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This calls for a Labour three-line whip, with the public warning that the Whip would be withdrawn from any remaining Blairite ultra.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.