The Yellow Peril

To the EU, that is.

There has never been the slightest chance of any hope from the Conservative Party, although a High Tory party set free by electoral reform would be a useful ally, on this as on so many other things. But we are not there yet.

But elsewhere on the benches behind the coalition, there are people who, and whose activists, are only interested in any tier of government insofar as it delivers on the single issues and the local communitarian populist causes that are almost, if almost, their sole political motivations; the EU has no interest whatever in those issues or causes. They are not naturally keen on the transfer of power from democratic to undemocratic institutions, or from those which meet in public to those which meet in secret, or from those at relative geographical and cultural proximity to those at considerable geographical and enormous cultural distance. And they might consider asking themselves what Cobden or Bright would have made of the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy.

Every Lib Dem MP, and every MP from their predecessor parties, did in fact vote against both the CAP and the CFP every year between 1979 and 1997. Like every Labour MP. Only in the dying days of the Major Government were they joined by the tiniest handful of Conservatives. Whatever happened to those annual votes? Meanwhile, those predecessor parties still exist. The Liberal Party's immediate past Leader was a candidate for No2EU - Yes To Democracy, and his party is searingly critical of the EU for the reasons given above. The much smaller SDP, still soldiering on in Bridlington and Aberavon, is now explicitly committed to the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law.