Monday 14 November 2011

A Hard-Headed View

“A hard-headed view of Britain’s national interests should be the hallmark of our approach to the coming negotiations.” So writes Douglas Alexander. But Britain has no direct role in the creation of new treaty arrangements among those countries which, unblessed by Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, were daft enough to join the euro in the first place. What is needed is our own primary legislation with five simple clauses.

The restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, with its use to repatriate agricultural policy and to restore our historic fishing rights in accordance with international law. The requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them. The requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. The disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights (or of the Supreme Court) unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons.

And the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons. We must no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, or Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates.

This calls for a Labour three-line whip, with the public warning that the Whip would be withdrawn from any remaining Blairite ultra. The Liberal Democrats set great store by decentralisation, transparency and democracy. They represent many areas badly affected by the Common Fisheries Policy, and are successors to parties that were as opposed to the Soviet Bloc as they were to Far Right regimes in Latin America and Southern Africa, as well as to the rise of antidemocratic extremism at home.

The SDLP takes the Labour Whip, the Alliance Party is allied to the Lib Dems, the Greens are staunchly anti-EU, so is the DUP, and the one other Unionist is close to Labour. The SNP and Plaid Cymru can hardly believe in independence for Scotland, greater autonomy for Wales, yet vote against the return to Westminster of the powers that they wish to transfer thence to Edinburgh or Cardiff; the SNP also has the fishing issue to consider. Even any remaining Conservatives who wanted to certify the European People’s Party as politically acceptable might be brought on board.

Leaving those fabled creatures, backbench Tory Eurosceptics. It is high time that their bluff was called. This is how to do it. Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, over to you.

6 comments:

  1. YouGov/Sunday Times results 11th-13th Nov

    LAB 41%
    CON 36%
    Other 14%
    LD 9%

    The Blue Labour age is nearly upon us, Mr Lindsay. Wee Dougie won't be Foreign Secretary for very long, if ever.

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  2. And so the Blue Labour government in waiting serves notice to a NuLab relic to shape up or ship out.

    With Ed Miliband comes the BluLab lot, and with them come this blogger and several of his blog roll. Each of those in turn brings something specific, in your case Radical Orthodoxy and that sort of economically Far Left, socially Far Right Catholicism.

    You even managed, by means of nothing more than blogging, to convince Labour that that was the political norm in North West Durham so the new MP had to be a practising Catholic who passed the David Lindsay Test of doctrinal acceptability. Did you mention something somewhere about entryism?

    It is amazing that there has never been a post on Harry's Place about this nexus, which is within touching distance of taking over the country in 2015. If that is not a coup, I do not know what is. Maybe once the books are out, they will be forced to sit up and take notice. Definitely if one particular rumour about them is true.

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  3. Unrepentant Blairite14 November 2011 at 15:25

    Well said @14:58. This post only repeats one of the many planks of the Lindsay platform. To do him justice, he makes no secret of any of them.

    The British People's Alliance website still functions, and these are its links: Blue Labour, David Lindsay, Democratic Labor Party [Australia - heirs of Bob Santamaria], Economics Is For Donkeys [US], Liam Carr, Mainstream Populist Democrats [US], Martin Meenagh, Michael Merrick, Neil Clark, Paul Leake, Pub Philosopher, Right Democrat [US], Rod Liddle, Samuel Fletcher, Social Democracy for the 21st Century, The 2020 Vision [Lindsay's Facebook Group with one of the most powerful local figures in it], The Distributist Review [US - Chesterbelloc stuff], Tim Collard.

    With Ed Miliband comes Blue Labour, and with Blue Labour comes all of those. Santamarians, conservative Democrats, Chestertonians, and the persons and supporters of David Lindsay and Neil Clark.

    Our friends in Euston do not take any of this seriously. They should. When Lindsay's next couple of books are out, perhaps they will. The Left should support immigration controls and be sceptical about global warming? Labour should be a party for hardline Unionists, hardline Eurosceptics, traditionalist Catholics, countryside activists and devotees of the monarchy? Labour should get back to its roots in "Radical Liberalism, Tory Populism, Christian Socialism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism" but not anything remotely resembling "Marxism"? Those roots are ultimately, wait for this, JACOBITE?!?

    Worthless rubbish, easily dismissed as such. Except Ed Milband is heavily dependent on Maurice Glasman and Maurice Glasman thinks the world of David Lindsay. The list of contributors to certain forthcoming edited volumes might finally switch on the lights in some people's heads.

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  4. It is very much on topic. You are close to people who are close to the Labour leader at a time when Labour is ahead in the polls.

    You want to turn Labour into a party of god-bothering, royalist, British nationalist, isolationist, anti-immigration deniers of climate change who support nationalisation, trade union power and Keynesianism because you see them as means to “national sovereignty”, “the Union”, and patriarchy.

    You fashionably but falsely claim that Labour used to be like that until it was taken over by “1970s campus Marxists,” and that takeover is why it eventually lost office, having alienated their “traditional supporters.”

    The hatred of the EU is part and parcel of that agenda, which is being listened to at only one degree’s remove, if that, by the leader that the unions imposed against the will of the members, the MPs and the general public.

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  5. Unrepentant Blairite14 November 2011 at 16:22

    Thank you, Anonymous. The narrative runs like this:

    - Labour grew out of popular Liberalism and popular Toryism, themselves based on that old time religion, especially the Methodist and Catholic varieties;

    - Labour became a party of left-wing, big government economics only in the service of those concerns;

    - Labour was therefore always a party of devoutly religious, monarchist, Unionist and Eurosceptical people who supported the Welfare State, nationalisation, trade union power, grammar schools and old Empire ties while opposing liberal interventionism, mass immigration, free trade and these days also action on climate change;

    - But all of this was ruined by people who read Marxist literature at university in the 60s and 70s, followed some highly conjectural shift in Marxism from economics to the culture wars, and took over the Labour Party, turning it into New Labour on that basis;

    - This had a certain amount of electoral success, but that would have happened anyway and once the real nature of New Labour was rumbled so few people voted Labour that the party lost office;

    - So to return to office, Labour has to "go back" to being the party of devoutly religious, monarchist, Unionist and Eurosceptical people who support the Welfare State, nationalisation, trade union power, grammar schools and old Empire ties while opposing liberal interventionism, mass immigration, free trade and action on climate change.

    Lindsay truly believes this. Glasman sort of believes it. Lindsay has the ear of Glasman. Glasman has the ear of Miliband. Milband leads the party that is ahead in the polls and likely to remain so because of the cuts, all the way up to the 2015 Election. Be afraid. Be very, very, very afraid.

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