A Very Long Shot

After 43 years in the supposedly protective and moderating EU, the British state pension age is set to go up to somewhere around 75.

Where is this Social Europe? It does not exist. TTIP is not some aberration. It is just what the EU does. It is what the EU was set up to do. Not "preventing wars". This.

In its own terms, it is a great success. More is the pity.

Proponents of "a reformed EU" are like, and very often are, proponents of "multilateral nuclear disarmament".

Those can never explain by what means, or in what forum, they would pursue their multilateralism. They can never explain when they would do so.

For example, they are entirely at a loss as to whether that would be before, or after, £180 billion had been spent on a new Trident programme for the use of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

If pushed, but never if pushed very hard, they are simply in favour of nuclear weapons per se.

Usually because such weapons provide employment to a very small number of workers whose union reps, and whose one or two MPs, apparently cannot conceive of any other livelihood for them.

On that basis, they would always be opposed to any nuclear disarmament. As, indeed, they would be.

Please note that this is now the only argument for Trident that continues to be advanced by the Prime Minister himself.

Effectively, he is now the leader of the trade union Right. The GMB ought to make a donation to his constituency party.

In the same way, and very much from the same people, one never needs to push very hard for professed proponents of "EU reform" to show themselves to be supporters of the EU under any and all circumstances.

They can never say what their preferred reforms would be, or how they would achieve them, or what they would do if they failed to achieve them.

The only hope, in the midst of all of this, is that a vote to Leave will result in a second renegotiation, and that Jeremy Corbyn will demand that that be preceded by a General Election, in order to determine who was to conduct it.

Corbyn and those around him certainly do not believe in staying in the EU no matter what it did or did not do. They would go along with a very real reform programme indeed.

That programme would be rejected out of hand. Leading the Corbyn Government to recommend a vote to Leave at a second referendum.

This is a very long shot. But it is the only one that we have.