Healthy

The real news to have come out of the Labour Party today has been the refusal to endorse Martin Schulz's candidacy for President of the European Commission.

That refusal is because of his federalism (that is the reason being given, complete with the f-word), and because he is opposed to the real-terms cut in the British contribution to the EU Budget for which every Labour MP voted, joined by fewer Conservatives than there were Lib Dem MPs.

With the retirement of Stephen Hughes, who wanted to abolish national institutions altogether in defiance of Labour Party policy, it looks as if, at my fourth European Election, I might be able to vote Labour for the first time at such a poll.

After the SLP in 1999, Respect in 2004, and No2EU in 2009, I might have gone for the first or, probably, the third of those again, although I have always had very grave problems with each of them.

I did toy with voting UKIP in order to aid its removal of both Coalition parties from all their seats in the three Northern regions. But that seems on course to happen, anyway. Just about: UKIP has had another of its farcical conferences, but that kind of thing does not perturb its supporters. If anything, it is what they like.

The Conservatives do have rebels in opposition to the EU and all its works, although there are extremely few of them. But Labour had none, not a single one, in support of David Cameron's capitulation over the Budget; commentators who wanted it to be true were reduced to suggesting that David Miliband might abstain, one abstention, but even that turned out to be pure wishful thinking.

And Labour will have none, not a single one, in support of the TTIP's attempt to hand over the NHS, nothing like which exists anywhere else in the EU so that it is a characteristically British institution, to the American healthcare companies, from a country and a culture as foreign as anywhere on the Continent.

What those who belch a sort of unlettered faux-hostility to the EU while wanting to turn Britain into their own fantasy version of the United States will do when that same EU, entirely predictably, attempts to do precisely that, who can guess?

The whole thing will be the making of many things, and not least of the claim of Andy Burnham to be the next Leader of the Labour Party. It will also be the unmaking of the pantomime characters who have been the sole permissible voices of criticism of the EU ever since they constituted a small minority of the mostly Labour parliamentary opposition to the Maastricht Treaty.