Labour Party: sleepwalking into the EU

Labour people are idealists which is why they are also naive as well as why the leadership has decided to campaign for Remain without any consultation of the party members many of whom are either opposed to membership or haven't the foggiest idea what their party is doing.

Naive idealism accounts for the fact that the party is campaigning for a very different EU to the one that hits its own supporters so badly. Jeremy says the EU is far from perfect, Alan wants to stay in a "reformed"EU others think that staying in will enable Britain to reform it.

Fat chance.The EU has been impervious to Britain's proposals except for the single market which we urged to benefit the City of London not its people.The creation of the EURO has moved Britain to a dog house somewhere on the periphery ,our former allies in Eastern Europe are turning fascist and the Franco-German block still dominates. The only likely reforms are more centralisation in a vain attempt to make the Euro work.

Meanwhile we're asking our supporters to vote for something which hurts them harder than any other section of society. It takes their jobs because of the de-industrialisation produced by the growing trade deficit.It hits their wages because the influx of immigrants keep them down. It increases their cost of living because of French agricultural protection and it hits their well being because economic demand and profits are sucked out of the country.It taxes them to pay the costs of belonging ,of building marble palaces in Britain and of keeping Europe's perambulating Parliament shutteling between Brussels and Strasbourg They see all this. Even if their party doesn't

Essentially Labour's support of the EU springs from our deep inferiority complex. We're so depressed and divided that we,be come too assume that we'll never again win power in Britain so that any gains in respect of labour and trade union legislation job protection or social improvements must come from Brussels.Our self confidence has gone so that we can only depend on crumbs from the Brussels table

There's no spending that comes from Brussels we can't improve on ourselves and no legislation that we can't do better for ourselves but because we've relegated ourselves to the role of a permanent opposition  we've abandoned the prospect of rebuilding Britain and rebalancing our economy when Labour comes in. This will require state aid and investment for industry,state help for exporters,,control of immigration to concentrate on the skills we need and an end to the tax fiddles throughly Luxembourg and Ireland the EU encourages.

Labour's not thought about any of that because it's begun to assume that it will never hold power anyway so why bother. We only need to control our own destinies if we know what to do with them.