Only The Liberal And Democratic Need Apply

Earlier this year, Vince Cable, the frontrunner at this week's Conference to anoint a new Lib Dem Leader, called for significant repatriation of power from the EU. His more lately proposed industrial policy is wholly incompatible with the Eurofederalist project.

Many of the old SDP have come to be far more critical of the EU as the last decades of progressed. Like Cable, they have realised that the apostles and prophets of post-War Keynesian Labourism - Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay, Anthony Crosland, Peter Shore, Bryan Gould - were not "right about everything apart from Europe". They were also right about Europe, and their entire vision is incomprehensible apart from that insight.

 

From the Right, defined in terms of economics, the rival candidate appears to be Ed Davey. Like David Heath, Norman Lamb, Alistair Carmichael and David Laws, Davey is of that rising generation of Lib Dems who are no fans of the EU, either. The Party President, Tim Farron, an economically left-wing and socially quite conservative adult convert to Christianity, is of similar mind, while, among the veterans, the Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes, abstained over Maastricht and remains no less lukewarm, while Sir Nick Harvey went so far as to vote against Maastricht, and no one need imagine that, on this or on anything else, his knighthood has bought him off since his confinement to the backbenches.

Hitherto, mild to strong Eurosceptics have kept quiet within the Liberal Democrats. They have probably assumed that they were a tiny minority. But I bet that they are not. In fact, I bet that they are not really a minority at all. Vicious campaigners though they very often are, Lib Dems believe profoundly in the election, sensibly or otherwise, of everyone who exercises any sort of power. In absolute openness and freedom of information, prudent or otherwise.

They believe in the highest possible degree of decentralisation and localism, appropriate or otherwise. 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, which must logically also mean from the coalitions in the Council of Ministers to floor of the European Parliament.

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 to the Highlands and Islands via North Norfolk, Berwick, and North East Fife.

And now, they are on course for something not seen in a major party since Labour in 1980, namely a Leadership Election featuring only Eurosceptical candidates. Ed Miliband, somewhere between Healey and Shore or Silkin in 1980 terms, you need to up your game on this, as you have been dropping distinct hints towards doing. Surrounded by Ed Balls, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman, that ought not to be difficult.