BRACE yourself, for there’s going to be a political earthquake.

It looks as if Ukip will sweep the board at the European elections in May. Good. It will unsettle the smug, patronising leaders of the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems who are all in favour of our belonging to the EU. At least now that Ukip has come along, voters have a genuine choice. It’s salutary to examine how the depressing pro-EU consensus among all three main parties came about. The prominent Labour class warrior Ernest Bevin was against the Common Market and, amusingly, he said of it: “If you open that Pandora’s box you never know what Trojan ’orses will jump out.” Many years ago, euroscepticism was common on the left. There were giants in those days. The former leader of the Labour Party, the admirable Hugh Gaitskell, famously said to a party conference that participation in the European project would mean: “The end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of 1,000 years of history.”

Or how about that socialist saint Michael Foot? He of the Cenotaph donkey jacket and the Labour manifesto, the longest suicide note in history – said: “We can disagree about whether the EU has been a socialist or capitalist influence, but it is undeniable that it wields influence without ever asking the people.”

And Tony Benn wasn’t consistently bonkers. He once said: “The EU is absolutely undemocratic and now we live in a continent where power has gone to a group of people who are not elected, cannot be removed and don’t have to listen to us.”

Let’s come up to date. The late Robert Crow, left wing firebrand, wrote: “Polls in Britain show that voters want a referendum on EU membership. So why not give them a referendum? Working people across Europe are sick and tired of the EU business model.

The only rational course is to leave the EU.”

With the passing of Mr Crow and Mr Benn, the only notable eurosceptic remaining on the left is Kate Hoey. At its special conference in 1975, the Labour Party voted against our membership of the EU, overwhelmingly by 3,724,000 to 1,986,000. So where have all the lefties gone? Why have socialists abandoned their opposition? Because originally they regarded the Common Market, as it was then, as a bastion of international capitalism, as they said, “a rich man’s club”.

But it was never anything of the kind. Festooned with regulations, restrictions and control-freakery, the European project has always been socialism red in tooth and claw and very congenial to the corporatism and collectivism which socialists hold sacred.

What are the self-appointed commissioners but commissars? What is the European parliament except the mouthpiece for the EU’s politburo?

The sad thing about all this is that next month’s European elections won’t mean a thing. They never do. Because members of the European Parliament have no power, no influence and they generate no policies. The scandalous truth about the EU is that all power and authority resides with the unelected commissioners and the Euro-parliament is just a talking shop that provides the rubber stamp for the commission’s decisions.

The institution is a dictatorship, and the commissioners are apparatchiks. As Tony Benn said, we have no democratic means of removing them. And so corrupt are they that they haven’t even signed off the EU’s accounts for the past 19 years. If you ran a tobacco shop like that you’d have been up before the beak years ago.