Stockton Stock Down

When James Wharton stages his Canute-like attempt to prevent Labour from taking back Stockton South, then that party ought to put down an amendment declining to give the Daft Bill a Second Reading in view of its eschatological timetable (except that the eschaton might come at any moment, and will certainly come at some moment), leading to its entire failure to address immediately pressing concerns such as:

- The total failure of any "Social Europe" ever to save a single job, service, benefit or amenity;

- The EU's imposition of economic austerity;

- The long, and increasingly accelerated, creation of a militarised EU waging global wars of "liberal intervention" while sustaining a vast military-industrial complex selling arms to all and sundry;

- The refusal of the Council of Ministers to legislate in public and to publish an Official Report akin to Hansard;

- The presence in the Council of Ministers and in the European Parliament of all manner of extremist and politically undesirable legislators;

- The Common Agricultural Policy;

- The Common Fisheries Policy;

- EU control of industrial and regional policy;

- The moves towards a "free trade" agreement between the EU and the United States, to the ruination of jobs, workers' rights, consumer protection and environmental responsibility on two continents inhabited by many hundreds of millions of people;

- Social dumping;

- The drastic restrictions of civil liberties necessary in order to make possible the borderless Europe that has always been a stated aim of the EU;
- The centrality of EU law to the proposed privatisation of the Royal Mail;

- The illegality under EU law of any renationalisation of the utilities or of the railways once they have been privatised, although there is no obligation to privatise them in the first place, with the preposterous and pernicious consequence that British railways and utilities can be and are State-owned, just so long as the State in question is not the British State, while the least subsidised railway line in Great Britain has to be returned to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice;
- The impossibility under EU law of using State aid to support two domestic sources of energy, so that it is impossible for this country both to have a nuclear power industry and to exploit our vast resources of coal;
- The abject incompetence of David Cameron in failing to deliver a real terms reduction in the United Kingdom's contribution to the EU Budget at this time of austerity, as explicitly required by a resolution of the House of Commons; and

- The role of EU competition law in the ongoing dismantlement of the National Health Service in England.

There are more. But those ought to be enough to be getting on with. A Second Reading Amendment must not be too long. In this case, though, it all too easily could be.

However, would the media pay even so much as the tiniest attention to it? Even if it were passed? Ed Miliband ought to make it clear that if this were not passed, then Labour would vote in both Lobbies on the unamended Second Reading motion, while the Whip would be withdrawn from anyone who voted in only one of them.

Or would the media just carry on giving coverage to Nigel and Nadine for a laugh? Dare we hope that Nigel and Nadine might be asked what it was about the EU to which they could possibly object? A polite way of asking whether or not they knew even so much as the first thing about politics. Or, indeed, whether or not the media did.

There is only one way to find out.