The One Nation Society

On this twentieth anniversary of the death of John Smith, the One Nation Society seeks a broad alliance between the confidently urban and the confidently rural, between the confidently metropolitan and the confidently provincial, between the confidently secular and the confidently religious, between those confident in their liberal social values and those confident in their conservative social values. It seeks that alliance across all ethnic groups, across all social classes, and across all parts of the country: One Nation.

The basis of that alliance includes the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. It includes workers’ rights, with the trade unionism necessary in order to defend and advance them. It includes John Smith’s signature policy that employment rights must begin on the first day of employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked.

That basis includes community organising. It includes profit-sharing and similar arrangements: not “shares for rights”, but shares and rights. It includes the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services, especially following the loss of the Co-op Bank precisely because it was not itself a co-operative, but was merely owned by one.

That basis includes consumer protection. It includes strong communities. It includes fair taxation. It includes full employment, with low inflation. It includes pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability. It includes publicly owned industries and services, national and municipal, setting the vocational training standards for the private sector to match.

That basis includes local government, itself including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, the accountability provided by the historic committee system, and the abolition of delegated planning decisions.

That basis includes the State’s restoration of the economic foundation of the civilised and civilising worker-intellectual culture historically exemplified by the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, by the brass and silver bands, by the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, by the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, and so on. In order to restore a civilisation in continuity with it, that culture must be rescued from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

That basis includes the Union, the Commonwealth, and the ties that bind these Islands, recognising that only social democracy guarantees the Union and that only the Union makes possible social democracy in these Islands, so that the erosion of social democracy is the most powerful of separatist arguments, despite the fact that the separatists could not possibly deliver social democracy, and very largely would not wish to deliver it, in the entities to which they aspire.

That basis includes economic patriotism, itself including both energy independence and balanced migration. It includes the recognition that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

That basis includes an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

That basis includes the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

That basis includes the organic Constitution, with the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes. It includes the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom in the face of all challenges: from the United States or from the European Union, from Israel or from the Gulf monarchies, from the Russian oligarchs or from the rising powers of Asia, from money markets or from media moguls, from separatists or from communalists, from over-mighty civil servants and diplomats (including in the intelligence services) or from over-mighty municipal officers, and from inappropriately imported features of the economic and political cultures of the Old Dominions. This list is not exhaustive.

That basis includes the understanding that the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom is, with municipalism, the only means to social democracy in the territory that it covers, and is thus the democracy in social democracy. It includes, no less than the previous point, the understanding that only social democracy, and not least the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, is capable of safeguarding that sovereignty, national and parliamentary, and that democracy, parliamentary and municipal.

That basis includes conservation and the countryside, especially the political representation of the rural working class. It includes personal freedom through superb and inexpensive public transport, ultimately free at the point of use. It includes academic excellence, with technical proficiency, refusing to compromise on either.

That basis includes civil liberties, with law and order, including visible and effective policing, and including an end to light sentences and to lax prison discipline through a return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction.

That basis includes fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. It includes a strong financial services sector, with a strong food production and manufacturing base, and with the strong democratic accountability of both. It includes a total rejection of class war, insisting instead upon “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”.

That basis includes a large and thriving private sector, a large and thriving middle class, and a large and thriving working class; all depend on central and local government action, and with public money come public responsibilities.

That basis includes very high levels of productivity, with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance. It includes a base of real property for every household, to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. It includes an absolute statutory division between investment banking and retail banking.

That basis includes a realist foreign policy, itself including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else. It includes British military intervention only ever in order to defend British territory or British interests. It includes a leading role on the world stage, with a vital commitment to peace, and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction.

That basis includes the subjection both of Islamism and of neoconservatism to an approach defined by our proud history of equal opposition to Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

The One Nation Society exists in order to debate and research these issues.

Founding Signatories:

Nic Dakin MP, Member of Parliament for Scunthorpe;

Jim Dobbin MP, Member of Parliament for Heywood and Middleton;

David Drew, Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Stroud, former Member of Parliament for Stroud (1997-2010);

Roger Godsiff MP, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath;

The Right Honourable George Howarth MP, Member of Parliament for Knowsley;

David Lindsay, Director of the One Nation Society;

Iain McKenzie MP, Member of Parliament for Inverclyde;

John Mills, Co-Chairman of Business for Britain, Founder and Chairman of JML;

Ian Paisley MP, Member of Parliament for North Antrim;

The Right Honourable Keith Vaz MP, Member of Parliament for Leicester East, Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

International Patron:

Professor Bryan Gould CNZM, former Member of Parliament for Southampton Test (1974-1979), former Member of Parliament for Dagenham (1983-1994).

Intended events include Peter Shore at 90; One Nation, One Struggle: Ascension Island, the Chagos Islands, the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar; The Case for Public Ownership, including in terms of national sovereignty, the Union, and support for fatherhood; Towards A Realist Foreign Policy; Learning from Germany: The Mittelstand, Regional Banking, Workers’ Representation; Neither Washington Nor Brussels, especially in view of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership; Bringing Social Democracy to the City of London; The Role of the Radical Traditions within the Organic Constitution; Catholic Social Teaching and British Social Democracy; and British Social Democracy, the Ulster British Culture, and the Ulster Protestant Tradition.

Intended projects include shaping the social economy, forming a realist foreign policy, restoring local democracy, reasserting the pre-eminence of Parliament, responding to climate change without compromising on well-paid employment and its benefits, renewing respect for working-class culture, and sharing with the rural working class the urban and the ethnic minority experiences of identifying and promoting community leaders.

theonenationsociety@yahoo.co.uk

@OneNationSoc

A Small Family Business, by Alan Ayckbourn, National Theatre; reviewed by Ian Oakley

This Alan Ayckbourn revival is great fun: it is well cast, funny but also with a darker underpinning of exposing widespread crookedness.

When A Small Family Business was first performed in 1987 it was taken as a critique of the ‘Greed is Good’ era.

The fact that it feels so relevant and timely in 2014 tells you how embedded a culture of greed, corruption and double dealing has become in British public and private life.

If you doubt that just think of the lies over the Iraq War, the phone hacking cover up and the massive insurance frauds for ‘whiplash’.

The plot revolves around Jack, an honest, hardworking (in the phrase beloved of our not so hardworking politicians) family man, who takes over the running of his family’s business and is shocked to find out what is going on.

What particularly shocks him is that the double dealing and crookedness is not being done by strangers, but his own family and in-laws.

As the play progresses he is increasingly sucked into the very corruption that he sort to prevent.

The only things that date the play is the teenager daughter reading a book, whereas today she would be on her smart phone, and the fact that the family business is a furniture manufacturer; to reflect today’s deindustrialised world it would have to be a haulage firm instead.

The portrayal of some of the less conventional marriage arrangements is as funny as ever, but probably more familiar to a generation brought up on television docusoaps and BBC 3 series such as My Dominatrix Wife.

The play makes great use of the Oliver Theatre’s revolving stage. As the play opens, we see the front of a normal detached house and the set revolves to reveal the goings on within.

There is not a weak performance in the cast, but the standout actors are Nigel Lindsay in the main role as Jack and Matthew Cottle as a creepy, but highly effective, private detective.

As I left the theatre, I could not help but reflect that with the laughter there was a serious underlying point that was more effectively delivered with humour than it would have been with tragedy or outrage.

I also reflected that this is but one of seventy plays that Alan Ayckbourn, a staggering achievement that I cannot think that any other major dramatist comes close to matching.

I just hope that Sir Alan has many more plays in him.

Defining Conservatism, by Arthur Gwylim

Political language has become detached from objective meaning. Conservatism is now synonymous with liberalism.

Yet the two are radically different.

If we are to retain a conservative tradition, then we must re-establish a coherent and accurate definition.

This is surprisingly difficult. What is its foundation? The answer suggested here is both radical and simple.

Conservatives place great importance on conserving the best from past generations.

They mourn the passing of the shopkeeper, the farmer and bus conductor. They distrust their replacements: the supermarket, more supermarkets, and the train manager.

They seek law and order; they are patriotic, but not nationalistic.  They defend the family.

They are sceptical of the state, but also of the market: they don’t want their lives run by politicians or by big business.

They believe in fairness, but do not like discrimination in the name of that fairness.  They respect others, but hate the demand for rights at every opportunity.

These may be mere instincts, in no way amounting to a coherent strand of political thought.

There are of course those who are merely sentimental. But to dismiss all such views as being little more than a regretful sigh over the rising of a lesser sun would be intellectual cowardice. Beneath these views is a coherent foundation.

Liberalism’s foundation is the individual: his freedom; his desires; his rights.

Much of modern socialism in Britain has its foundation in equality through state intervention.

By focusing on what he can demand from the state or from other individuals, people are encouraged to look inwards, replacing a man’s relationships with his peers with the state.

The liberal’s campaign for individual choice destroys his community.

By putting himself first, he will act to the detriment of others: the relationship between him and his neighbour weakens.

This creates a vacuum for state intervention: to do what the community used to do. Individualists end up with bigger government.

The UK government now spends the same proportion of GDP as it did just before the Thatcher experiment, despite each of her predecessors promoting her economic legacy.

Since 1945, it is only in this economically liberal climate that it is acceptable to nationalise a bank.

Whether one follows liberalism or socialism, the experiment ends up with a bureaucracy doing for people what they can do for themselves.

They need not rely on each other and so have no need for loyalty, self-sacrifice or charitable love.

Such attributes are outward looking, while the relationship with the state or relationships within a market economy are inward looking.

The man bred on feeding from the big state will ask what that state can give him. The man bred on feeding from the market will ask what the market can give him.

If selfishness is not conservatism’s basis, then we must look to its opposite.

The foundation of true conservatism then has to be this: love.

Love is meant in a broad sense: outward looking; selfless; charitable, familial and brotherly as well as romantic. Ultimately, this means putting others first.

This may confuse the left winger who sees himself as the ideologue of love.

But there is no love in putting all dependency in the state.  There is no love in giving bureaucrats and politicians god-like power.

It will inevitably prompt sniggering to think of a starch-collared; tweed clad Colonel Blimp basing his politics on love.

However, love is neither soft-nosed nor inherently left wing. Conservatism’s foundation in love is best illustrated by its fundamental principles.

The most obvious element of conservatism is that it is intergenerational. Why do conservatives so often look backwards?

Conservatives respect those who have gone before: they do not always know better than their predecessors; they are not inherently more enlightened.

Their social contract is one with other generations: those passed and those to come. So the question could just as easily be put: why do conservatives look so far forwards?

Conservatives are trustees: they inherit a society from their forefathers; they preserve it and improve it for their children.

This is a form of love. It is a refusal to ‘live for today’ and an avoidance of the temptation for each generation to return to ‘year zero’.

It is an act of collective love when a generation sacrifices its own comfort for the good of its successors.

Today, it is never experienced. If it was, our attitudes to our natural surroundings would be radically different.

This trusteeship demands conservatives protect institutions.

Be they state organs, constitutional concepts, or other bodies, they are greater than any one man or government.

They are the anchors at the bow and the stern: keeping us fixed to the wisdom of our fathers and the wellbeing of our children.

An institution is not bound to market interests or profit and should be quite distinct from the state.

There is always a danger of traditionalism, but progressivism passes without criticism.  In the last thirty years, we have despised our constitutional heritage, tearing down idols such as parliamentary sovereignty, the unitary state and the absence of enshrined human rights.

Yet we find our constitution breaking apart: devolution is uncertain and unstable; the EU has more power than most understand; accountability seeps away like spilled water through the floorboards.

Our politicians have squandered our inheritance and have shattered the delicate balance. This balance, it turns out, carried more wisdom than we realised.

The greatest of these institutions is our country itself. Conservatives are patriotic.

The country is inherited, its history, its legends and its shame.  It unites and causes people to look to their common interest.

The conservative is more apt to see themselves in the context of a hundred generations before and the generations yet to come.

It also makes people more aware of their culture.

Liberalism and statelessness threaten us with a ‘cultural free market’ of sorts, sacrificing cultural beauty and its quirks on the altar of the most dominant cultural forces.

Love for a country and its culture can defend its people against this. The French for instance, do this better than most.

Another element of conservatism is community.

With an ideological scepticism of excessive state and market, it follows that the conservative prefers community.

Conservatism sees the best society as the one which stands by itself: without being engineered by either the state or by ‘market forces’. Such a society is not composed of self seeking individuals or automatons.

Community encourages and embodies a form of love. Very simply: “love your neighbour as yourself”.

It is when you have this love, or respect, that people see wrongs in their true light: harm against themselves.

When you do not love a person, it is easy to put them in the hands of the state.

It is easy to be kind and nod with approval when they are given subsidies rather than a job, or allowed to follow some dubious moral choice: it does not affect you.

But when you love someone, you see the enforced idleness that will kill them ten years early; the horror of addiction and the desolation of emotional damage.

Only when this love exists are we moved to act, we personally look after our weak.

This is why conservatives believe in a strong approach to law and order: the community must be protected.

Crime is not viewed as something which merely does harm to individuals.

It is a refusal to show respect; the criminal deems himself more important than the community: he is content to harm others to get what he wants.

It is both an exalting of his self and a refusal to give to others, which are ultimately the same thing: a lack of love.

“The law” can be seen by the conservative as having an almost spiritual significance. He is deterred by the very prospect of breaking the law.

It can be explained by the everyday remark: “well if we all did that, where would we end up?”

But beneath this lies the very wise realisation that community can only survive where restraint is exercised out of respect for others.

It is also why conservatives believe in the family.

Family is the first instance of love that the fortunate will experience.

It teaches us not to think of ourselves; to love and to be loved. It is the first community. It is also our first trust: we inherit from our parents; we maintain and improve; we pass on. We live out these ideas in the family, and then in our community.

The family is not simply something to which conservatives have a sentimental attachment; it embodies precisely the values that are fundamental to conservatism: love; respect; selflessness; trusteeship and community.

The big state, small state dichotomy has failed because it arrives at the same liberal consensus. True conservatism has the power to break this orthodoxy.

It may be surprising to speak of conservatism as based on love, but it is consistent with its principles and is radical enough to realign left and right wing conservatives against the liberalism dominating British politics.

Bank-Created Credit, by Bryan Gould

For those of us who have argued for a long time that orthodox monetary policy is fundamentally misconceived, a significant milestone was achieved this week.

In an important paper published in the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin*, three Bank of England economists have acknowledged that the overwhelmingly greatest proportion of money in the economy is created by the banks out of nothing.

This finding comes as no surprise to that growing number of economists and others who have recognised, as a consequence of simple observation, that this is the case. 

But it will no doubt be hotly denied, in the face of all common sense and evidence, by those (including bankers themselves) who, for reasons of self-interest or sheer ignorance, continue to adhere to the classical view that banks are simply intermediaries between lenders and borrowers.

The great British public is itself the victim of the confusion and obfuscation that has surrounded this issue for generations.

Most people, if asked, will tell you that what the banks do is to lend out to borrowers the money that is deposited with them by savers. 

On this analysis, there is nothing particularly special about banks; they simply charge for the service they provide in bringing savers and borrowers together.

The truth, however, now conceded by the central bank, is very different.

The banks enjoy a most spectacular and surprising monopoly power.

They alone are able to create new money - vast quantities of it - by the stroke of a pen or, in modern terms, by pushing a key on a computer keyboard.

When a bank lends you money, it simply makes a book entry that credits you with an agreed sum; that sum represents nothing but the bank’s willingness to lend.

The debt you thereby owe the bank does not represent in any sense money that was actually deposited with the bank or the capital held by the bank.

Nevertheless, when it arrives in your account, and you use it to spend or invest, the overall money supply is increased by that amount.

The only attempt to regulate the volume of new money created by the banks comes through raising or lowering interest rates - a power exercised not by government but sub-contracted to - you’ve guessed it - another bank.

This means that, in practice, the only limit on bank lending is their willingness to lend to applicant borrowers at whatever the current rate of interest may be.

The size of the market which provides the huge profits enjoyed by the banks is, in other words, decided by the banks themselves and their assessment of, and willingness to accept, the degree of risk involved.  

There will, in the search for the ever higher profits to be made from lending more and more of the money which they themselves create, always be the temptation to lend more than is prudent in their own interests or desirable in the wider interest - and that is how the global financial crisis came about.

The astonishing feature of this monopoly power enjoyed by private companies seeking profits for their shareholders is that their decisions as to how much and for what purpose money should be created, made with virtually no external control or influence to restrain them, constitute by far the single greatest (and potentially distortional) influence on our economy.

The Bank of England paper has now laid all of this out for public inspection. 

The authors do not quite have the required courage of their convictions, since they attempt to downplay the significance of their conclusions by using the operations of a single bank to illustrate the process of credit creation, and thereby fail to register the immense scale, when looking at the banking system as a whole, of what they are describing.

Even so, the policy implications of what they say are immense.

Our macro-economic policy at present virtually limited to attempting to control the money supply as a means of regulating inflation.

But since the volume of money is a function of bank lending and reflects nothing more than the banks’ search for profits at whatever the current interest rate may be, it follows that the whole thrust of current policy is entirely misplaced.

The banks, in deciding for themselves how much, to whom and for what purpose they will lend, will always give priority to lending for house purchase since it requires by far the least effort, and is the most secure and profitable form of lending.

Can we be surprised that, as a result, those wishing to borrow for business investment are at the tail end of the queue while house prices - inflated by the volume of new money going into the housing market - go on rising inexorably?  

It is bank-created credit that provides the major stimulus to asset inflation in the housing market, with all of its deleterious economic and social costs, while at the same time diverting essential investment capital away from where it is really needed - in the productive sector of the economy.

If we wish to restrain inflation, why do we not target the most obvious cause, rather than burden the whole economy with deflationary interest rate hikes?

And if we want a stronger real economy, why allow the banks the exclusive power to decide that the new money should go to housing rather than productive investment?

Our current monetary policy is based, in other words, on a complete misunderstanding of the role of money and its impact on economic activity.

Our economy is awash with money, but it is neither the economically neutral phenomenon - interesting only because of its impact on inflation - that classical theory describes, nor does it provide the stimulus to new productive investment in the real economy that it could and should do.

Monetary policy need not be just a rather ineffectual tool for controlling inflation.

It has the capacity instead to be a major stimulant and facilitator of real productive investment if we understand and use it properly. 

The banks’ monopoly of the power to create money prevents us from doing just that.

*Money Creation in the Modern Economy, by Michael McLeay, Amar Radla and Ryland Thomas.

A Referendum: Refounding the Case for Europe, by Kevin Meagher

The case for Europe needs completely refounding. We can start with a referendum. 

It was a choice my 19-year-old self made without a second thought. Keep on canvassing the night before the 1994 European elections or go home and revise for a crunch exam the next day.

As an instinctive pro-European, carrying on fighting the good fight was a no-brainer.

Revisiting my decision two decades on, I think I would have prepped a bit harder for my ‘European policy and policy-making’ paper instead.

I still recognise the benefits, but I’ve grown tired of hearing the same tendentious propagandising for the EU.

Weary of hearing calls for reform that never seem to lead anywhere.

Sick of the waste, incompetence and drift and wondering why no-one ever seems to be able to change direction.

Particularly the European Parliament, which lacks the basic dynamism even to change itself, ending, once and for all, the costly shuttle backwards and forwards between Brussels and Strasbourg.

Now we are just weeks away from the dismal, quinquennial ritual of elections to the European Parliament. 

There will be no discussion about lofty geopolitics. No mention of how the EU deals with the Russia-Ukraine crisis. No remedy for the crisis of youth unemployment scarring large parts of the continent.

No mention, either, of the consumer rights, clean bathing water or urban regeneration that Europe has brought us.

Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local is never truer than when it comes to the European elections, used, as they are, as a proxy for the state of British politics.

A chance for voters to have a pop at the Tories and Lib Dems, cock a snook to Labour and flirt with UKIP, safe in the knowledge that it is all a harmless, consequence-free act.

All the power in the EU sits with the unelected Commission and the remote Council of Ministers - and that will never change.

The European Parliament is like one of those soft play areas in McDonalds, a place to keep the kids entertained while the parents talk.

MEPs are to all intents and purposes, invisible. Many would ruefully concede this.

Nobody knows who they are or what they do. Even I had to double check the current Labour group leader is.

To be fair, they are hobbled by the wretched regional list system, an utter disaster in terms of public accountability.

The voters are presented with a list of 10 people they have never heard of, can’t choose between, and know next to nothing about.

And if any MEP quits, the next, unelected person on their regional party list takes their place without a vote. It’s enough to make the appointments secretary to the Soviet Politburo blush.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The EU is, and always has been, the preserve of a rarefied elite. Centrist politicians. Business leaders. And Eddie Izzard. It couldn’t be more remote from the people if it tried.

For me, the recent Clegg-Farage debates brought it all home.

Nick Clegg, a former European Commission official, the apotheosis of the rootless Eurocrat, making the same, stale managerial arguments for the EU that so many centrist politicians before him have done over the years.

As a result of Clegg and other pro-European panjandrums’ taking British public opinion for granted, it is hardly surprising that voters see Europe as an unwanted and unhelpful appendage to their lives.

Less than a fifth of UK voters ‘tend to trust’ the EU, with two thirds actively mistrustful of its schemes, according to the latest Eurobarometer findings.

Yet calls for a referendum on Europe from the Labour side of politics are not (in many cases) to get us out of the EU.

Rather, it’s an expression of frustration, borne from the self-evident fact that Europe remains a putrifying sore at the heart of British politics.

This is why the case for Europe needs nothing less than refounding in an in/out referendum.

The onus is on fellow pro-Europeans to show why the European ideal – co-operation between nations that have found themselves homicidal enemies twice in the last century – still matters.

To move beyond Clegg-ite blandishments designed to curtail debate and to throw this hot potato into the laps of the British people to decide. 

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism, reviewed by Ian Oakley

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was a remarkable figure.

He was a cowboy, a soldier, a policeman, a historian, a naturalist, a big game hunter, an intellectual and much, much else. He is a rebuke to the bland careerist politicians that we see on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book though is not just a biography of Roosevelt, but rather a joint biography of him, William Taft - his successor as President - and a group of remarkable journalists, who helped both Roosevelt and Taft reform the United States in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.

The work is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s first book since her blockbuster work about Lincoln and his cabinet. It is a worthy successor; she is a master of her material and tells the interwoven stories with pace and telling detail.

One of the first things the book does is rescue poor William Taft from the ranks of forgotten Presidents. He achieved much for a one term President and the man of whom he most reminded me was President George Bush Senior.

They were both decent high achievers who made it to the Presidency; who were better at governing than politics, and who paid the price for it in defeat when seeking re-election. Both were overshadowed by charismatic predecessors, and both had tough, ruthless wives who aided their careers.

The other striking fact I took from the book was how much the Progressive Era in American Politics achieved, especially in light of the gridlock of modern day Washington.

It is impossible to imagine the modern Republicans advocating the attacks on trusts, the regulation of food safety, and the proposal for a federal income tax, that both Roosevelt and Taft championed. On the other side you had Democrats calling for restrictions in federal spending, not something you would see today.

The journalists that aided these reforms are another admirable and diverse group that would probably get nowhere today in the era of celebrity gossip and partisan news channels.

The most remarkable of them all was Samuel McClure, who began in grinding poverty in Ulster and followed the American Dream to found his own magazine and help transform America.

All in all this is a tremendous book.

I would recommend it to anyone interested in American History, and to anyone who isn’t but who enjoys a great story, well told.

My last thoughts on finishing the book was that I could not help but note that such was Teddy Roosevelt’s lasting fame that though the work should have been called Roosevelt and Taft, but poor President Taft got elbowed aside, probably on the basis nobody would have heard of him.

Such is the harshness of history and of the publishing industry.

Labour Should Embrace A More Sceptical Approach To The EU, by Richard Cotton

Labour has always been the driving force for constitutional reform and democratic advance, from Kier Hardie’s support of the suffragettes, to the Attlee Government’s abolition of plural voting with the removal of the property based business vote and university constituencies in 1948.

Prior to that, businessmen who were also graduates had as many as three votes.

In 1969 it was a Labour Government, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

In 1975, it was a Labour Government that, in the teeth of strong Tory opposition, granted the British people the right to determine their future in or out of Europe with the first UK wide referendum on EEC membership.

It was, of course, a Tory Government which took Britain into the EEC without a referendum.

Since then there have been nine further national and regional referendums, eight on devolution issues, three in Wales, two in Scotland and one each in Northern Ireland, the North East and Greater London, together with the UK-wide referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) in 2011.

In addition, under the Blair Government there were 37 local referendums on the constitutional arrangements for local government (elected mayors, etc).

Indeed, until now only twice has a Tory Government supported a referendum, once in 1973 on the constitution position of Northern Ireland, and the second time in 2011 on the Alternative Vote, but that was only conceded as part of the Coalition Agreement.

Historically, it was always Labour that championed the right of the British people to determine constitutional issues, just as it was Labour that was historically opposed to the EEC, which has now morphed into a neoliberal concept known as the EU.

It is difficult to understand why the party opposed the EEC on the grounds that it was a ‘capitalist club’ yet know embraces the EU, which really does enshrine neoliberalism into law: read the Single European Act.

The EU is now embarking on secret negotiations known as the Transanlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will give all power to global corporations and destroy our cherished NHS.

The party says that the EU is not an issue that resonates on doorsteps, and that is true. But issues related to the EU often do.

For example the way in which house prices in central London have rocketed as a result of overseas buyers buying new homes and leaving them empty. Denmark negotiated an opt out on foreign ownership of homes as a result if which you have to be a Danish citizen in order to own property in Denmark.

People are also concerned about the free movement of capital and labour, not because they fear outsiders, but because they fear that free movement benefits the rich and powerful and not communities like the car workers in Hampshire whose jobs were outsourced to Turkey with the aid of an EU grant.

It is, to say the least ,odd that EU membership means that our immigration policy privileges ‘EU citizens’ over West Indians, Indians or New Zealanders. Yet it is often those who are Eurosceptic who are accused of being racist.

How can it be right that Scotland gets to vote on their constitutional relationship with the rest of the UK, yet the UK as whole is denied a referendum on our constitutional relationship with the EU? Before anyone says we had such a referendum in 1975, that was on the EEC not the EU.

Uncritical support of the EU has now become an article of faith for many Labour representatives and activists, but surely we should embrace a little more scepticism if we are to reflect public opinion?

And, at the very least, we should embrace an in/out referendum both to demonstrate our democratic credentials and to wrong foot the Tories who have set and arbitrary date for a referendum.

It’s good that Ed is promising a referendum in the event of any further transfer of power to the EU. But many remember that we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution, aka the Lisbon Treaty.

I fear that if we continue to be seen on the side of the undemocratic EU elite, then it won’t just be the Tories who lose support to UKIP.