LABOUR and PREJUDICE

This is an expanded version of a paper I presented to the Warminster Constituency Labour Party on June 18th 2016, following a screen of a Ken Loach film:

I’m a writer rather than a speaker and better, I believe, at writing than extemporising so, inevitably, I have written a paper. I hope you will bear with me.

It wasn’t difficult to anticipate that it would be tough to try to follow a movie by Ken Loach – who, by the way, turned 80 yesterday – especially one as penetrating as The Spirit of ’45. I was born in 1947, two years and six days before that young upstart Jeremy Corbyn. This means that I spent the first four years of my life under the only Socialist government this nation has ever enjoyed. I hope to live long enough to die under the next one.

The first nine months of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership have seen the party and the media dwell on the same academic questions that arose when he narrowly secured his nomination as a candidate, a year ago on Wednesday last. Is a Corbyn-led party electable? Shouldn’t it have a huge opinion poll lead by now? If the next election is to be in 2020, the answers to the questions are respectively: electable? yes of course; poll lead? no, it doesn’t signify. Commentators and party dissidents talk as if the manifesto is about to be launched and the election is in six weeks. Well, given the uncertainty surrounding the EU referendum vote next Thursday, perhaps it is. The political climate can turn on a sixpence. The events in Birstall last Thursday demonstrated that only too appallingly. But it’s always the case that politics is fluid. The truest thing Harold Wilson said – perhaps the only completely truthful thing he ever said – was “a week in politics is a long time”. Six weeks is an age. Four years is a very aeon.

So even if the next election comes in the next three or four months, trying to anticipate its outcome would be a fool’s errand, particularly considering the unusual circumstances. Who would be the Tory leader? Would the Tories implode? Would Labour implode? Would UKIP start to fade, its main ambition achieved? Would the Liberal Democrats decline further? Has the SNP bubble burst?

Whenever it comes, I believe there is one man who could wreck Labour’s chances more thoroughly than any other. His surname begins with C and he was barely known outside Westminster until last year. His name is Lynton Crosby. Australian by birth and a professional consultant to cigarette manufacturers and private healthcare providers, Sir Lynton (as he now is) was Cameron’s chief strategist at the 2015 general election. His fingerprints are all over the government’s and media’s attempts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Crosby’s useful allies are the Tory press. He has proved brilliant at feeding the broadcast media, especially the BBC, as it runs scared of John Whittingdale’s plans for it. But he finds his most willing creatures on the backbenches of the parliamentary Labour Party. These dupes he plays with extraordinary skill.

Lynton Crosby: The Road to Utopia

A good example of Crosby’s art was carried out with exquisite timing ten days before the local elections last month. At some point, Crosby’s office had unearthed a couple of tweets by a Labour MP, newly elected in May 2015. The tweets were written in 2014 by Naz Shah, a Moslem who now sits for the Bradford West constituency and since this February had been Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. Crosby’s office passed the tweets to Paul Staines, who blogs under the title Guido Fawkes. Staines made a story of them, a media furore ensued and Shah was held to typify the obvious anti-semitism of Corbyn’s take-over of Labour. She stood down from her post and was then suspended by the Party.

Well, I expect you’ll all have your own ideas about the matter, because you’ll all have read the offending tweets. Yes? No? Anybody read them? You see, that is a measure of Crosby’s triumph. Everybody readily accepted that a soon-to-be MP was an anti-semite – well, she’s a Moslem so of course she is – and that Labour, particularly its loony left, is riddled with prejudice. No need actually to examine the facts.

Naz Shah: stepping down

For the record, then, here is what Shah posted. In July 2014, she simply quoted: “Hamas: We are a legitimate resistance movement”. That December, she retweeted another quote: “Hamas should be removed from terror list” and added the source “EU court ruling”. You perhaps notice that there is no mention of Israel, of Zionism or of Jews. It shouldn’t need stating that supporting Palestine is not of itself anti-semitic. There was also – and this was actually cited quite widely – a graphic that imagines Israel relocated to the American mid-west. Naz Shah did not dream this up herself. She took it from the blog of an American academic, Norman Finkelstein. As you may surmise from his name, Professor Finkelstein is Jewish, the son of two Shoah survivors. In collaboration with a Palestinian scholar, Finkelstein is preparing a book entitled How to Solve the Israel-Palestine Conflict, his twelfth on the subject. This provenance casts a rather different light on the map's intent, I venture.

The Guido Fawkes weblog did not disclose the background of the graphic. It did, however, in reference to the tweets declare that “Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK”. This is simply untrue. Unlike the US and the EU (whose court ruling about which Shah tweeted was, by the way, later overturned), the UK does not deem Hamas itself a terrorist organisation. Only its military wing, which is called Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades, appears on the proscribed list.

Finkelstein's graphic, the satiric intent of which he says would be widely understood in the States

Pretending to make no distinction between Hamas and guerrillas who proceed under its banner is a stance taken by many of those people who did the same with Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA. Incidentally, there are two small Zionist organisations, Kach and Kahane Chai, that are not proscribed as terrorist in the UK but are so listed in the US and indeed in Israel. Avigdor Lieberman, who the other week was appointed Defence Minister in the most right-wing government Israel has ever produced, has been accused of former membership of Kach.

The row about Naz Shah boiled over with a characteristic intervention by Ken Livingstone who – in a gesture unacceptable in the present Labour Party – attempted to defend a colleague against unjust attacks. In a BBC London radio interview, Livingstone said: “Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism”. There seem to be people who have a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the name of Hitler and who instinctively assume that the speaker must be anti-semitic. John Mann MP, who hounded Livingstone up a stairway with several camera crews conveniently available while Livingstone was trying to take part in an interview over the phone, is evidently one such. Mann compared Naz Shah to Adolf Eichmann and called the graphic of Israel transposed to the States “a chilling transportation policy”. Mann, who is being investigated for his expenses claims, is always ready to pour oil on water that is troubling for Corbyn.

The aforementioned Norman Finklestein told Peace News that Mann was “dragging the Nazi Holocaust through the mud for the sake of … petty jostling for power and position". He said that Livingstone “maybe wasn’t precise enough, and lacked nuance” but was “as accurate as might be expected from a politician speaking off the cuff”. No doubt Livingstone was alluding to the Haavara Agreement of 1933, made between the Nazis and the Zionists, which provided for the resettlement of some 60,000 German Jews in Palestine over the following six years. Nevertheless, Livingstone too was suspended from the Labour Party.

Professor Finkelstein

The very notion that the left is in any way anti-semitic has no merit. Jewish people have been wedded to Socialism from its very outset; indeed with Marx and Trotsky one could argue that Jews own Socialism. Among celebrated Jewish Socialists were and are Rosa Luxemburg, Harold Laski, Ernst Bloch, Harold Rosen, Walter Benjamin, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Einstein, Ernest Mandel, IF Stone, Manny Shinwell, Ian Mikardo, Sydney Silverman, Gloria Steinem and Bernie Sanders.

Jeremy Corbyn’s immediate predecessor as Party leader, Ed Miliband, was in my view often treated by the media in an implicitly anti-semitic fashion – his voice, his alleged weirdness, the notorious unflattering photograph of him eating a bacon sandwich. Most overt of all was the disgusting attack by the Daily Mail on his father Ralph, “the man who hated Britain”. Again, the subtext was about his status as a Jewish migrant. It counted for nothing that Miliband had served in the Royal Navy during World War II, whereas Peter Dacre, the father of the editor of the Mail, had avoided military service by pulling strings.

John Mann accosts Livingstone

Panic in the Labour Party accounted for several unjust, knee-jerk suspensions. Jackie Walker, a Momentum vice-chair, was temporarily suspended for writing about what she called “the African holocaust”. Walker has both Jewish and African ancestry and her partner is Jewish. Momentum, the pro-Corbyn pressure group set up by veteran Socialist Jon Lansmann (who is Jewish), is being cast as the hub of anti-semitism. A Momentum member, Rhea Wolfson, was prevented from standing for the Party’s National Executive Committee via a fix led by the notorious Blairite revisionist Jim Murphy who, in Wolfson’s enforced absence, attacked her as a “factionalist”. Wolfson was the sole Jewish candidate for an NEC seat but the Murphy-ites preferred to smother the notion that Momentum is anything other than anti-semitic.

Lynton Crosby’s Machiavellian manipulation of the media and of grateful anti-Corbyn Labour MPs duly prevented the party progressing quite as much as it might have hoped in the local elections, especially in seats where there is a strong Jewish presence. Labour and its true supporters need to be better prepared for the next stroke that Crosby pulls. Watch out for Corbyn being set up for the blame if the country votes to leave the EU.

The Tories have always known how to fight dirty. Not for nothing did Theresa May, when Tory chairman (as she chose to be known), dub it “the nasty party”. Labour plays into this because its own particular talent is for self-harming. It’s instructive to examine the internal party report by Jon Cruddas, Labour’s Future: Why Labour lost in 2015 and how it can win again. The issue of immigration is frequently mentioned by Cruddas who repeatedly observes that Labour has lost those voters whom he calls “socially conservative”, identifying UKIP as the main beneficiary. Cruddas accounts the socially conservative as people “who value family, work, fairness and their country” but he doesn’t explain what that means or whether everybody else is by contrast, homeless or living alone, feckless and unemployed, bent on unfairness and either anti-British or pro-globalist. What he doesn’t explore is what he thinks Labour should do about immigration. If the implication is that Labour should metamorphose into a racist party like UKIP, I suggest that it will cease to be the Labour Party.

In the last phase of the referendum campaign, the leavers have played immigration as their trump card, or perhaps I mean their Trump card. There are many arguments that can be advanced concerning immigration that are very different from anything Nigel Farage would say. To begin with, we are continually told by the government that unemployment is coming down. On Thursday, it was announced that the number of people in work is at a record high. Evidently, then, the present level of immigration is not having the effect that is often claimed: that “they’re taking our jobs”. Of more concern is the argument that the NHS is overstretched and that there is a housing shortage. However, immigration doesn’t cause these problems even if it exacerbates them, and there is irony in the unarguable fact that both the NHS and house-building are unusually dependent on immigrant workers to keep going.

Cruddas supports the fallen in Downing Street

The nettle that Labour must grasp about immigration is that its extent is an urban myth. Ask people what percentage of the population in their area was born abroad and even those who welcome multiculturalism pitch the number far higher than it actually is. Official figures take time to process and the most recent are 18 months old. The percentage of the UK population that is foreign-born was then put at 12.8.

But of course the spread is very varied. Immigration in London runs at about 37%. In Wales, where UKIP gained seats for the first time this year, the percentage is 5.9. And in the North-East, it’s only 5.2 (the lowest in the UK), yet that region has one of the highest rates of UKIP support (nearly as high as Wales), which suggests that unjustified, imaginary fear is a significant factor in opposition to immigration and is exploited by UKIP; by contrast the place where UKIP gets its lowest support, save for Scotland, is London. (The percentage in the South-West, by the way, is 8.4).

Labour must point this out to its potential supporters who bend their ears about being “swamped”, in Margaret Thatcher’s unlovely term. I have found when canvassing that a fruitful line to take, when told that immigration is a “problem”, is to ask how specifically it proves a problem for that householder. Vanishingly few in fact have anything to offer other than prejudicial generalities. It isn’t rocket science to shame them very gently and respectfully out of their more unjustified claims, because few want to commit to stating baldly to your face that they just don’t like Poles or West Indians or Pakistanis. And if they do, then frankly UKIP is welcome to them.

Let’s remember also that it is not so many weeks since the British public, appalled at images of drowned children, were pressurising the government to accept many more refugees than it had hitherto permitted, an issue about which Jo Cox was passionate. Again, on the doorsteps, it helps to remind sceptics that the countries from which millions are now fleeing are the very same that our planes have bombed: Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. We have a moral duty that voters gainsay only if they are prepared to admit that narrow self-interest is their only concern.

The Cruddas Report regurgitates the attitude that has been widely expressed in the Party and beyond concerning the 2015 general election: that it was “a crushing defeat”, “catastrophic”, “a calamity”. Even more apocalyptic language is used on specific aspects of the defeat: “a tsunami of aspirant voters sank Labour … Labour is on life support in England and Wales”. This stuff is deeply offensive to people who have relatives or friends who actually (rather than metaphorically) are on life support, who actually have lost family in a tsunami. Such overstatement is childish and reductive and it solves nothing.

People who bemoan Labour’s recent electoral performance are apt to point to Tony Blair as the unbeaten leader. Blair indeed won three elections but with steeply declining support. In 2005, Labour was down almost 4 million votes on its 1997 total and had sacrificed 63 parliamentary seats. Although it lost the 2010 election under Gordon Brown, Labour gained more than a million votes on its 2005 total and, in 2015 under Ed Miliband, the vote increased by a further million in England and Wales (a lot more than the Tories gained), though this was offset by losses in Scotland. But the decline in Scotland was not down to Miliband or Brown. It began under Blair.

At the 2015 election, there was a swing to the Tories of 0.8% but a swing to Labour of 1.5%. The major losses were sustained by the Liberal Democrats, against whom the swing was 15.2%. That might have favoured Labour, but the distribution of votes happened to help the Tories most significantly in seats, especially those held by Lib Dems; this was Lynton Crosby’s famed decapitation strategy.

Labour did well in the local elections last month but you would never guess as much from the media or indeed from the Labour Party. Jon Cruddas is a typical example. He seems to think that selective comparisons “prove” things. So, for instance, he writes that “The 5th of May elections were the first time that a new leadership – of either the Labour or Conservative Party – has not made substantial gains in its first year of opposition”. But even in the chart that Cruddas reproduces you can see that 1,680 council seats were gained altogether under Ed Milband’s leadership, nearly twice as many as the Tories had won from Labour over the previous eight years of local elections. In other words, to make further substantial gains would have been little short of miraculous. It would have been unrealistic even had the party been led by Liz Kendall, who had absurdly declared, before the elections, that Labour ought to gain 150 seats, whereas many pollsters were forecasting a loss of that magnitude. In the event, Labour’s net loss was 18 seats, a very commendable result from such a high base, while the Tories, who needed to make up ground, shed a further 48.

In any case, you could just as well say “The 5th of May elections were the first time a new leadership has had to fight elections when half the parliamentary party is refusing to serve, many of them are pumping out anti-leadership propaganda on a daily basis and the BBC is unabashedly pursuing a policy of undermining the new leadership and questioning its ability to survive”.

Even in Scotland, the Holyrood elections could be seen as encouraging. Everybody focused on Labour coming third behind the Tories; nobody mentioned that Labour won 24 seats. As it managed to hold only one seat in the general election a year earlier, I would have thought that could be reasonably described as a recovery.

My overarching point is that results can be talked up or talked down. The Tories habitually talk theirs up. Why could Labour not bring in a revolutionary notion and talk theirs up too? Instead, Labour is in the dismal, habitual game of finding fault with itself. Cruddas says that Labour has become a “toxic brand”. Thanks, Jon. People who have never read or even heard of your report will hear and remember that phrase and it will stick in their minds as an historic “fact”, rather like Theresa May’s “nasty party”, long after the occasion of its use is dead and buried.

The murdered MP, Jo Cox

Corbyn has admirably answered those who reckoned he is unelectable. Confidently predicted by everyone to be another disaster, even a loss to UKIP, the Oldham by-election last November was taken by Labour with a strikingly increased majority. Two days ago – did you know this? the media were widely silent about it – there was a by-election in Tooting, Sadiq Khan's former seat, where his majority in the general election was 2,842 on a 70% turnout. Not surprisingly, the turnout on Thursday was down to 42.5%. Yet despite that, Rosena Allin-Khan more than doubled the majority to 6,357. With a vote like that, Labour has absolutely no fear of a snap election. Don't anybody DARE suggest that Corbyn is unelectable.

Though you might think opinion polling a discredited industry, Cruddas relies heavily on it to do his thinking for him. So many of the propositions put by pollsters either beg the question or offer self-fulfilling prophecies: “I am most likely to vote for the political party that puts my financial interests first” and “I am most likely to vote for the political party that knows the importance of supporting businesses to grow”. Here’s one that they missed: “I am most likely to vote for the political party that doesn’t spend all its time, effort and resources on rubbishing its own history”.

The report takes it as axiomatic that the media is not going to change, so Labour must accept it as it is. This is wrong on two counts. Media is changing. The influence of the print media and broadcasting is in clear decline and that decline will accelerate. But even if the status quo remained, there is plenty Labour can do about it. The report also takes it as read that the electorate gets mixed signals from Labour and that Labour’s “message” doesn’t “get through”, but these things are not a reflection of Labour’s performance, they are the result of mediation by the media. Because the media spends a disproportionate amount of time disparaging and belittling Labour, the Party has a daily disadvantage compared to other parties. Labour needs to deal with this not by adopting policies that belong to the Tories or UKIP, as Cruddas implies, but by a) systematically opposing, questioning and countering every lie, distortion and sin of omission that appears in the media; b) by being much more aggressive towards media outlets and towards rival parties; c) by being much smarter in using social media and in investigating other routes to the electorate.

“To win again, Labour will need to develop a new political economy,” says Cruddas. This is a strange response to his finding that the electorate broadly don’t know what Labour stands for. Changing the policy doesn’t make it any more widely known. What Labour needs to do is to address the fact that the naked bias in the media prevents Labour from being heard and, more specifically, from being given an unbiased hearing.

Cruddas says that Labour has to be “listening to the people, trusting their judgment, letting them decide the destiny of their country”. Quite right. The people spoke pretty damned loudly and flooded into – and in many cases back into – the Party on the election of Corbyn, who has introduced more grassroots participation in the party than it has ever had. So why isn’t Cruddas cheer-leading for Corbyn. And if Labour had done extensive polling of its supporters before on the question of EU membership, it might well have found a majority in favour of leaving. So does Cruddas believe that should have been the policy? I doubt it: he supports Remain. It’s an old saying but a sound one, and to be remembered as we vote on Thursday: be careful what you wish for.

The REFERENDUM – WHAT DO I KNOW?

Are you sitting comfortably, children? Then I’ll begin. All of you have, I am well aware, been eagerly awaiting definitive guidance on what to do about the referendum concerning our continued membership of the European Union next Thursday. Now is the time to grant you that guidance. There is still long enough for you to process it and take from it all that you need. So here it is. I shall not be adding to it and I shall not be taking questions. Anyone who wants to argue with any of it is naturally free to do so, but I shall not be engaging with such arguments. I am not in the business of explaining further to anyone who is incapable of paying attention. And I cannot be shamed or browbeaten into changing my analysis. But I warn you that the guidance is comprehensive and lengthy [3,000 words] and you will need to persevere if you have the interest.

The first thing you should know is exactly what the screenwriter William Goldman famously reported about Hollywood in his memoir of that town and that industry. It is so important and so fundamental that he wrote it in capitals and I shall do the same: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING [Adventures in the Screen Trade 1983 p39]. This is as true about politics in general as it is about movies in general, and it is as particularly true about the political future of Great Britain, in or out of the EU, as it is about Hollywood. So, as Goldman did, I shall write it again. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Of course a great many people think that they know rather a lot, even that they know everything, but they are deluded. Pay them no heed. If you needed examples of how little they know about the political future, just ask them if, twelve months ago, they anticipated that Jeremy Corbyn would be leader of the Labour Party (he secured his nomination as a candidate a year ago yesterday) or that Donald Trump would be the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States (he announced his candidature on this date in 2015). You would think, with these lollapaloozas of examples, such people would foreswear gravely informing us of what will happen. But they never learn, even though they all knew for a fact a year ago that either Manchester City or Chelsea would win the football premier league.

I am fond of quoting Harold Wilson’s maxim, so you may have noticed me quoting it before: “a week in politics is a long time”. It is true so often that what was the case on Wednesday is out of all consideration on Tuesday that you would think no one could possibly have the temerity to pontificate about what will happen in six months or two years or at the 2020 election. But they do so pontificate and with such hubristic self-satisfaction that you wonder how they get their pullovers over their heads. Well, pay no attention. Nobody knows what will happen. We could all be dead, even before the conference season is due to begin.

Now, many people – politicians, columnists, lay people and haunters of social media – have been telling us for weeks what “will” happen if we leave the EU. Some – fewer, but more than enough – have been telling us what “will” happen if we stay in the EU. By the laws of averages and probability, some of these statements will turn out to be reasonably correct, but only because shooting a lot of bullets greatly increases the chances of someone being hit, not because the speculators actually knew what would happen; because, as I say, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

In the Remain campaign, this presumption to prophesy the future if the Leave campaign prevails is characterised, reasonably enough and not only by the Leave campaign, as “scare-mongering”. It does seem very clearly designed to frighten people into voting to stay. Is it any wonder that such tactics do not commend themselves to everyone? As the opinion polls have suggested that the result may be becoming uncomfortably close, the Remain campaign have perhaps lost a little nerve or tried to soften their tactic. Thus the interview with the Prime Minister in The Observer (on Sunday last) generated the main headline: “Cameron: Brexit may put pensions at risk”. We are, then, entitled to assume simultaneously that leaving may NOT put pensions at risk. Would the newspaper have granted such a half-hearted headline to Boris Johnson and indeed would he have wanted it?

For most of the time, the Remain campaign have heavily leaned, dismayingly but not unexpectedly, on the doom scenario. They do it because it is easy and it does not require detailed exposition. From the first attempts by Harold Macmillan to secure British entry to what was then called the Common Market, pro-EU politicians have presented an unwavering attitude to the British electorate: “You just leave it to us; don’t you worry your pretty little head about all this European stuff; we know best”. That has been the demeanour of Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Jeremy Thorpe, Roy Jenkins, John Smith, John Major, Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and now David Cameron. What the present Remain campaign has conspicuously lacked is any kind of exposition of how being in the EU is a good thing. There has been almost nothing constructive and upbeat about the campaign; the only message has been: stick with us or the sky will fall.

Actually, there has been an exception to this negativity. Some of you will grumble that yes, of course I WOULD say this; but I play it as I see it and this is what I see. The only British politician who has talked about the actual advantages of being in the EU is Jeremy Corbyn. He has also talked, sensibility, judiciously and in a measured way, about the disadvantages of being in the EU as he sees them. He has taken a mature and – as people say these days – nuanced line on the referendum. But this has been nothing like sufficient for the drama queens in the Tory Party and the media. Though Corbyn has made dozens of carefully worded speeches about the referendum, only three of them have been made public to my knowledge. Reporting on those three has concentrated on the notion, spread by Lynton Crosby for the Tories and by his allies on the Labour backbenches, that Corbyn is “lukewarm” on the EU, that he is a “closet leaver” and that Labour supporters don’t know where the Party stands. The conventional wisdom becomes that Corbyn has “failed to get his message across”. Well, as Marshall McLuhan proclaimed half a century ago, “the medium is the message”. If the media get in the way of the message because reporters and commentators are only interested in who’s up and who’s down (presently in the Tory Party), the politicians cannot be blamed if they find that they are shouting into a void. Crosby knows this very well; it is all part of his plan to try to shift the blame onto Labour if Cameron loses the referendum.

Apart from eschewing the scare-mongering and name-calling that his fellow Remain campaigners have daily indulged, Corbyn is (as far as I am aware) unique in presenting himself not as a politician only concerned with the British interest or even – and few enough of the strong advocates do this – as one properly ‘communautaire’ (which is to say concerned with the European interest), but as a citizen of the world. Corbyn wants to reform the EU so that it protects the planet and its working millions. He is not in this racket to ensure that all the bankers and asset-strippers and speculators stay in London. Jean Monnet, the founding father of the Common Market, and the Treaty of Rome, which enshrined the articles that set up the market, were dedicated to the self-interest of the nations that made up one of the two wealthiest continents in the world. In that way, the EU was inward- rather than outward-looking. It has continued to be so. That is why it has been found so wanting when challenged by the great crises of the 21st century: the ailing economies of the weakest EU members and the plight of millions of refugees. European governments have fretted that their domestic interests will suffer and this has led them to make destructive and stupid decisions. This stupidity and destructiveness is evidently endemic. The EU is in dire need of comprehensive reform; it may be beyond saving.

What is more, consensus politics is in retreat, not only in Europe but right across the world, as witnessed by the astonishing successes of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the presidential primaries in the States. It is perfectly conceivable that within four or five years there will be highly ideological governments of both right and left in several of the EU member states, not least in France and Germany. Moreover, it has been suggested with some credibility that the spread of Islam across France has been so vigorous that within thirty years there could be a Muslim administration in Paris. Certainly, the possibility of supporters of Sharia law having the means of raising objection to liberal social measures – let alone any say in the framing of EU regulation – gives pause and makes the aspiration of Turkey to join the EU something to be resisted. One can foresee a Europe ahead that Britain might wish it had left when it had the chance.

For me, the issue for Britain and the world this year that is far more important than the future of the EU is the future of the United Nations. A new Secretary-General must be appointed soon and the courage and nature of that appointee will have a profound impact on the geo-political future of the planet. The UN is desperately in need of reconfiguration; its charter, now 71 years old, is no longer fit for purpose. I’d like Corbyn to bend his mind to that issue. I’d like to hear his proposals.

The UN’s methodology has remained fixed and consistent through its history. By contrast, the Common Market/EU has changed radically. Some of its attempts to change have been tested against public opinion, as will happen in Britain next Thursday. But the grave warnings that this referendum will be irrevocable and “a once-in-a-lifetime decision” are not borne out by precedent.

In 2005, the French President, Jacques Chirac, called a referendum on the European Constitution. Three days later, the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, held a similar referendum. Both the French and the Dutch voted against ratification. The EU reintroduced the greater part of the new constitution renamed as the Treaty of Lisbon which was passed by the member governments without offering it to any electorates, save that the Irish constitution required ratification. In the referendum duly held in June 2008, the Irish voted against the Treaty. The EU tinkered with the treaty and then the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, asked the electorate to vote again 16 months after the rejection. This time the ratification was successful. In another part of the forest, the Scottish voted against independence in September 2014, but already there is strong pressure for a repeat of the referendum. So remember the venerable saying about politics: “never say never”.

Irrevocability is another of the ways in the Remain campaign paint a frightening picture of chaos and collapse if Britain leaves the EU. Some of those who will play some part in Britain’s future relations with Europe have added to the doom scenario. The European Council President, Donald Tusk, reckoned the other day that Britain leaving the EU “could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety”. Oh, for Pete’s sake. An hysteric should not be appointed to a position of power. Donald Tusk is as undisciplined a prophet as Donald Trump. The world needs grown-up, judicious, steady leaders, not fantasists.

We should give no credence to these prophesies of doom. It is true that we are entering new territory. Nobody has been here before. But the new dispensation, whether in or out, has still to be managed by real-life politicians who stand to gain nothing from making difficulties where none needs exist. The sun will still rise and wages will still have to be paid. If Britain leaves the EU, accommodations will be made, threats will be rescinded and a new relationship with Europe will be constructed. It will not be the world of the world; it may, however, be the end of David Cameron.

The argument is put that leaving will make for uncertainty and that business hates uncertainty. Business will have to pull itself together. The rest of us hate those businesses that avoid their share of taxation. Perhaps leaving the EU will expedite measures to enforce tax collection.

In any case, political uncertainty is fertile ground, testing the mettle of politicians and public alike. Only a fool – there are plenty of those – would predict who will occupy no 10 Downing Street at Christmas. I hope it will be Corbyn. Certainly, if the electorate vote to leave, the prospect of a Corbyn government unfettered by EU regulation would be a bracing one. We must hope that the Labour Party will allow him to rise to the occasion.

I might be positively attracted to the Leave campaign were it not peopled – without exception as far as I can see – by chancers and shysters of the kind one would resist accompanying up a single floor in a lift. Its leaders have made outrageous claims about the present cost of belonging to the EU and about what they would do with the cash that wouldn’t actually be saved, including suddenly presenting themselves as the saviours of the NHS, the break-up of which institution many of them have hitherto espoused.

And lately they have been playing their trump – or do I mean Trump? – card, the Farage joker: immigration. This is the main reason given for the perceived support for leaving the EU among Labour supporters. The issue is also frequently mentioned in the internal party report by Jon Cruddas, Labour’s Future: Why Labour lost in 2015 and how it can win again. Cruddas repeatedly observes that Labour has lost those voters whom he calls “socially conservative”, identifying UKIP as the main beneficiary. What he doesn’t explain is what he thinks Labour should do about immigration. If the implication is that Labour should metamorphose into a racist party like UKIP, I suggest that it will cease to be the Labour Party.

There are many arguments that can be advanced concerning immigration that are very different from anything Nigel Farage would say. To begin with, we are continually told that unemployment is coming down, that the number in work is higher than it has ever been. Evidently, then, the present level of immigration is not having the effect that is often claimed: that “they’re taking our jobs”. More convincing is the argument that the NHS is overstretched and that there is a housing shortage. However, immigration does not cause these problems even if it exacerbates them, and there is irony in the unarguable fact that both the NHS and house-building are unusually dependent on immigrant workers to keep going.

The nettle that Labour need to grasp about immigration is that its extent is an urban myth. Ask people what percentage of the population in their area was born abroad and even those who welcome multiculturalism pitch the number far higher than it actually is. The most recent official figures are 18 months old. The percentage of the UK population that is foreign-born was then put at 13.1. But of course the spread is very varied. Immigration in London runs at almost 40%. In Wales, where UKIP gained seats for the first time this year, the percentage is 2.3. And in the North-East, it’s only 1.6, yet that region has one of the highest rates of UKIP support (nearly as high as Wales), which suggests that unjustified fear is a significant factor in opposition to immigration; by contrast the place whether UKIP gets its lowest support, save for Scotland, is London.

Labour has to point this out to its supporters who bend their ears about being “swamped”, in Margaret Thatcher’s unlovely term. I have found when canvassing that a fruitful line to take, when told that immigration is a “problem”, is to ask how specifically it proves a problem for that householder. Vanishingly few in fact have anything to offer other than prejudicial generalities. It isn’t rocket science to shame them very gently and respectfully out of their more unjustified claims, because few want to commit to actually stating to your face that they just don’t like Poles or West Indians or Pakistanis. And if they do, then frankly UKIP is welcome to them.

Let us remember also that it is not so many weeks since the British public, appalled at images of drowned children, were pressurising the government to accept many more refugees than it had hitherto permitted. Again, on the doorsteps, it helps to remind sceptics that the countries from which millions are now fleeing are the very same that our planes have bombed: Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. We have a moral duty that voters gainsay only if they are prepared to admit that narrow self-interest is their only concern.

When it comes down to it, I think that it is only proper to bring moral considerations to the way one votes. Self-interest is not always a simple procedure. More often, benefit comes over the longer term by taking consideration of everyone’s interests, not just one’s own. I would have voted gladly to remain in the EU if I thought that anyone additional to Jeremy Corbyn presented a cogent and humanitarian reason to do so. But I have been profoundly dismayed at the antics of the last few weeks. I shall not make a final decision until actually inside the voting booth. But, as I said in my letter to The Guardian the other day, I incline strongly to spoiling my ballot paper. This is a very different gesture from abstaining and staying at home. I am sorely tempted to write across my ballot paper: “Each campaign as vile and destructive as the other – neither deserves my vote”. Many more people at the count would look at my ballot paper than any just marked with a cross. It is a legitimate exercise of one’s civic duty.

STILL STANDING

As the smoke begins to clear after days on end of noise and confusion, stifling heat but precious little light, Gordon Brown has come through his backbenchers’ meeting and remains in Downing Street, horribly bloodied but remarkably unbowed. If the media are to be believed, this has been June’s only important story and yet there doesn’t need to be a general election until next May. A sense of proportion appears conspicuous by its absence from this saga.

If a week is a long time in politics – probably the only entirely true thing that Harold Wilson ever said – then eleven months is an eternity. The political climate and the electoral context will be different by next May, perhaps markedly different. None of us can know what the intervening months will bring. Few of us had any inkling a month ago that the overriding media story about politics through the second half of May would concern MPs’ expenses. Events, dear boy, events will occur and balances will shift. Although psephologists love to project the results of one completed election onto another still to be held, the exercise is wholly idle. The next election will be held in an unpredictable future.

The commentariat decided long ago that the Tories would win a general election in 2009 or 2010 and this conclusion brooks no discussion. Shorter memories than mine ignore that Labour was supposed to win the general election of 1992; even on the night, the BBC “called” it for them. Sir Robert Worcester of MORI, no less, “called” the 2004 US election for John Kerry after the polls closed and we went to bed happy that Bush was out. The Tories won the European elections handsomely in 2004 but lost the general election in 2005. Politics does not stand still, even overnight.

The media’s obsession with individual politicians – Westminster’s equivalent of celebrities – rather than policies seriously distorts the way that the electorate understands what is at stake in elections. I would like to have heard or read some debate on European issues ahead of the Euro-elections and some more on local issues ahead of the council elections but the media have neither time nor space for such matters, being swallowed up by speculation and the mad joy of crisis coverage.

Reporters will object that they are only reflecting the perfervid atmosphere in Westminster but this is disingenuous. Parliamentarians conduct a great deal of debate and evolve a great deal of policy that is never covered at all or only covered en passant in the media. Correspondents are much more interested in plotters and loudmouths in the Westminster village than mature, steady and reliable members who are, as the prime minister likes to put it, “getting on with the job”. And politicians are by nature liable to be attention-seekers. Those whose off-the-record gossip or on-the-record outspokenness makes them favourites of the media will inevitably enjoy the limelight. But they are not necessarily any more representative than the random vox pops that now pass for public comment on television news bulletins.

What’s more, politicians are inevitably influenced by the media. When headlines and broadcast packages are whipping up a frenzy, it is hardly surprising if MPs let it get to them. The frantic pace of the rumour mill is bound to turn heads but you take it seriously at your peril. The so-called “sources” that are credited with so much Westminster gossip are impossible for the reader or viewer to judge precisely because their opinions are unattributed. Given that there is no identifiable source, what is to stop the reporter making it up?

That the media are obsessed with who is up and who down rather than anything more substantial is simply demonstrated. Here are June’s successive main headlines from The Guardian and The Observer in the editions that reach us in the west country: “Brown insists he won’t step down as election rout looms” (June 1st); “Beleaguered Darling faces reshuffle axe” (2nd); “Labour’s day of resignation” (3rd); “Brown hangs on, for now” (4th); “The smooth assassin” (refers to James Purnell, 5th); “Bloodied Brown vows: ‘I will not walk away’” (6th); “Labour fears EU poll disaster will spark fresh crisis for PM” (7th); “Judgment day for Brown” (8th).

It’s noticeable how little in these headlines is genuine news and how much idle – and sometimes plain wrong, like the Darling line – speculation. It is hardly to be wondered at if a prime minister turns away from such febrile stuff and ignores it altogether – at which point, of course, the gossipmongers will say he is in denial.

I do not deny that Brown is a highly political animal with a taste for plots and black propaganda and low cunning. Of all the resignation statements to come out of this saga, the one that is perhaps most damaging for thoughtful observers is that of Jane Kennedy today, saying that she was repelled by the negative briefing and attempts to destabilize that emanate from Downing Street. The Damian McBride affair confirms that there is substance to this charge.

The prime minister would do well to rise above this game. One of his strengths has been that he is not Blair in the sense that he is not a snake oil salesman devoted to spin and gesture politics, something that also handily distinguished him from Cameron. But lately he has allowed himself to be persuaded to make some gestures that sit on him so awkwardly. It’s not merely the rictus smile on You Tube. It’s also the wholly unpersuasive pretence of being concerned about Jade Goody and Susan Boyle. Brown should leave this kind of thing to the more simpering breed of populist.

Meanwhile, the daily issue is: can he survive? Absurd question. Of course he can. He doesn’t, as far as we are aware, suffer from a terminal illness. He is relatively young and evidently has enormous reservoirs of resilience. So then: will he survive? Time will tell. Why bother with predictions no more well-founded than punts on the Grand National?

But look at the next general election from another perspective. If Labour does lose, no one will be able to account it a shock. Indeed, it will need to be a defeat of much greater resonance than those we have seen for the pundits to make much of it. From a moderately bloody defeat, Labour will recover and renew itself.

But if Labour wins it will be one of the greatest reversals of fortune in modern politics. The European elections have inured us to the unprecedented so we ought to understand that something extreme could happen again. Who is to say that David Cameron’s luck will not turn soon? He has set off on a course that could do his party great damage in his decision to ally himself with a rogues’ gallery of right wing and neo-fascist groupings in the European parliament. What will he do if the two new BNP MEPs apply to join?

For the Conservatives to lose the next election would be much more disastrous for them than it would be for Labour. It would mark a fourth defeat running and taint Cameron as the fifth failed leader in succession. And it would be against the most propitious set of circumstances an opposition party has faced at least since 1997. The challenger will not have the government quite so on the ropes as this for a long time to come. No wonder they are baying continuously for an election now. They may already sense that things could get better for Labour. To use the inflated language of contemporary political coverage, if the Tories lost they would be “finished”: the party would implode and there would need to be a realignment on the right. With the BNP and UKIP dug in at the European parliament, here would be a truly dangerous situation. Perhaps for all our sakes we should hope that Labour does indeed lose the next election.

Meanwhile a summer break lies ahead. The hysteria will wane. The government may get good news on the economic front. Mandelson might be persuaded from his reckless determination to sell off parts of the Royal Mail. The new cabinet could prove to be less ham-fisted than the last one. James Purnell, Hazel Blears and Caroline Flint will soon disappear from the public memory whereas moats and gardening expenses may linger longer. And things will happen. As far as Gordon Brown is concerned, there is still everything to play for, especially if he can steer the public’s attention towards policy where, it should note, there is still a resounding vacuum in the Tory’s programme for government. As the BBC's Nick Robinson is apt to observe, though more with an eye on prolonging the supposed “leadership crisis”, it’s not over yet.

FARAGO and FARAGE

Mr Cameron calls confidently for a general election. Opposition leaders do that, you may remark, only when they are comfortably ahead in the opinion polls. They also demand that the national leader debate with them on television. If Gordon Brown had the wit, he would offer to debate with Mr Cameron only on condition that Mr Cameron, to whom the extreme right wing parties are the greater threat, undertake to debate on television with the leaders of UKIP and the BNP. You may rest assured that Mr Cameron would not agree to do so. Such an offer would expose the essential emptiness of Mr Cameron’s challenge.

But Mr Cameron should be careful what he wishes for. There is much evidence of the electorate being in a mood of “a plague on both your houses, including your second homes and those you have flipped”. The Sunday Times hazards that more than half of the sitting members will have been replaced (“swept away” is how it is characterised) when we know the results of the next general election: 325 is the curiously precise figure. Labour currently has 349 members taking the whip and there is no suggestion that all of those “swept away” will number among them: far from it.

Long before that election, on June 4th to be precise, there will be elections for the European parliament and for many local councils. The commentariat is increasingly convinced that these elections will hit Labour very hard – though Labour cannot proportionately fall a great deal further – but will also deplete the Conservatives and to a degree the Liberal Democrats (who, remember, were overtaken by UKIP in the popular vote last time round).

This is a dangerous moment. The liberal intentions of the Weimar Republic were swept away on popular sentiment for a break with the past that the National Socialists seemed to represent for Germans in 1933. Thereby, Adolf Hitler came to power and Europe was in the grip of cataclysm from which it would not begin to recover for a quarter of a century. It must be contemplated that UKIP or an unholy alliance of UKIP and the BNP may be in a strong position after the June elections, perhaps holding the balance of power on – or even (unthinkably) running – councils. Stranger things happen.

So Mr Cameron’s summer 2009 election would not necessarily produce the unassailable Tory majority that he fondly imagines. Perhaps the Commons intake of BNP and/or UKIP members would be so great that the Tories could only take a ruling role by going into coalition with either or both of these parties. In such a case, the Tories might need to ditch Cameron in favour of some leader more amenable to the extreme right: Eric Pickles, for instance. There’s your nightmare scenario, then: Pickles as Prime Minister, Nigel Farage as Foreign Secretary, Nick Griffin as Home Secretary and – oh, let’s see – Sir Fred Goodwin as Chancellor. Bring it on, Dave.

If it is because he is mindful of these possibilities that Mr Cameron has re-opened the Conservative candidates list and invited political greenhorns (not his phrase) to offer themselves, he is making a terrible mistake. We have seen how carefully-vetted, long-term members of the Tory party – and the other established parties -– have nonetheless treated the rules with cavalier disregard. How much more unmanageable the Tories would be if their big tent were to embrace a whole new self-chosen band of delegates with nothing undisclosed beyond their outsized egos. That way madness lies.

For an alternative script is being written: Get Me into Office – I'm a Celebrity. In this one, the likes of Esther Rantzen, Richard Branson, Joanna Lumley, Simon Cowell and Susan Boyle sit in a cabinet of National Government and solve all our problems by the application of star-power common sense. Don’t imagine that this is any less horrifying than the prospect of the BNP hosting – rather than merely being invited to – Buckingham Palace garden parties.

Celebrities entertaining political delusions are nothing new. Back in the 1960s, the crimper Raymond (said Raymonde) Bessone, known to one and all as Teazy-Weazy, decided he was going to stand as a Liberal candidate in the general election of 1964. Bernard Levin cordially invited him onto That Was the Week That Was to give a political account of himself and proceeded to destroy him with a ruthless despatch that took the breath away. Teazy withdrew from the candidates list the next day, understanding (as modern celebs may not do) that discretion is always the better part of valour.

In these days, celebrities are actively encouraged on all sides to imagine that they are omnipotent and all-knowing. They are not these things. Politicians – at least in this country – are moderately able to acquit themselves with a certain conviction because they toil long and hard in the foothills of political fame before becoming recognisable politicians. If celebrities don’t understand that, they should be made to do so. Jeremy Paxman should submit them to the Levin treatment: “So, Ms Rantzen, do you favour the structural, the well-specified or the reduced-form model of macroeconomics?”

What’s more, the bona fides of these arrivistes should be scrutinized at least as closely as are those of the parliamentarians to whom they consider themselves so morally superior. I’d like to hear, for instance, Sir Alan Sugar and Carol Vorderman harried into full disclosure of their financial arrangements before they get to put themselves forward as candidates. If the electorate are willing to allow themselves to be bedazzled into elevating people “off the telly”, they should have the opportunity to see all the feet of clay that lurk beneath the red-carpet gowns of celebs just as surely as in the publicly subsidized footbaths of MPs.

Meanwhile, the right wing parties are no whited sepulchres either. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, has been unguardedly bragging of how he has got through £2million of expenses and allowances while sitting as an MEP in the Union from which he campaigns to withdraw the UK. This money has been spent, he reckons, on “the best of causes”. Meanwhile, members of his party who sit in the European parliament have a juicy record of dipping their hands in the till, including one jailed and another soon to be tried for money laundering. The BNP have had their collective collars felt too. Their elevation would be so constructive for relations with nations where young fanatics go to be trained as suicide bombers, wouldn’t you say?

The two embarrassments caused this last week by the BNP member who sits in the London Assembly ought to give people pause. At a moment when the committee charged with securing England as the venue for the football World Cup was discovering the thinness of its non-white composition, the BNP assemblyman turned up, perfectly legitimately, at the launch. His presence obscured the message that the committee wanted to send to the world. The same tribune of the people was given to understand that an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party would shortly follow and he made it known that he would be taking his leader, Nick Griffin, as his guest. More outrage and diplomatic discomfort. But this is the price of democracy. If the people are going to elect undesirables to represent them, those means by which they have traditionally carried out such representation cannot now be denied to them just because the establishment doesn’t find their participation comme il faut. The electorate need to have made clear to them all the implications of the way they vote. It’s no good using your ballot paper to make a protest and then regretting the result of your gesture. If you want to punish Labour or the Tories or the Lib Dems by voting Green or Workers Revolutionary Party, you may well find that your effective abstention from the important question has only succeeded in putting into the Commons a bunch of airheads and fascists.

THEY’RE ALL AT IT

Performing the onerous task of owning The Daily Telegraph from their tax haven in Monaco, the multi-millionaire Barclay Brothers must contemplate their organ's continuing revelations of footling expenses-fiddling by parliamentarians with an air of comfortable superiority.

I sent the above paragraph as a letter to The Guardian on Monday but it wasn’t used. I can hardly complain: the paper has given me a good run lately. But it’s interesting that the suggestion that dubious morality about money is not confined to Westminster is unwelcome in the press. Having worked as a journalist for many years, I know well enough that expenses on what used to be known as Fleet Street have always been a source of abuse. Media people will respond that it’s the misuse of public funds that signifies here but misuse is misuse and money is money whatever its source and the media were no less disdainful of the way bankers rewarded themselves before they received support from the government.

The press barons have never been slow to avoid paying their dues. Rupert Murdoch contributes no tax to the British government and employs an army of accountants to minimise doing so elsewhere. Lord Rothermere, owner of The Daily Mail, contrives to live in tax exile even though his main residence is in Wiltshire, a remarkable piece of juggling (his newspapers are registered in Bermuda and the wealth he inherited from his father was not subject to British penalties because Rothermere Sr lived under the rather less draconian tax regime in force in Paris).

Nevertheless, the mother of parliaments has had good reason to cluck over her unruly children lately. And the way that the story has played has been instructive and rather unexpected. Public anger has seemed to grow and spread in response more to the stories about Tory misuse of public funds than to those featuring ministers and Labour backbenchers. As some have noted, it is more the nature of the claims – for swimming pool maintenance, cleaning Douglas Hogg’s moat, garden landscaping and other instances of gracious living in the shires – than the sums involved that has got up the noses of voters.

Worse for the politicians (and especially Tory ones), the party activists are up in arms. There is a suspicion taking root that the minority parties – by which is meant UKIP and even the BNP – will pick up support among the disaffected, perhaps significant support. Lord Tebbit, no less, has all but advised Tory voters to switch to UKIP, specifically urging them to “boycott” the three main parties in the European elections, as a protest against “misbehaving”. Tebbit is being disingenuous. Everyone knows that all three main parties are a good deal more communitaire than is he; he is merely using the present scandal as a pretext for not toeing the party line.

To his credit, David Cameron dealt swiftly and toughly with Tebbit, making it clear that any more overt disloyalty would lose him the party whip. Indeed, faced with a dangerously developing situation at a time when his party’s opinion poll lead was beginning to look unassailable, Cameron has been decisive and clear. In contrast, Gordon Brown has been elusive and ambiguous. Once more he has let Cameron pre-empt him so that any prime ministerial response of equal force and conviction looks what it is: tardy and derivative. At a moment when the Tories seemed suddenly vulnerable, Brown ought to have come on swift and deadly. This may have been his last moment to seize the initiative before the local and European elections. Vincent Cable’s devastating joke from eighteen months ago – “the House has watched transfixed the transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean” – produced at the time the blackest scowl ever seen on Gordon Brown’s face in the Commons. As the months have passed, the thrust has only seemed more apt and more earned. This gives no pleasure to someone like me who doesn’t want a Tory government. Why can’t we instead have a rapidly insurgent anti-Capitalist party like the one in France that is threatening to overtake the ineffectual Socialist opposition and destabilise the authority of President Sarkozy?

A BALLOT with YOUR NAME ON IT

The trouble with democracy, of course, is that it empowers all the idiots. The democratic ideal, so beloved of such great political visionaries as … um … George W Bush, is apt to deliver governments representing such movements as, for instance, Hamas, leaving the pro-democrats fulminating against what they perceive as anti-democratic governments elected by democracy.

At the end of last week, ballots were organised in ten Labour and Liberal Democrat-held constituencies across England to test the demand for a nationwide referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. There is some doubt as to the reliability of this as a test of public opinion. The ballots were the work of a campaign called I Want a Referendum, a somewhat parti pris convenor for a vote on the desirability or otherwise of a referendum. There was not much evidence of campaigning done in these constituencies, save by the pro-referendum party. There was certainly a variable shortfall in the number of ballot papers issued in the various constituencies, so that a significant proportion of the electorate was actually disenfranchised.

The organisers didn’t let a little thing like an obvious lack of democracy prevent them from claiming that 88 per cent of those who voted did so in favour of a referendum. How far such a figure is verifiable is swathed in mist. The result is hardly more credible than that in favour of Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Russian presidential elections. Why would a man whom the electorate knows not at all win a landslide? Simply because a not-so-benevolent despot told the people to vote for him.

Just as it would be interesting to know if one per cent of the Russians who voted for Medvedev have the remotest idea of what he stands for (other than Putin by another name), so I would love to know how many of those who voted for a referendum in Britain have read the Lisbon treaty or know what is the constitutional status of referendums. Come to that, I wonder how many of the objectors have the 2005 party manifestoes to hand. “You promised a referendum” is a mantra that may not survive close examination. Proposing to have a referendum or saying that it is your intention to have one is not a promise. Any parent knows that “you promised” is a cry that generates more heat than light.

The suspicion remains – it’s a big suspicion and you know just what it is but it rarely gets mentioned – that large numbers of Britons don’t want to be in Europe at all. They cannot marshal any sort of coherent argument as to why they don’t. It’s a mixture of xenophobia, nostalgia and fantasy. They think if we leave we’ll somehow be more prosperous, less regulation-ridden and better able to refuse entry to economic migrants and asylum seekers. Some of them think it will mean fewer Pakistanis and West Indians “taking the social”, but the people who think that are even more stupid than those who think leaving Europe would be a smart move.

The I Want a Referendum party is of course merely a front for the I Want to Leave the EU party. They are a mix of little Englanders, UKIP and BNP supporters, free-lance racists and general malcontents. They have no programme for Britain outside Europe because they haven’t thought that far; they don’t actually think, they just resent. Somebody representing I Want a Referendum should be obliged to explain objectively just what the economic and social consequences of leaving the Union would be. The electorate is entitled to know in which lower division an unaligned Britain is going to find itself as the global power arrangement reshapes. I suspect Russia will eventually find an accommodation with the EU and perhaps even join it; maybe Israel too. The world will divide into the USA, the EU, China, India and Islam with Britain either along with Australasia and the Far East in a somewhat compromised outer circle or down in the basement with Africa and South America. The Union-quitters had better have a convincing argument to say I am wrong.

Of course, the pro-Europeans have only themselves to blame. Britain has always been the least communitaire member of the EU. The other members must be fed up to the back teeth with our constant requirement of special considerations, vetoes and waivers. What is more, the Europhiles have never made any effort to share the European ideal with the home electorate, rather as though they feel the matter is too complex and sophisticated for the short attention span of hoi polloi. From Macmillan and Heath to Blair and Brown via Roy Jenkins and George Thompson, British politicians have never deigned to attempt to expound their desire for membership. With newspaper proprietors who have never lived in Europe ranged against them, all newspapers reluctant to give more than token space to what is perceived as an unpopular and dull subject and dissent in their own parties (all parties), they have retreated to a state of superior indifference to question or objection.

The pro-Europeans understandably don’t want a referendum that they will certainly lose. They will not lose it because any measurable proportion of the electorate has coherent objections to the Lisbon treaty but because Europe has never been sold or even explained to the electorate. Personally, I would very much appreciate a clear and coherent statement of what Europe wants to achieve and why Britain benefits from being part of that desire but we look for such reassurance in vain. Gordon Brown seems no more likely to give us that than did any of his predecessors. Or perhaps the rather farcical ten-constituency vote will turn out to put some long-needed backbone into the European apologists.