What’s going on (again)
The weirdest thing about British politics is the extent to which the average punter like me (and I certainly don’t claim any personal special skill or facility for doing this) can reach conclusions about – or see blindingly obvious logic in the implications of – events that happen, or crises that emerge, or policy decisions that get taken, or mistakes that get made, or even new laws and statutory instruments that come into effect … which (apparently) our MPs cannot.
I don’t wish to go back over old familiar ground more than I need to in order to make my point but let’s start by referencing Tony Blair and David Cameron.
Blair is most famous for the UK’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (in the days when he was sucking up to America so hard he was known as George W. Bush’s poodle); for letting in hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Eastern European EU citizens into the country when he could have delayed this by four years minimum if he’d wished to (like other countries did); for one day coming up with the ludicrous policy that petty criminals were going to be dealt with by being apprehending, frog-marched to an ATM cash point and forced to pay ‘on the spot’ fines – a notion that lasted all of 36 hours and was then quietly and hurriedly dropped the moment he discussed the concept with the first experienced person in the know he came across; and, of course, for effectively rendering himself a ‘lame duck’ by announcing the timing of his own departure – the fact that he’d stand down before the next General Election – and thereby consigning the country to endure the sad Gordon Brown premiership era.
Cameron, who at one stage appeared to describe himself as the Tory version of Mr Blair and think that was a positive move, will be forever damned for hatching the ‘Bedroom Tax’; for setting in stone the whole “In or Out” EU Referendum juggernaut in a panic when he thought that UKIP would steal enough votes from the Tories to let Ed Miliband and Labour into Number 10 Downing Street – and then finding out that UKIP’s appeal to the electorate was a fraction of what he imagined; and, worst of all, for wasting a year of his life thinking that he could go round the 27 other EU countries and wring from them enough concessions to be able to claim (Neville Chamberlain-style) that “He’d done a deal for Britain which would allow us to stay in a supposedly reformed EU super-state that from now on was going to be run along British lines and act sensibly” when in fact he’d done nothing of the kind and was fooling nobody – within the EU or the UK – throughout the entire process, as he then tacitly acknowledged by deliberately dropping all references to his ‘new deal’ during the subsequent EU Referendum campaign.
Let’s fast-forward to more recent times and whatever the Bill originally called ‘The Great EU Reform Bill’ (or something like that) is now officially entitled.
Furthermore, let’s leave aside for these purposes the £1 billion deal that Mrs May cut with the 10 MPs of the Northern Ireland DUP in order to give herself what is supposedly a ‘working majority’ in the House of Commons after her disastrous General Election result – I suggest that because it is so weirdly ‘out there’ that I come all over with a hot flush every time I’m reminded of it. Talk about short-termism and self-interest …
The sole purpose of Her Majesty’s Opposition is to oppose the Government or – let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of real life – to oppose it whenever ‘good men (or women) and true’ form the opinion that what the Government is up to is just plain wrong.
I ‘get’ that.
However, at the moment (it seems to me) Labour is flailing around somewhat. Despite the Jeremy Corbyn factor – because of the Jeremy Corbyn factor, some might argue, especially when, for reasons that the pundits are still examining the entrails of the 2016 General Election to get to the bottom of, somehow herds of the electorate made a late swing over to Labour presumably as a form of all-in-one protest at the prospect of five more years of Tory misrule – they somehow came within about 70 seats of getting back into Government.
Given where they started the 2016 General Election campaign from, that was almost the equivalent of Foinavon, winning jockey John Buckingham, winning the 1967 Grand National at odds of 100/1.
Tantalisingly close, in other words. With one small difference – Labour didn’t win.
Recently Labour – and others, including some Tory dissidents – having been attacking the Tory Government for the draconian manner it has been forcing through the ‘Great EU Reform Bill’ (as I’m still calling it), using what are known as ‘the Henry VIII measures’, and thus bypassing what those Parliamentarians who are traditionalists in principle, and/or short-term opportunists (and probably many of them both) on this occasion, regard as the proper scrutiny of new legislation by the Houses of Parliament.
In counter-argument the Government and its apologists have been pointing out that the 1945 Labour Government of Clem Atlee used the Henry VIII measures to get items such as the National Health Service on the statute books – but also, most pertinently in this context, ever since the UK joined the EU, hundreds of legislative measures per year from Europe have passed into UK law without any scrutiny at all, let alone of the proper variety … so why are all these supposedly ‘concerned and principled’ MPs belly-aching now?
My take on this situation is slightly different – and is not necessarily favourable to the Tory Government.
Mrs May and her Party would do well to think through the implications of the passage of the ‘Great EU Reform Bill’ through Parliament in the manner they have been doing it. I say that because I don’t think anyone in their camp has yet done this.
As, when and if the ’Great EU Reform Act’ (as it will then become passes into law), it’s going to a bit of a hostage to fortune for the next fifty years.
Why?
Well, because the next time Labour get into Government – with or without the support of the Lib-Dems and/or any number of other smaller parties if needs be – the very Tories who have pushed through the ‘Great EU Reform Act’ are going to be hard put to make any serious case that said Labour Government is doing anything against precedent or principle (still less against morals, ethics or the unwritten British constitution) when if ever it resorts to using the Henry VIII measures to get legislation putting its latest socialist, anti-capitalist, ‘spend and borrow’ welfare and pro-worker policies into effect onto the books.
After all, what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.
Lastly – and I didn’t want to blow my own trumpet on this one because plenty of UKIP and other Brexit-supporting MPs have been ‘filling their boots’ on the subject already – but I couldn’t let Wednesday’s annual address to the EU Parliament at Strasbourg by EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker slip by without comment.
It’s funny in this world how reverse psychology works so often and so well.
Mr Juncker is one of those political (or is it bureaucratic?) establishment figures that we all love to hate.
To British eyes, he’s the personification of everything that is wrong about the EU. Let’s just start with unelected; unaccountable; unashamed federalist and centralist; vastly over-paid and with ready access to mind-boggling unlimited expense accounts; arrogant and full to the brim with a sense of self-entitlement; cynical and dismissive of all aspects of democracy and individual nationhood. Need I go on?
Over the past three years the EU powers-that-be (and indeed all UK Remainers) must have been working overtime to persuade Mr Juncker to make as few public pronouncements as possible on the UK’s position and indeed the fact that it had decided to have an ‘In/Out’ Referendum on its membership of the EU.
Why?
For the simple reason that every time he touches upon the subject of the UK when speaking in front of a microphone, the instant effect is to add another 500,000 votes to the Brexit cause.
There has been a deafening silence from the UK Remain camp since Wednesday, whether they’re out-and-out hardliners who’d like a second Referendum and/or (as an alternative) to somehow bugger up the Brexit negotiations sufficiently that they amount, as near as dammit, to a not-departure from the EU … or those who are appeasers and say they accept the result of the Referendum but simply want to secure as soft a departure as possible.
They’ve been too busy taking Valium and holding their heads in their hands.
Because the realpolitik of the EU is very simple and almost black and white. The fact is that where it is headed – that is, if not to the graveyard – is straight to a federal dictatorship by unelected officials and power-brokers in which all notions of democracy, nationhood and national independence are irrelevant and of no consequence whatsoever.
None on the Remain side of the argument wanted to admit this during the Referendum campaign because – to them – democracy is far less important that personal and economic self-interest. In short, ‘the people’, the vast majority of whom by definition aren’t intelligent enough to know what is best for the country, clearly cannot be trusted to vote the right way.
End of message.
