Bang On Trend

Out of interest, has there ever been a country with unrestricted immigration?

Anyway, you certainly do not need to have that, even for EU citizens, as a condition of membership of the EU. Hence the fact that no EU member-state has it, not even for EU citizens.

When we (very unusually) decided not to restrict entry from the countries that acceded in 2004, then that was our choice, made by very few other existing members.

That there could be a debate around the restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians demonstrated that we could have, because we did have, restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians.

It turned out that they had no intention of coming to the basket case that Britain had become under George Osborne, precisely as some of us tried to tell you. But Labour still missed a trick by not insisting on a Commons vote on the retention of the controls that it had put in place.

It is a matter of political will. This Government has demonstrated absolutely none. No Government dependent on big business ever will.

Remember, none of this could ever happened if it had still been a matter of "no union card, no job". No wonder that the running is now being made by John Prescott and by the signatories to Sunday's open letter.

Both on immigration and on the EU, the trends within all three parties have been building up for more than 20 years.

Those trends have absolutely nothing to do with UKIP, to the demise of which we are now almost counting the hours.

When it fails to win Newark, a seat which it could have invented to suit its own hype, then it will all be over. That will be the end of UKIP.

But not of the trends towards Euroscepticism and towards immigration controls within all three proper parties. Those trends have nothing whatever to do with UKIP, which might as well never have been founded.

Yes, all three.

Nick Clegg may have defected from the Conservatives over Europe, in a curious mirror image of Nigel Farage and with far less cause.

But the rising generation of both right-wing and, in this age of Euroland austerity and of Brussels-imposed juntas, left-wing Lib Dems has no such starry eyes.

Nor has Vince Cable, whose eyes have never been noted for their starriness.

Cable's pronouncements in office on industrial and regional policy have been firmly in the tradition of Douglas Jay and Peter Shore, Jon Cruddas and Ed Balls.

Most Lib Dems have never been members of the Conservative Party, and are therefore neither running away from it nor, simultaneously, running back towards it, for that it what is to be going round in circles.