One Party To The Tune Of Another

As UKIP implodes, Tories Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP have published its programme, practically word for word, as the blueprint for a Tory Government. Priceless. And do they expect their readers not to know who dismantled local government in the first place, or which party gave this country all three of the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty?

Are Carswell, Hannan et al entryists, as Trotskyists in the Labour Party used to be? I suspect not. Rather, they strike me as more like the tiny faction of pro-Soviet MPs that Labour had to expel in the Forties, or that which later accrued to Straight Left: in close touch with the Communist Party, actually more pro-Soviet than plenty of people in it, but with no formal connection to it.