UKIP Has Rannoched Itself

Admittedly, it had no other serious option.

However sterling (so to speak) may be the work that Lord Pearson does on learning disabilities and as Chairman of the Deerstalking Committee of the Countryside Alliance, the fact remains that he is a close friend and ally of Margaret Thatcher, with all that that entails, although presumably they never discuss the Single European Act.

But half of the UKIP vote for Strasbourg, based on its geographical distribution, must be Old Labour or (especially in the West Country) Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. Add together the Tory and UKIP votes in Wales, London, the South West, either of the Midland regions, or any of the Northern regions, and you get an absurdly high figure for the number of natural Tories living there.

Those voters stand in the tradition of the Attlee Government, which refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state” which “the Durham miners would never wear”. In that tradition, Gaitskell rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth.

Most Labour MPs voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. The Parliamentary Labour Party voted unanimously opposed Thatcher’s Single European Act. 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. Every Labour MP, without exception, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution. And the No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections included in London Peter Shore’s erstwhile agent.

Some of us would wish to vote for such candidates. Whom we are therefore going to have to be.