Labour's hypocrisy on the EU budget

Vulture

Where do Labour find these people?
Waynetta looks like an unemployed Tesco car park attendant.

He is, of course, talking crap. Our three mainstream parties are signed up to the EU project, but Dave appears to be selling out even faster than Brown did.

Anonymous

Labour MEPs didn't vote for a 6% increase:

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-did-labour-meps-vote-for-a-6-rise-in-eu-budget/4755

rogerb

What is so amazing apart from his lack of knowledge of his own mep's(ps don't take voting against an amendment as having voted for the 6%) it his complete lack of knowledge about how EU budgets are set (the seven yr deals).

Naomi Muse

Labour is showing overt hypocrisy on this one.

Why did the Labour MEPs vote the rise through? I think we should be told.

Woody

This has always been one of the main differences between Labour and Conservatives that these Labour MP's will hit the airwaves and say the most outrageous lies, lies and more lies. They have no shame. They are absolutely disgusting and pollute our politics.

Alex R

David is actually quoted saying that Labour MEPs voted against the rise. total lie.

Mark,Edinburgh

Somewhat misleading surely?

Labour voted against the EU budget increase on the main motion, along with the Tories, UKIP, the Lib Dems and the BNP.

Only the Greens and the SNP voted in favour of the main motion.

Check it out at the Euvote Watch website if you don't agree. Note more Labour MPs bothered to vote against(10)than UKIP (9).

You would expect this because just like any good opposition Labour are preparing to side with Tory rebels if it comes to a Commons vote, just like they did during the Maastricht sessions.

Wayne David came out with the usual "we need to be in the EU because otherwise they won't trade with us and we'll lose jobs" twaddle. For once he was challenged by the BBC on this. Good.

I'm old enough to remember when Labour genuinely represented industrial workers so opposed the EU on the grounds they would lose jobs because the EU wasn't a level playing field!

Martyn Rowe

I've got a letter in my house from Wayne David explaining why the Lisbon Treaty was so wonderful for Britain.

If he'd had the guts to tour his constituency during the election campaign I would've gladly pinned it to his forehead.

David Blackburn

To various posters, apologies for the loose phraseology about the amendment. Should be clearer now. And, I'd like to point out, the initial motion was still carried.

Bocephus

Is the BBC newsreader thick or a shill? Why on earth did he not challenge him on the Labour MEPs vote? Astonishing.

Mark, Edinburgh

Rather than argue about what Labour did or did not vote against, the fact remains is that Labour voted against the EU budget.

Surely we should be pleased.

85% of all UK MEPs voted against the budget.

Effectively and probaly for the first time our MEPs voted as a country with a majority of MEPs in all four administrations.

Sadly the EU budget was still passed by a majority of 5 to 1. And the UK comprised 60% of all the votes against.

No other country voted against the budget in terms of total MEPs. Not even close.

This vote clearly demonstrates the UK to be different to the whole of the rest of Europe.

For once, and for whatever nefarious political reasons, we (with the tiny exception of the wretched Greens and SNP) were "all in this together" in rejecting the EU budget. And Labour and the Lib Dems left their nasty federalist parliamentary groups to do this.

Right now I'd like to see Mr. Cameron use this argument against the EU federalists in Brussels, rather than slag off Labour.

dorothy wilson

My jaw dropped when - earlier this afternoon - I heard on the radio news that Yvette Cooper had said the Coalition Government should have dealt with the EU budget months ago. Has the silly madam forgotten that a few months ago she was a member of the Labour government?

Verity

Martyn Rowe - "If he'd had the guts to tour his constituency during the election campaign I would've gladly pinned it to his forehead."

With a blow dart, I hope.

David Lindsay

Not only should Ed Miliband Lead the Opposition to any increase in our EU budgetary contribution, as only the Leader of the Opposition to the cuts can do, but he should also remember that John Smith had been one of the Labour rebels whose votes behind Roy Jenkins had passed Heath's European Communities Bill, yet he cheerfully deployed every trick in the book during Maastricht's passage through Parliament. That's called Opposition.

There is work to be done by a Leader of the Opposition acting ruthlessly as such. The backbench Conservative Right is disaffected, so these challenges to put up or shut up, on the issue about which it claims to care the most, might well yield considerable results. Meanwhile, what of the Lib Dems? They were EU enthusiasts when they saw no hope of office at Westminster. But those days are gone, and everything about the EU - a legislature which meets in secret, for heaven's sake - is contrary to everything for which they stand. That is sharply true of the CAP and the CFP, and the CFP hits several centres of Lib Dem support particularly hard.

The European Parliament and the Council of Ministers subject us to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, of neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, of people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, of neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, and before long both of the ruling Islamists in Turkey and of their opponents, variously extreme secular ultra-nationalists and viciously violent Marxist Kurdish separatists.

Who will propose the relevant amendments to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to require that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy in the Council of Ministers until such time as it meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, to restore the mysteriously discontinued annual votes on the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, to use those votes to demand the abolition of those Policies, and to disapply in the United Kingdom anything passed by the European Parliament unless the majority of MEPs voting for it has been drawn from among those certified as politically acceptable by at least one seat-taking member of the House of Commons? Who would dare vote against such amendments?

Ed Miliband, over to you.

Mark, Edinburgh

David Lindsay

I agree with everything you say.

Hwoever to be fair to the Irish Republican Army Council I think you'll find that they voted against the EU budget, unlike the SNP.

normanc

Labour talking tough on Europe.

At least the wife won't need to mop the floor tonight, all the rolling around laughing I've done has given it a good polish.

David Lindsay

nortmanc, the Attlee Government refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was “the blueprint for a federal state” which “the Durham miners would never wear”. Gaitskell rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth. Most Labour MPs (and one Liberal) voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. The Parliamentary Labour Party’s unanimous opposed Thatcher’s Single European Act.

66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so, and outnumbering Conservative opponents by three to one. Every Labour (and Lib Dem) MP, without exception, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

The 1997 General Election result kept of the United Kingdom out of the euro, by making Gordon Brown Chancellor the Exchequer in place of Kenneth Clarke. Half of the French Socialist Party successfully opposed the EU Constitution. A recent electoral blow against the euro was dealt by the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Half of the UKIP vote, based on its geographical distribution, must be Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. The No2EU – Yes To Democracy list at the 2009 European Elections in London included Peter Shore’s erstwhile agent, and in the North West included the immediate past Leader of the Liberal Party.

Do I need to go on?

Attlee denounced the referendum as “a device of demagogues and dictators”, a view echoed word-for-word by Thatcher as Prime Minister; it is Pythonesque that ostensible defenders of British parliamentary sovereignty and democracy demand the adoption of this foreign and deeply flawed device, rather than that parliamentarians who would not simply say No to any erosion be replaced with parliamentarians who would.

Edward McLaughlin

I did hear a Labour voice here didn't I, saying '...we need to make the case for financial stringency...'?

Surely one of the most tragic consequences of the demise of the British high street, is that somewhere in this land, there is a boarded up sweetie shop. in which, in a right world, this man could have spent his days, giving advice to school children on the various merits of the delights on his penny tray.

Tarka the Rotter

Labour hypocrisy? I'm shocked...shocked (hat tip to Louis Renaud, Casablanca)

Tarka the Rotter

@David Lindsay

Why is a referendum a 'deeply flawed and foreign device' ? OK I know a bit of history and how they have been rigged to bring people like Louis Napoleon and so on to power, but shouldn't we be seeking ways to consult people on key constitutional issues? Do you really believe elected representatives, who follow their own agenda and are swayed by personal ambitions and greed, can make decisions for the rest of the population? Are we subjects or free citizens? Or cannon fodder?