Up The Cable

The trick with the Conservatives is to make it think that it was their idea. Vince Cable has done very well indeed, selling to them, to the point where they are government policy (although it will be interesting to see how much of it ever comes to pass), a classic Labour industrial strategy of precisely the kind that first made him a member of the Labour Party and then made him a member of the SDP.

In its inherent Unionism and affirmation of parliamentary sovereignty, this sort of thing really and truly is a Tory idea, carried over into the Labour Movement from its Tory populist rather than from its Radical Liberal roots. And Cable's Old Labour economic patriotism is Tory to the core, including in its utter incompatibility with European federalism. 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 - were not "right about everything apart from Europe". They were also right about Europe, and their entire vision is incomprehensible apart from that insight.

It is downright hilarious, meanwhile, that Cable is being denounced by people who believe that it is somehow un-Tory to insist that the British Government buy British wherever and whenever possible. they have clearly been taken over by the Liberals in their midst far more than Vince Cable ever has been.