Getting The EU Right

Over on Daniel Hannan's Telegraph blog, I am glad to see that I have touched such a raw nerve by pointing out that the Eurofederalist project has always been a platform for the Far Right, including the Conservative Party's internal Far Right, which was at the heart of government under Margaret "Single European Act" Thatcher, which was still hanging around under her chosen successor, and which, in the person on the Monday Clubbing Geoffrey Rippon, had been directly responsible for taking us in under Heath.

The Far Left and the Far Right have both made a show of opposing the EU, and the Far Left probably means it. But, perhaps especially in Britain, it won't for much longer; in fact, those who followed academic Marxism down the cultural rather than the economic road, creating New Labour and then also taking over the Conservative machine under Cameron, have always identified the shift over Europe as one of their definitive changes of mind. The Far Right never really did oppose the EU in principle, and, again perhaps especially in Britain, it no longer even has any reason to pretend to do so in practice.

The opposition now needs to come from the people who have always been most consistent: the pro-Commonwealth Keynesian Tories who have opposed first the European Communities Bill, then Thatcherism, then Maastricht, then neoconservatism; the like-minded, historically normative, never expunged tendency within the Labour Party, now quietly on the rise again; and those who really do believe in the Liberal values of democracy, subsidiarity, transparency, anti-extremism, and anti-protectionism (unlike me, but then I do not see the CAP and the CFP as protecting anything, but the very reverse).

As ever, the Thatcherite and Blairite media will ignore us all completely, just as they did when three times as many Labour MPs as Tories voted against Maastricht and by no means all of the Tory rebels were Thatcherites, several of them having been very hostile to her, as she had been to them.