Candidate Connections

Rufus Hound has been tweeting, and using The News Quiz, with some valour in order to publicise the privatisation of the NHS. I do not see how or why he is any less qualified than anyone else to be a candidate for the European Parliament.

Nor is it the case that the NHS has nothing to do with the EU. On the contrary, its privatisation is in no small measure pursuant to EU competition law, and that is even before the monstrous Transatlantic "Trade and Investment" "Partnership".

But with Labour now committed to repeal of the Health and Social Care Act, and on course to vote against the TTIP, what is the remaining purpose of the National Health Action Party?

Arguments against the EU on the part of people who have any objection to anything that it does are not allowed to be heard in this country. That is why the threat to the NHS is not huge news, while the idiotic utterances of the UKIP clowns are news morning, noon and night.

20 years ago, the media decided that the likes of Peter Shore, Roger Berry and Bryan Gould did not make the entertaining television that was provided by the likes of Tony Marlow and Teresa Gorman.

So the three times as many Labour MPs as Conservatives who voted against Maastricht were treated as if they did not exist, and the anti-Maastricht cause was instead depicted as a peculiarity of buffoons.

During John Redwood's Leadership campaign, he was asked by Jeremy Paxman which of his supporters was going to be in his Cabinet. He had no answer, because the idea of such persons as Cabinet Ministers was so utterly absurd. Just as the idea of a UKIP Cabinet, or of a Cabinet including any of its nominally Conservative fellow-travellers, is utterly absurd today.

By contrast, several of the anti-Maastricht Labour MPs had already been Cabinet Ministers, and many more would have been in any Labour Government in the 1980s. At least one went on to sit in the Cabinet under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (having previously been Blair's Europe Minister), while at least one more would have done so if he had not voted against the Iraq War.

A generation later, and the real, serious, politically coherent opposition to the EU continues to be ignored completely. Nigel Farage and Godfrey Bloom are just funnier, as are their tribute acts on the Conservative benches. That is the criterion: public amusement.

Peter Shore's former election agent, John Rowe, was a No2EU candidate in 2009, as was the trade union counsel John Hendy QC, who in 2012 spoke on the same Durham Miners' Gala platform as Ed Miliband. But we now know from his published diaries that, until talked out of it by Hilary Benn, Tony Benn had also seriously considered being such a candidate.

That would have sent shockwaves through the Labour Party, in which Benn the Elder occupies a position unparalleled by anyone alive, and quite possibly by anyone in the whole of the party's history.

The media blackout of No2EU, which extended to the heavy editing of a Question Time European Election Special when a member of the audience dared to mention it, would have been completely impossible if one of its candidates had been one of the most famous politicians in the country, who has probably appeared on Question Time more often than anyone else who is still breathing, or indeed than anyone else at all.

Never mind the audience. His seat on that panel would have been assured. The Conservative defectors to UKIP and the BNP in Wales and the North would have been easily outnumbered by the Labour supporters who lent their votes to No2EU, and UKIP would not have done anything like as well as it did in the Midlands, either. Here in the North East, the third seat would have been No2EU, not Liberal Democrat.

Labour would have had to have abandoned any expulsions of people who had campaigned for No2EU, or even who had signed its nomination papers, simply because there would have been so many of them.

After all, it never expelled the Blairite ultras who used their newspaper columns to urge a vote for Boris Johnson. Nick Cohen, who he is no Blairite but who also took that view, is using his Observer column this very day in order to urge a Lib Dem vote in Hampstead and Kilburn. Dan Hodges's mother is retiring, so there is no trouble in Paradise.

If Labour cannot expel Nick Cohen for demanding the Lib Dem gain of a Labour seat at the 2015 of all General Elections, then it simply could not have processed the paperwork necessary to expel everyone who had campaigned the real, live, actual Tony Benn.

Oh, well, it was not to be.

But Leeds East has selected, to succeed the pretty sound George Mudie, the decidedly leftish Richard Burgon. Just as the Right now means Mike Kane, recognisably Labour Right, so the Left now means Richard Burgon, recognisably Labour Left.

Thus defined, the Left's capture of the seat of the Armstrongs père et fille ought to have been newsworthy enough. The capture of Denis Healey's old citadel is a triumph. Burgon should involve himself in the cause of justice for the British Chagos Islanders.