By Ian Wood
My wife and I live in St Mawes and so our MP is the Labour Party’s Jayne Kirkham. Jayne, I have no doubt, is a dyed-in-the-wool European. Like virtually every Labour MP, she is more in favour of European integration that she lets on. And of course it must be difficult being a Labour politician representing a thoroughly traditional area like St Mawes as well as younger, less conservative communities in Falmouth and Truro. But it might all be different at the next election. We might, conceivably, be staring a very right-wing government in the face.
I wonder if Jayne herself, and all her parliamentary colleagues, will wish that they had made what would be an overwhelmingly popular, sensible, economically beneficial, realistic, anti-extremist and above all INEVITABLE announcement that moving alongside the European Union is something they want to do.
They won’t do it, mostly because Sir Keir Starmer, a man of iron discipline who is well aware of previous changes of direction under his leadership, has said they won’t. They should. They won’t. And this is all the more mysterious because they are already doing the difficult bit, the moving alongside bit. The journalist Ian Dunt has pointed out that the Product Safety And Metrology Bill, which has embarked on its journey through Parliament, declares that if UK products meet European standards they will automatically be taken as meeting our own. This is highly significant. It is alignment pure and simple, and product manufacturers will find it extremely helpful.
These musings have been set off by the feature in the last issue of Cornwall for Europe News showing the Opinionometer at a recent stall in Falmouth. The trend towards European reintegration is as ever overwhelming in that town. It was, I recall, just as overwhelming a trend the day there was a stall in St Mawes! The Never Rejoiners are now a consistently small minority, perhaps below twenty per cent nationally. But they are noisy and effective. They trade in fear. What the Opinionometer shows is that there is now a new fear in town.
President Trump is unleashing a terrifying wave of destabilising nonsense in America that is knocking off balance the entire country. Trump thrives on chaos. A fearful people are a malleable people. People in the UK are not yet affected by what Trump is doing, but we can see it is bad and possibly mad. Will the fear of something similar to Trump happening over here drive even the followers of Nigel Farage into the embrace of the European Union? Possibly. But: does the presidency of Trump make actually rejoining the EU more likely for the UK? The Opinionometer asks the question, and the answers strike a far more uncertain note. Rejoining still seems a distant prospect to many people.
Meanwhile, Starmer seems to be happy doing good and worthwhile things, and then not taking the credit for them. He just wants to avoid an entirely fraudulent commotion generated by proven liars. You know what would stop all this nonsense? Proportional representation. It would kill off the populist right by putting them in a fairly small box. Farage may be about to benefit hugely from first past the post. Starmer should go for PR, too.
But I’m now going off-topic and have gone on for quite long enough.
