Toby on Tuesday
'Gannex and Government'
No one in Yorkshire over the age of 60 will ever forget Harold Wilson, or
Lord Wilson of Rievaulx - in our constituency - as he became. He was
the canny Labour MP from Huddersfield who became Prime Minister from 1964 to
1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. His famous one-liners like “A week
is a long time in politics” and “You ask me what’s going on – well I’m going
on!” have long survived him. His trademarks were his pipe, although
in truth he was a relentless cigar smoker and the pipe only came out when the
cameras were on him, and his Gannex coat, made in Elland by his great friend
Lord Kagan who in 1980 went to jail for theft and false accounting.
Harold Wilson was never an effective Prime Minister as, like David Cameron, he
thought that once he had made a speech his job was done and no follow-up was
needed, but he was a truly brilliant manager of the Labour Party.
His one real achievement was to have kept Britain out of the Vietnam War while
maintaining good relations with Washington, something that Tony Blair and his
“heir”, David Cameron, should really have tried to emulate. In the
end, however, his heroic consumption of brandy did for Harold Wilson and he
stepped down as Prime Minister in 1976. In 1983 he went to the House
of Lords at Lord Wilson of Rievaulx in the heart of our constituency, with which
he claimed a family link. He died in 1995 but, extraordinarily, his
truly delightful poetry-writing widow Mary is still with us. Earlier
this month, on 12th January, she reached her 100th birthday and UKIP Thirsk and
Malton is proud to offer her many happy returns on her centenary.
Now of course where all this is leading is that, for reasons of party
management, on 5th June, 1975 Harold Wilson gave our country a referendum on
membership of the then EEC. Like David Cameron now, he offered
fundamental reform but in reality made only a few cosmetic adjustments, which
all sounds very familiar. The usual litany of big corporations, the
BBC, the Government machine and the CIA all weighed in and, by a two-to-one
vote, Britain opted to remain a member. And, for identical reasons
of party management, 41 years on David Cameron is also offering our country a
referendum which might take place as early as June too. In all of
this, Cameron is not so much the “heir to Blair” as the “heir to
Wilson.” To remind ourselves, before the General Election David
Cameron promised to opt out of EU employment laws and social policies, to
repatriate control of criminal justice, to disapply the Charter of Fundamental
Rights and to recover control of who could settle in the UK, all aims which have
now been dropped. And a further promise in the General Election
campaign was that Britain would never be called on to bail out the failing
Euro. Yet a month after the poll, he was obliged to pledge £850
million to bail out Greece and then three months later he was called on to pay
the balance of a £1.7 billion “prosperity surcharge”, based on Brussels’
previous estimates of the value of illegal services such as prostitution and the
drugs trade which he had previously described as “completely
unacceptable.” In effect David Cameron won the General
Election on a false prospectus, behaviour which in the private sector would have
resulted in his sharing the fate of Lord Kagan.
Of course the real reasons for David Cameron’s rushed referendum are that
both the EU’s migrant crisis and the collapsing Euro are now approaching their
critical stages. The EU’s supporters are trying to prevent reporting
of the consequences of both uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and
financial meltdown in France and Italy, but truth will out. For
Britain to survive, we need to be a safe haven and to protect ourselves from the
fallout of these self-inflicted disasters. We can only do this if
our country votes to “Leave” when the referendum comes. Of course
there will be disruption, but nothing like the disruption that we face if we
remain trapped inside the doomed EU ideology. In 1975 Harold Wilson
kept his party together and kept Britain inside the EEC. The same voices
which supported membership then, the same voices which sought unsuccessfully to
browbeat us into joining the failed Euro currency are now back in force to bully
us into a “Remain” vote. But here in Yorkshire we all know that the
project is unsustainable and that something better, something that is right for
our nation, must now take its place. And I suspect that even canny
old Harold Wilson, with his pipe, his Gannex coat and his Yorkshire shrewdness
would agree, for above all else he liked to be on the winning side!
Until next Tuesday!
Toby
