Friday 24 May 2013

Labour for a Referendum?

It is a good list: Ronnie Campbell, Rosie Cooper, John Cryer, Ian Davidson, Jim Dowd, Natascha Engel, Frank Field, Roger Godsiff, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, John McDonnell, Austin Mitchell, Grahame Morris, Graham Stringer, Keith Vaz. Interesting, intelligent, independent-minded politicians from all wings of the party.

Add in figures such as Éoin Clarke, Kevin Meagher, David Drew, Richard Cotton, Owen Jones and, in the chair, the redoubtable John Mills, who was the national agent for the No campaign in 1975. He has been Secretary of the Labour Euro-Safeguards Campaign ever since that year. He was also the largest donor to the Labour Party in the first quarter of this calendar year, giving more than twice as much as Unite.

Faced with all of that, I want to believe, I really do. But what if it went the wrong way, as it did in 1975? What chance would there be that those making the sober, factual case founded in opposition to the EU's neoliberalism and neoconservatism would be permitted any kind of hearing when the comedy characters who merely disliked Abroad, but who had no rational grounds for objecting in the slightest to the EU, made for so much more entertaining television?

And where would be the need, when this could all be achieved simply by primary legislation? Indeed, if not by that last means, then what would we be fighting for? What, in that case, would be the point of Parliament?

7 comments:

  1. So "the sober, factual case" against the EU "founded in opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism".

    Erm, no Dave. Only a few Left-wing obsessives think it's all about "neoconservatism" and "neoliberalism". They represent nobody but themselves.

    Among normal people (of all political stripes and none), the "sober, factual" case against the EU is simply founded in patriotic love of our laws, institutions and opposition to foreign rule.

    Combined with the (radical, I know) belief that our own elected Parliament ought to make our laws.

    Its a bipartisan position.

    Trust the Left to try and turn it into an issue around some obscure economic theory.

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  2. You would have to look very hard to find people with the length of record of opposition to the whole project of Ronnie Campbell, John Cryer, Ian Davidson, Jim Dowd, Frank Field, Roger Godsiff, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, John McDonnell, Austin Mitchell, Grahame Morris, David Drew, Richard Cotton or John Mills. They were right when Thatcher, Tebbit and Farage were wrong.

    Rosie Cooper, Jim Dowd, Natascha Engel, Grahame Morris, Graham Stringer, Éoin Clarke, Kevin Meagher and Owen Jones are newer arrivals on the national scene. But they have proved or are proving just as valiant in the cause. Owen seems to believe in some kind of alternative EU but he must know that that is never going to be on offer.

    Keith Vaz is probably coming round. He would not be keeping this kind of company otherwise. Being Minister for Europe is enough to turn anybody against the EU.

    Dowd and Engel are both German-born and half-German. Gisela Stuart is of course completely German in that sense. She is a conspicuous absentee from this list. Maybe she shares your doubts about the need for a referendum?

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  3. @23:27, second time tonight that you have demonstrated that you are really too rich to have an opinion, so completely out of touch are you with the lives of more or less everybody. Making you one of the last people in the Conservative Party, or one of the only people in UKIP, as the case may be.

    @23:31, stormingly good stuff. You have put Grahame Morris in both lists, but I suppose that that might have been intentional.

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  4. God, can you imagine it? A whole month of Farage, Bloom, Dorries, Tebbit, Hannan, Bone, the never seen but ever mentioned Mrs. Bone, and Rees Bloody Mogg.

    Look, look, the Beeb will say. What a bunch of fruitcakes and swivel-eyed loons. You have nothing in common with them. Vote for the EU instead.

    No mention allowed of the things you listed on Tuesday, http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/stockton-stock-down.html. No platform for the people who wanted to discuss those real issues and who have been right all along about the EU.

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  5. That is why any legislation providing for an In-Out referendum must only be the sixth clause of a Bill the first five clauses of which would come into effect regardless of any referendum result, and indeed at the same time as the provision for any referendum to be held at all.

    First, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and its use to repatriate agricultural policy, to repatriate industrial and regional policy (already a specific Labour commitment, whereas the Conservatives are not committed to any specific return of powers), and to reclaim our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law: 200 miles, or to the median line.

    Secondly, the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them.

    Thirdly, the requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard.

    Fourthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament.

    And fifthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons.

    Thus, we should no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists, Trotskyists, neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, or Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates.

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  6. I suspect that the referendum will fail to produce a majority for withdrawal. The British dislike joining in but they detest exclusion even more.

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  7. If anyone does it, it will be Labour. The only party ever to have held one, like the only party ever to have had a manifesto commitment to withdrawal. I wonder how Farage voted in either 1975 or 1983.

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