The Chimes of Big Benn

Polly Toynbee is pretty much right. By far the biggest chance of British withdrawal from the EU would indeed arise from the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party.

It is hardly as if he has ever hidden his views. It is not his fault that no one in what regards itself as the mainstream media has ever reported those views.

Corbyn has suggested a renegotiation that of course he knows would be the exact opposite of that which would ever be brought back by David Cameron.

Cameron was elected to conduct that exactly opposite renegotiation, and then to put its conclusion to a referendum. He is going to do both of those things, and that is fine. 

Whatever arrangement with the EU has been renegotiated to the satisfaction of David Cameron will be horrendous from the point of view of British workers and of the users of British public services.

Submitted to a Special Congress of the TUC and to a Special Conference of the Labour Party, it will be rejected overwhelming, even unanimously, thus initiating the entirely correct campaign for a No vote in the referendum.

Big business and almost the entire Conservative Party will line up behind Cameron, since their only objection to the EU is the imaginary "Brussels red tape" that he will have pretended to have cut.

Very occasionally, there is constitutional theory stuff on the outermost fringes of Toryland. But right-wing intellectualism is the most Continental of concepts. It is not about such Bennite concerns to almost anyone on that side. They are just not like that.

The Government's latest assault on trade union funding is really designed to attack the only possible source of funding for the No campaign.

The economic, social, cultural and political power of the British working class, whether broadly or narrowly defined, cannot exactly be said to have increased since 1973.

Any more than Britain has fought no further wars since joining a body as successful as NATO or nuclear weapons when it comes to keeping the peace.

We had full employment before we joined the EU. We have never had it since. No job in the real economy is dependent on our membership. Or were trade with, and travel to, the Continent unheard of, because impossible, before our accession to the EU?

Not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher support that accession, oppose withdrawal in the 1975 referendum, and go on, as Prime Minister, to sign an act of integration so large that it could never be equalled, a position from which she never wavered until the tragically public playing out of the early stages of her dementia. "No! No! No!" was not part of any planned speech.

In anticipation of Cameron's Single European Act on speed, Labour needs to get its retaliation in first. The next Leader and Deputy Leader, Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson, by far the candidates most likely to take such a view, need to demand immediate legislation.

First, restoring the supremacy of United Kingdom over European Union law, using that provision to repatriate industrial and regional policy as Labour has advocated for some time, using it to repatriate agricultural policy (farm subsidies go back to the War, 30 years before we joined the EU, and they are a good idea in themselves, whereas the Common Agricultural Policy most certainly is not), and using it to restore the United Kingdom's historic fishing rights of 200 miles or to the median line.

Secondly, requiring that all EU legislation, in order to have any effect in this country, be enacted by both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or the other of them.

Thirdly, requiring 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.

Fourthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament. That would also deal with whatever the problem was supposed to be with the Human Rights Act.

Fifthly, disapplying in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs who had been certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons.

Thus, we should no longer be subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of people who believed the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and of Dutch ultra-Calvinists who would not have women candidates.

And sixthly, giving effect to the express will of the House of Commons, for which every Labour MP voted, that the British contribution to the EU Budget be reduced in real terms.

All before Cameron even set off for his renegotiation, never mind held a referendum on that renegotiation's outcome.

After all, which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, shipyard, steelworks or mine did it save?

If we needed the EU for the employment law that, since we do not have it, the EU is obviously powerless to deliver, then there would be no point or purpose to the British Labour Movement.

Far from preventing wars, the EU has done nothing to prevent numerous on the part of, at some point, most of its member-states, and not least this member-state.

It was a key player in, and it has been a major beneficiary of, the destruction of Yugoslavia, a process that events in Macedonia more than suggest is ongoing even after all these years.

The EU is now a key player in, and it seeks to be a major beneficiary of, the war in Ukraine, which is the worst on the European Continent since 1945, and which is a direct consequence of the EU's expansionist desire to prise a vital buffer state out of neutrality and into the NATO from which the EU is practically indistinguishable.

As one candidate for Labour Leader has been saying all along. Just as one candidate voted against the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty.

Thankfully, that candidate is going to win.