Contrary To Popular Myth

While the children's comedy media lark around with essentially fictional characters such as Nadine Dorries, Peter Bone, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Douglas Carswell and anyone from UKIP, this is the front page of today's Morning Star, the only newspaper subscription to which is actively promoted from the Labour Whips' Office and the only newspaper to have a Readers' and Supporters' Group among Labour MPs, drawn especially strongly from the 2010 intake:

Bob Crow urged left-wing activists today to mobilise and break the right-wing stranglehold on the EU referendum debate. The RMT general secretary said that the transport union "will not sit back and allow this debate to be dominated by Ukip and the right-wing of the Tory party."

"We will continue to set out the left-wing, pro-worker case for British withdrawal from the EU. We will put jobs, standards of living, democracy and public services centre-stage. The truth is that you cannot be pro-EU and anti-austerity when the whole structure of the European project is dominated by the interests of bankers and big business, the driving forces behind the imposition of austerity measures across the continent."

He spoke out amid an escalating Tory party rumpus and a media frenzy over Prime Minister David Cameron's failure to include in the Queen's Speech a Bill promising an EU referendum by 2017. Mr Crow said his union's position was unequivocally for British withdrawal and for an early in-out referendum. Over 50 Tory backbenchers and three Labour MPs have already signed an unprecedented amendment to the "Gracious Speech" regretting the absence of an EU referendum Bill.

Frazzled Downing Street spin doctors revealed that Mr Cameron has now instructed ministers that they must either oppose the amendment or abstain in any vote on Wednesday night. They will be prohibited from voting in favour, despite Mr Cameron's earlier claim that he was "relaxed" because the amendment supports his pledge to hold a referendum if he wins the next election. In a bizarre twist, parliamentary private secretaries - junior ministerial aides - will be allowed to support the amendment along with Tory backbenchers.

Adding to the atmosphere of farce, Euro-fanatic Deputy PM Nick Clegg will take the stage on behalf of the government at Prime Minister's Question Time on Wednesday while Mr Cameron is away in the US. A spokesman for Mr Cameron said the PM believed he could "negotiate a better deal for Britain."

The British people would then be asked to give their consent or otherwise to remaining in an EU that was "more open, more flexible and more competitive." Former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind denounced fellow Tory backbenchers for their "foolish" amendment. It had only achieved a split in the party, he whined.

But Tory MP Peter Bone claimed it presented a "win-win" situation for Mr Cameron, since the amendment backed his policy. Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins said he had signed the Tory-led amendment because "a socialist Eurosceptic view must be represented."

Labour MPs John Cryer and Kate Hoey have also signed, and former Labour government minister Keith Vaz today urged an early EU referendum before the next election. No2EU spokesman Brian Denny warned that Labour leader Ed Miliband's failure to demand a referendum would "alienate working-class voters further."

Speaking of whom, here he is on Page 9:

Many top Tories are giving PM David Cameron headaches at the moment by talking of withdrawal from the European Union. Arch-Thatcherites such as Nigel Lawson add to the mood, claiming that the "true blue" icon the Iron Lady would have been much "tougher" on "Europe" than her successors.

But contrary to popular myth Margaret Thatcher spent most of her political career supporting the transformation of the then Common Market into today's European Union.

It is one of life's ironies that much of the left has continued to support this neoliberal project long after her U-turn in the now famous Eurosceptic Bruges speech. But the fact remains that Thatcher was one of the architects of the 1987 Single European Act, the treaty which gave us EU militarisation, the single market and the single currency.

Boosting the Thatcher myth, many fawning eulogies point to the Bruges speech in 1988 which attacked the coming EU centralisation she had done so much to construct. The speech was not only too little too late but it gave the EU more ammunition to present itself as vaguely progressive to the labour movement - vaguely being the operative word.

Former European Commission president Jacques Delors's mendacious address to the TUC Congress in Bournemouth that year, offering full employment and mandatory collective bargaining across Europe, duped a generation of trade union leaders into believing that Brussels was "the only game in town."

Journalist Larry Elliot captured the mood by pointing out that the Delors vision appealed to some of the less attractive traits of the left - "the worship of power, the notion that there is always a big solution to the smallest of problems and the feeling that there is something unseemly about loving your own country." At this pivotal moment the foundation stones of new Labour and Blairism were being laid as delegates pitifully sang "Frère Jacques."

So what was the Iron Lady's true role in "European construction"? Arch-Europhile and Tory prime minister Edward Heath brought Thatcher into his government in 1970 before he dragged this country into the then Common Market in 1973.

In the 1975 referendum, Thatcher campaigned to keep this country in "Europe" before she ousted Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party in opposition. One of the first things she did when she became prime minister in 1979 was to remove all controls on capital, as demanded by the European Community treaties.

Her successive administrations fell into line with the needs of the EU and the finance sector by deindustrialising the country, shutting down the steel and coal industries and eroding the manufacturing base, which led to mass unemployment paid for by squandering revenues from North Sea oil.

By 1983 the previous attempt at creating a European single currency, known as the European Monetary System, had been causing economic havoc and was quietly abandoned. However the newly formed European Round Table of Industrialists, made up of major global corporations, launched plans to deregulate European economies to allow big business to grab more industries in order to extract profit.

To make this a reality former Irish foreign secretary James Dooge chaired the secret Dooge committee of the European Community in 1985. It prepared the ground for the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. Malcolm Rifkind was Thatcher's appointee to this committee. Ironically these plans were enthusiastically adopted by Delors and European commissioner for the internal market Lord Cockfield, another creature of Thatcher.

These plans with the Dooge report formed the basis of the 1986 Single European Act and set the ideological framework for all treaties that followed. In the proposals Lord Cockfield pushed through over 250 measures to remove barriers to trade by qualified majority voting. As Thatcher herself put it, "We wished to have many directives under majority voting because things which we wanted were being stopped by others using a single vote."

Another Tory involved was the young John Bercow, later an MP and now Speaker of the House of Commons. He said: "Margaret Thatcher was herself a driving force behind the Act and some of her ministers positively fizzed with enthusiasm about the single market, which they believed achieved the Thatcherisation of Europe."

This was followed by Thatcher's infamous "big bang" deregulation of the banks and the City, marking the launch of a rapacious and profoundly corrupt casino economy that has led us to the current crisis of capitalism.

The Act also began the long process of EU militarisation, enshrining aspirations to create a single foreign policy and an EU-wide military-industrial complex to build and sell arms. This directly led to the hugely expensive project to build an EU fighter plane, the Eurofighter - a white elephant that has cost the British taxpayer over £25 billion at the last count.

By the late 1980s all Thatcher's hard work was bearing fruit and led to the launch of plans for the Maastricht Treaty, designed to further centralise powers to the EU. It was at this point that she became more vocal in her opposition to the monster she had done so much to create. She opposed the fall of the Berlin Wall as she understood the power a revanchist, reunited Germany could wield.

But leading Tory Europhiles like Michael Heseltine quickly moved against her, forcing her to resign as prime minister and party leader in November 1990, kicking her out "like a dog in the night," as Dennis Skinner put it. Europhile John Major replaced her as Tory leader, forcing through Maastricht and among other things the privatisation of the railways - under EU directive 91/440.

Any assessment of Thatcher must recognise her lack of original thought and judgement in favour of opportunism and subservience to a ruling class that serves its own interests above those of the nation as a whole.