The Rise of UKIP?

Unless we are seriously expected to believe that there are as many "natural Tories" in, say, Hull or Cornwall, both of which placed UKIP at the top of the poll for Strasbourg last time, as the combined Conservative and UKIP votes there would suggest, then we must accept that at least half of UKIP's Strasbourg vote is Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal rather than Old Tory or "Thatcherite" New Right (don't mention the Single European Act). The idea that they would otherwise vote Conservative is laughable. They would just go home. As, at General Elections, all sections of the UKIP Strasbourg vote always do.

As a matter of party policy, the Conservatives are not even remotely Eurosceptical, and they never have been. The Liberals and the SDP, both of which still exist, are both far more critical of the EU. So is the Gordon Brown-Ed Miliband-Ed Balls wing of New Labour, like the Labour Left and the parliamentary remnant of the Old Labour Right.

Miliband is already making hay, entirely sincerely and without any hint of opportunism, over the Coalition's daft schemes to cripple provincial economies by slashing the spending power of public employees far from London, to redefine legal marriage in order to include same-sex couples (which has never been Labour Party policy, and on which Labour MPs are probably going to have a free vote), to deregulate Sunday trading, to devastate rural communities by flogging off our Post Office and our roads to private companies and even to foreign states, to break the Royal Mail's direct link between the monarchy and every address in this Kingdom, to abolish Gift Aid while drastically reducing the activities entitled to charitable status, and to bankrupt the Church of England by imposing VAT on listed building repairs.

He could seal his position as the voice of moderate, mainstream Britain by promising primary legislation to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to use that provision both to repatriate agricultural policy and to restore the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights (200 miles, or to the median line), to require that all EU legislation pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them, to require that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meet in public and publish an Official Report akin to Hansard to the satisfaction of a resolution of the House of Commons, to disapply any ruling of either European Court unless and until ratified by a resolution of the House of Commons, and to disapply anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by at least one seat-taking member of the House of Commons.

Heaven knows, the party of Heath, Thatcher and Major never will.