Arising out of a discussion over on Rod Liddle's blog.
I am not convinced that most Lib Dems are all that pro-EU at all. I have a strong suspicion that they are more like the characters in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. One by one, each of the members of an anarchist cell turns out to be an undercover policeman.
Vicious campaigners though they undeniably are, there really are Lib Dems, doubtless clear majorities of their members and voters, and probably even of their MPs and Peers, who believe profoundly in the election of pretty much everything that exercises any sort of power. In absolute openness and freedom of information. In the highest possible degree of decentralisation and localism. In the heritage of uncompromising opposition to political extremism everywhere from Moscow to Pretoria abroad, and from the Communist Party to the Monday Club at home.
In (unlike me) the tradition of anti-protectionism against everyone from nineteenth-century agricultural Tories to 1970s industrial trade unionists. In the rural Radicalism that has always stood against the pouring of lucre into the pockets of the landlords. And in the interests of the arc of Lib Dem fishing seats from Cornwall via North Norfolk, Berwick, and North East Fife, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
Mild to strong Eurosceptics, including a goodly number of the latter, probably keep quiet within the Lib Dems because they assume that they are a tiny minority. But I bet that they are not. In fact, I bet that they are not really a minority at all. And now, they have to make legislative and executive decisions.
Ed Davey is in the Cabinet, while the similarly non-Eurofanatical David Heath and Norman Lamb are on the cusp of it, with Alistair Carmichael as the party's Chief and the Government's Deputy Chief Whip. Heath, as Deputy Leader of the House, also has an important role in progressing business.
The Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes, abstained over Maastricht and remains no less lukewarm 20 years later. The Party President, Tim Farron, is very much of the same mind. Longstanding readers will be aware of my view that David Laws belongs in the same prison as anyone who had stolen that much in Housing Benefit, but the fact remains that he is effectively an unpaid Minister without Portfolio instead.
Nick Harvey went so far as to vote against Maastricht, and is not only a Minister with that record, but a Defence Minister who also voted against the "renewal" of Trident.
We need legislation with five simple clauses, most easily introduced as an amendment to the next appropriate Government Bill.
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.
Ed Miliband, over to you, and challenge the Lib Dems to prove their commitment or otherwise to liberty and democracy, to the Liberal and Social Democratic patrimonies. Or over to Simon Hughes and Tim Farron? If not, why not?
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Funnily enough, the GKC comparison was made by Iain Sharpe, Watford Lib Dem councillor, in December:
ReplyDeletehttp://eatenbymissionaries.blogspot.com/2011/12/are-lib-dems-really-pro-european.html
His blog is well worth a look and I think you are both right, there are lots of Lib Dems with big doubts about the undemocratic, secretive, protectionist EU that devastates our fisheries while promoting all sorts of enemies of liberal democracy.
I shall certainly give it a look. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI must admit that I have tended to do online what I have been known to castigate the print media for doing in print, namely ignored the Lib Dems.
As things stand, apart from Vince Cable from time to time in the Mail on Sunday, that party is exempt from an important form of scrutiny, a Fleet Street column. Every national newspaper should have a Liberal Democrat. They need scrutiny.
Scrutiny of schemes to join the euro. Or to grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Or to abolish church schools. Or to raise the income tax threshold, but without the wholesale restructuring that would guarantee everyone a tax-free income of at least half national median earnings at the given time. Or to reverse the erosion of civil liberties, but without therefore restoring proper sentencing and proper prison regimes because we could once again have confidence in convictions. Or to give the vote to prisoners. Or to advocate in this country openness, decentralisation and the election of everything, while also subscribing to European federalism.
Those, remember, are only the things that have managed to become party policy. Liberal Democrat columnists would give an insight into the milieu that produced such policies, into the ideas that circulate around them and provide their context, and thus into the minds and character of the people involved in that process. Where are those columnists?
For many years The Sun would not even send a reporter to the Liberal Democrat Conference. Yet over a good number of years it carried fairly or very regular pieces by Sir Clement Freud, much loved by many of us for his appearances on Just a Minute, making him the only regular Liberal or Liberal Democrat, as such, on Fleet Street.
The Lib Dems are probably feeling very smug at the moment. After all, that is their usual aspect. They should consider, and be reminded, that their only newspaper voice over a prolonged period was in a paper of which Rupert Murdoch was not only the proprietor but also the editor-in-chief, and that it was the voice of a Liberal and then a Lib Dem whose son was by happy coincidence married, and still is, to Murdoch’s daughter.
But I cannot deny it: if I had never heard of a Eurosceptical Lib Dem blogger who made Chestertonian references, then there is something of a beam in my own eye.
Lib Dem peers, mostly older and so more pro-EU than their MPs, specifically tried to stop EU Competition Law from applying to the NHS under the Health & Social Care Bill. They are getting there.
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