The highly meaningful withdrawal from the Common Fisheries
Policy was proposed by David Davis while he was standing for the
Conservative Party Leadership. But that was duly ignored by the Blairite, toffish media in preference for the toffish Heir to Blair's
meaningless blather about where and with whom Conservative MEPs would be
sitting.
Every year for 18 years, Labour, the Lib Dems and the
latter's predecessors voted unanimously against the CFP on the floor of
the Commons, joined in the very last days of the Major Government by the
tiniest handful of Tories. Perhaps it is time for Ed Miliband to seek
to restore those annual votes? Then again, the media are determined not
to report the fact that there are now even fewer Eurosceptical Tory MPs
than there were in the Major years, and there were barely any even then.
But most of those media which still bear any sort of sentimental allegiance to
Labour, or to the Lib Dems, or to the memory of the latter's predecessors, are determined to conform to the stereotype of people who, as surely as they
gorge themselves on battery-produced poultry while screeching against
shooting and against the hunting that alone makes free range poultry
possible in practice, will not hear a word against the CFP while lifting
their skirts in horror at the thought of whaling.
Just what, exactly,
is so horribly wrong with whaling, by which Koreans have been feeding themselves and their families for eight thousand years? And why, at a push, is it more or
less all right for scientific research, but never, ever for food?
Mr Lindsay. You say The Tories are not the most eurosceptic of the Parties.
ReplyDeleteThe Tory Maastricht rebels far outnumbered the 52 Labour Maastricht "rebels" (who were only voting against it to create more trouble for Major, not because they opposed it). The Tory Party under William Hague were the only Party to committ to the Pound on principle (Blair always wanted to join the euro). Recently, 81 Tory MP's defied a three-line whip to back an EU referendum. How many Labour MP's backed it?
Your analysis doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
No, there were 66 Labour votes against Maastricht and only 22, exactly one third as many, Tory votes against it.
ReplyDeleteIt was Gordon Brown and Ed Balls who kept Britain out of the euro. The Conservative Party fought the 1997 Election on a promise to keep Ken Clarke as Chancellor.
That referendum vote was just silly. What would it have achieved even if it had gone through. Whereas Labour is now the only party even open to the principle of a referendum on EU membership. The Conservatives have absolutely and repeatedly ruled it out.