The Labour Party of today is a complete and utter mess. It’s currently dominated by the middle class Metro-Left and their obsessions with gender, race, pandering to certain religious minorities and a type of top down socialism that treats the working class with contempt.

It wasn’t always like that however. It was once a party that although it was a party that contained within it people with principles that are admirable. One of those people with admirable principles who I don’t think would find a place, or especially not a senior position, in today’s Labour Party is the late Peter Shore, later ennobled as Lord Shore of Stepney.

Peter Shore was a dogged opponent of what later became the European Union and as he died in 2001 it is a great shame that he didn’t live to see the triumph that was the result of the Referendum to leave the EU in 2016. He campaigned hard in the 1975 Referendum to leave the EU but because of the poor state of the economy and the weight of propaganda aimed at staying in what was then the Common Market, the people at the time voted to remain in it.

However, Peter Shore was correct about what became the EU. It did reduce tremendously the sovereignty of the nations that joined it. It did impose very high tariffs on goods imported from outside the EU and did become a superstate run by those who did not owe their position to any democratic mandate.

I recently found and watched a fascinating bit of video from just before the 1975 Referendum of Peter Shore arguing against remaining in the Common Market at a debate at the Oxford Union. It’s a blistering performance by Mr Shore with carefully aimed barbs at the former Prime Minister Edward Heath who was also present at the debate.

This twenty odd minute video is well worth watching not just because of its historical value or to see glimpses in the background of titans of the Labour movement such as Barbara Castle. It’s worth watching not even to see Heath, a man widely derided these days as a traitor for his support for EU membership, looking glum sitting in his chair, but also because of what it tells us about how much the Labour Party has changed.

I can’t imagine that today’s Labour Party would tolerate anybody like Mr Shore in a front bench position these days. The Labour Party is no longer interested in making sure that the country is able to make its own decisions on things like agriculture, industrial policy or energy. Come to think of it the Labour Party is no longer even interested in basic stuff like border security.

There are still people in the Labour Party who think like Peter Shore, people like Paul Embery for example who want to bring manufacturing back to the UK, to shorten supply chains, who ask awkward questions of the Metro-Left and about the Metro-Left’s obsessions. The problem is people like Mr Embery have no power in the party. Labour has become a party of minority obsessions rather than being concerned about the conditions of life for the majority. In today’s Labour Party power resides in a devils cauldron of the far left who prospered during the Jeremy Corbyn years and who dominated a number of local constituency parties and the distinctly Metro-left aligned Parliamentary Labour Party. I’m not saying that there are not solid pro-working class Labour MP’s or Labour members, it’s just that their voices and their views are drowned out by the other voices.

Watch the video below and observe in astonishment at what sort of intellectual giants and left wing patriots that the Labour Party used to produce. Watch it also and mourn for what Labour has turned into. The Labour Party of Peter Shore was one that today I could vote for. Sadly I cannot say the same for today’s Labour Party.