IS LORD ROSE, the former boss of Marks & Spencer, a double agent? Ostensibly the Tory peer is head of Britain Stronger in Europe, the umbrella group campaigning for a “remain” vote in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU; but he has been so hopeless an advocate of his cause, it appears as if he might be working for the other side.
He provided more evidence with his performance last week in front of the Commons Treasury select committee. Asked whether British workers’ wages would rise if we pulled out of the EU — and therefore we were no longer obliged to take all-comers from the other 27 states — Rose replied: “The price of labour will go up, so yes. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
Expect to see that quote, fully attributed, on the front page of leaflets circulated by the Brexit camp, once the campaign proper gets under way.
But if anyone might be embarrassed by this rallying cry — “Workers of Britain, vote to remain in the EU, or else your pay will rise!”— it will be the Labour party; and it is excruciating for its leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
This is a man who has for his entire parliamentary career been a vehement critic of the institutions of the EU. In 2011 he wrote: “The Eurocrats are presiding over an economic realignment at the expense of all the progress made by the working class over the past 50 years.” And only six months ago he said in a Labour leadership debate: “The EU . . . is damaging working class and workers’ interests across Europe.”
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But not long after that, in what amounted to a coup by Labour party members against their colleagues at Westminster, this man actually became their leader. He then found it impossible to form a shadow cabinet unless he agreed to continue with the Labour policy of uncritical support of Britain’s membership of the EU. Essentially, they sat on his head and wouldn’t get off until he gave in.
This explains the extraordinary decision of Corbyn not to raise the question of the UK’s membership of the EU at prime minister’s questions, despite the opportunity to do so on live television. There, he surveys a Conservative party riven on our future relationship with the EU, its leader fighting for his political life over the issue (like so many other Tory prime ministers before him) . . . and Corbyn can’t bring himself to mention the topic. Last week, when the Labour leader addressed the British Chambers of Commerce, he devoted precisely 56 words to the matter.
But at Westminster only seven of Labour’s 230 MPs have declared themselves in favour of leaving the EU. That is an extraordinary display of near-unanimity, especially given that a referendum is not a vote controlled by party whips.
Graham Stringer, one of that tiny group of Labour MPs for Brexit, explained it to me as follows: “Tony Blair completely shut down the debate in Labour over the EU. Since then the party have not thought about the issue at all.” He is not happy.
Perhaps it should cheer up Mr Blair. Under Ed Miliband and now under Corbyn, the Labour party has seemed bent on disowning everything its most electorally successful leader stood for. Yet over EU policy, at least, it is still sticking to the Blair doctrine.
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That is probably because this dogma preceded the Blair ascendancy: he had only reinforced it. As Stringer observes, this was all and only because of “one speech by Jacques Delors to the TUC in 1988”.
This was a year after Margaret Thatcher’s third electoral victory, when the Labour movement was in a state of morbid despair. That September the Socialist president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, travelled to Bournemouth and told the annual meeting of the Trades Union Congress that the delegates need have no fear that the rights of British workers would be swept away by a Conservative government: they would be protected and even enhanced by the European Commission.
“The test we must apply is: ‘who elected you? And how can we get rid of you?’
He was serenaded by the brothers as “Frère Jacques” — as one observer rather snobbishly remarked, “the only French song most of them knew” — and the head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Ron Todd, told delegates: “It is no secret that many of us have been sceptical of the European dimension. But, colleagues, in the short term we have not a cat in hell’s chance of achieving [what we want] at Westminster. The only card game at the moment is in a town called Brussels.”
This was a seismic political moment. It was also profoundly undemocratic. The Labour movement was declaring that since it could not get the policies it wanted via the ballot box in this country, it would rely on the unelected European Commission to impose such polices on an elected British government.
It was not a coincidence that in that same month, September 1988, the elected British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, travelled in the opposite direction to Monsieur Delors to deliver her Bruges speech, thundering: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.”
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Yet it is not just the Labour movement that had seen an increased role for the European Commission as a convenient — indeed essential — way of thwarting a British government it feared and detested. In the last referendum on our membership of what was then the European Economic Community, in 1975, Thatcher campaigned to stay in, happily wearing a pullover festooned with the flags of the member states.
The Conservatives were in opposition, having lost four of the previous five general elections, and were fearful of what the secretary of state for industry, Tony Benn, might do to British business via a mixture of nationalisation and even expropriation. They saw Brussels as offering the protection for commercial interests that Westminster would not.
In other words, both our main political parties, at different times, have supported expansion of the influence of the European Commission as a means of achieving their objectives at home when they have not been able to do so via the ballot box. This is almost pathological — and entirely unhealthy in political terms.
Given the abysmal prospects of Labour returning to power, it is on this analysis unsurprising that its shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, declared that the mass of regulations emanating from Brussels is “not a burden but a benefit”.
But in a democracy the point is not whether laws imposed by an unelected outside body are good or bad, or better or worse than what parliament might decide if left to itself — or who out of Hilary Benn and Jeremy Corbyn is right about whether Brussels is a friend or foe of the British worker. As Hilary Benn’s father, Tony, often said, the European Commission fails the test we must apply to those who have power over us: “Who elected you? And how can we get rid of you?”
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Governments at Westminster come and go; the laws they originate can be overturned by a successor parliament. Not so with legislation emanating from Brussels, whether enlightened or perverse.
Somehow, I don’t think this bothers Lord Rose.