Transmogrified

In the belly of the Blairite Beast, on the Progress website, a very brave Graham Stringer writes:

Politicians, like generals, always fight the previous war, or, to be more precise, the winners stick with successful tactics and the losers look for better ones. Being against the European Union, or its predecessor the European Economic Community, was seen as a major reason for Labour’s unpopularity and electoral failure during the 1980s. Consequently the party changed tactics and decided it wanted to be at the heart of Europe.

This change was mirrored in the trade union movement after the president of the European Commission Jacques Delors promised the TUC in 1988 that the EU could protect the rights and benefits of their members against the ravages of Thatcherism. The TUC changed from hostility to the EU to support on the spot.

Electoral success followed and these pragmatic changes have become an article of faith that, for electoral success, Labour has to be pro-European.

This is no longer a tenable position. The EU of Delors promising prosperity, social progress and democracy has now transmogrified into a body for destroying jobs and the position of elected politicians. Some people have argued that although the EU is now extremely unpopular with the electorate this will not affect the outcome of the election because people vote on the ‘economy stupid’, not on constitutional matters. This might have been true but the eurozone crisis has now irrevocably linked the economy with European constitutional matters.

Ever closer union and the creation of the euro have inevitably led to youth unemployment of over 50 per cent and adult unemployment of over 20 per cent in many so-called Club Med countries. Labour’s current position of supporting more Europe not less is irrational. More integration in Europe will not stop the crazy competitive deflation that is inherent in the current structure of the EU and the euro. A deflating Eurozone not only damages the eurozone countries but also the UK’s economy as there is less cash in our largest market to buy our goods.

Put simply, the pragmatic social, economic and electoral reasons our party had for changing its policies on Europe more than 20 years ago have all now reversed. These changes alone should be enough for a deep rethink on our attitude toward Europe, but there are also fundamental democratic principles that need debating. Extraordinarily after the passion and brutality of the debate around Europe in the 1970s and 1980s the move to a pro-EU position was arrived at in almost grudging silence, with little debate. We need that debate now and the following key questions, among many others, need answering.

Should we be part of an organisation that decides a majority of our laws, when these laws can only be initiated by unelected European commissioners? How can this be squared with any notion of democracy? This question is made particularly acute by the ‘let them eat cake’ attitude of the commission which wants a seven per cent increase in its budget and salaries while pursuing public service-destroying policies in southern Europe.

Is the Europe of the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy and the incredibly expensive and inefficient Regional Policy reformable? And if so, how? If it is not (the last government and this one have an abysmal record of failure when it comes to reform) do we get out? Should we stay with qualified majority voting, which effectively means that countries in net receipt of European grants can vote to increase their European grants at our expense?

My view is simple: the EU has failed the vision, and it was a genuine vision, of its founders. It is unreformable and therefore dangerous to prosperity, democracy and, in the end, peace. Ed Miliband showed he had the bottle to take on Murdoch; he now needs to show he has the cojones to take on the European debate and the courage to let the people decide in a referendum.