Rules-Based Order?

As long ago as the late 1940s, an initially tiny clique of people who were in the Labour Party but not of the Labour Movement began to try and use the emerging European federalism as a means of turning Labour into the Bloomsbury Liberal Party of their parents and of their own early lives. As their campaign picked up, then even Hugh Gaitskell felt it necessary to give them short shrift.

Yet here we are, 70 and more years later, and the personification of the metropolitan liberal elite is leading Labour to death in the last ditch for the sake of Britain's continued subjugation to the State Aid rules of Margaret Thatcher's Single Market. The Conservative Party has conceded that Tony Benn had been right all along, and wants to be free of that key part of Thatcherism. But not so the Labour front bench.

We know that there will be a Conservative rebellion over the written-in illegality of the Internal Market Bill, although breaches of international law will never have concerned most those rebels over wars, as they do not bother them over Julian Assange right now. But will there be a Labour rebellion over Keir Starmer's determination to remain subject to the State Aid rules?

Well, there are 34 members of the Socialist Campaign Group, and several of them have a pronounced streak of Euroscepticism, even if several of them most certainly do not. It is also worth noting that 17 of those 34, half of the total, are members of the 2019 intake. Those sitting Members of Parliament are not sitting around waiting for anyone to get back in. North West Durham Constituency Labour Party, take note.