and may very well be more advanced again by early 2014. However, they will still have nothing like the reach of the great and the good. We need to be clear that, how and why we will not stand for the treatment meted out to No2EU – Yes to Democracy.

Labour is usually ahead in the polls, and it has won five parliamentary by-elections in a row, all with healthy swings from the Conservatives. But it would benefit from a body of MEPs, and then also of list members at Holyrood, Cardiff and City Hall, plus products of the Stormont electoral system. Perhaps initially to act as Labour’s conscience. But at least potentially to provide a real alternative.