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Is Labour’s EU legacy fuelling Brexit NEW LABOUR IN EUROPE: LEADERSHIP AND LOST OPPORTUNITIES by Anita Pollack John Harper £17.50 Anita Pollack, Labour MEP for a decade up to 1999, has followed socialists favouring of up her earlier Wreckers or Builders? A protection over production. History of Labour MEPs 1979-99 in a Some - and occasionally new book covering Labour in Government. a majority - went native. It Her story is of not of one, but was Labour MEPs that first exposed Echelon and rather a series of lost opportunities the NSA’s over 13 unlucky years. spying. Pollack amusingly reports that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at times Labour Ministers were failed to put Britain at the heart of reduced to lobbying Britain’s Liberal Europe. For Blair it was not a matter of MEPs to counter their Labour wish but will, as he allowed himself to counterparts commitments to the be diverted and distracted by events trade unions and the Working Time and blandishments. In contrast, Directive. Brown, who at worse was a mild eurosceptic The consequence was more and at best an inchoate isolation, with European pro-European, was incapable of Parliamentary Labour Party (EPLP) understanding that Europe was an leaders reduced to ‘meeting’ Tony integral part of domestic politics Blair between floors in No 10’s lifts. rather than some intergovernmental Not that toadying served any better. distraction you occasionally gave a The leader who described the Iraq nod to when absolutely necessary. It invasion in a European Parliament wasn’t new; in opposition, prior to debate as “a people has been liberated, 1997’s Labour victory, he managed to freedom reigns where terror once did” produce an economic policy paper for deservedly failed to creep his way into the ’shadow’ cabinet that failed to the House of Lords. Equally Pollack mention Europe once. details that within the EPLP even the Labour’s 18 years of political most Christian MEPs could rarely exile – and its years of internal resist kicking a man when he was wrestling with its own euro-sceptics – down. meant it was ill-prepared to operate New Labour in Europe – because of in the new European political its encyclopaedic detail – inevitably architecture. The European Parliament gets some things wrong. Socialist was either an ante-chamber for Commissioners’ dinners with the Westminster for those on the way up Group’s leaders were taking place in or a convalescent home for those on the late 1980s and early 1990s, as was the way down rather than a secondfront EPLP attendance at ’shadow’ cabinet to deliver Labour’s promises. meetings, and were no product of the Pollack skilfully and exhaustively late 90s or 00s respectively. outlines the sterling work of MEPs like Nevertheless, this is Stephen Hughes on Social Policy, Alan unquestionably a valuable first book Donnelly on German Unification, on a neglected facet of both Labour Glenys Kinnock on Development and and EU history. One only worries that David Martin on Trade, but back Pollack is all too right and it was home in the Party and Government Labour’s failures that were the fatal this went unnoticed or ignored. MEPs legacy that leads inexorably towards were Labour’s shock troops rarely seen Brexit in June. as the vanguard for the onward march Glyn Ford of Labour in Europe but rather a sacrificial rearguard WWW.TRIBUNEMAGAZINE.ORG to stubbornly resist foreign .

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