Winston Churchill was right on Europe: Cooperation means we can solve major issues - like the refugee crisis

'If we all pull together and pool the luck and the comradeship … and firmly grasp the larger hopes of humanity, then it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age'

History will judge David Cameron on his part in the EU’s response to the refugee crisis (AFP/Getty)

Could there have been a greater contrast between the scenes at the Macedonia border last week and the latest squabbling over the EU referendum campaign in the UK? The row over whether the In campaign was running “project fear” or “project fact” did not seem to be on the same planet, let alone the same continent, as the images of hungry babies clutching at their mothers’ faces, a woman refugee despairing that she no longer feels human, or several members of one family sleeping in thin tents designed for two people.

The Out campaign uses migration and the refugee crisis as a reason for Britain to leave. Peter Bone, the Tory MP and co-founder of Grassroots Out, says, in the event of Brexit: “If asylum seekers start arriving at Dover, we will send them straight back.” Brexit will give Britain back control of its own borders, and so the ability of migrants and refugees to travel freely throughout the EU would stop at the UK. David Cameron, on behalf of the In campaign, says he has secured tougher rules on migration as part of his reform deal from Brussels. But this only focuses on a narrow detail of a much bigger picture. Shouldn’t the Prime Minister use the refugee crisis as precisely a reason that the UK should stay in Europe?

In a House of Commons speech that will take some beating to be the best of 2016, the Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Soames, who wants Britain to remain in the EU, quoted from his grandfather’s speech in The Hague in 1948. Arguing why post-war European co-operation was so important, Winston Churchill said: “If we all pull together and pool the luck and the comradeship … and firmly grasp the larger hopes of humanity, then it may be that we shall move into a happier sunlit age, when all the little children who are now growing up in this tormented world may find themselves not the victors nor the vanquished in the fleeting triumphs of one country over another in the bloody turmoil of … war, but the heirs of all the treasures of the past and the masters of all the science, the abundance and the glories of the future.”

It is a tragedy that Churchill’s words can be applied to Europe today, but they also underline the reasons why EU countries are stronger together in facing one of the greatest challenges of our age – the refugee crisis. Britain took in refugees during and after the Second World War, and it should not turn its back on them now.

It is true that this country is helping Syrian and Iraqi refugees in camps closer to their home countries. But, on the eve of a major EU summit on migration, it is inescapable that there are also more than a million refugees in Europe. Instead of getting bogged down in the detail of dossiers of what might happen if we left, the Prime Minister should step back and deliver a speech that captures the momentousness of the refugee crisis, and how Britain can play a leading part, through its continued membership of the EU, in tackling it. Because history will judge him on this, whatever he says.

Churchill’s Hague speech showed that part of what makes Britain great is its ability to “firmly grasp the larger hopes of humanity”, not release the grip because our hands are full.

Poison in the Labour Party

The referendum campaign may be threatening to split the Conservative Party, but at least many of its MPs are insisting (as they would) that after 23 June, whatever the outcome of the vote, there will be a period of healing. The same cannot be said of Labour.

The bitterly fought election for its NEC youth representative shows that the party is already split. Under Jeremy Corbyn, factionalism has taken hold. Wes Streeting, the MP for Ilford North, says he “can’t recall anything quite as poisonous” as the campaign between James Elliott, who was backed by Momentum and Unite, and the eventual winner, Jasmine Beckett.

What was disgraceful was the accusation by Corbyn’s ally and the founder of Momentum, Jon Lansman, that Beckett was a “careerist” – when she is a 19-year-old from a working-class background in Liverpool. It is easy to focus only on the EU referendum, but this May’s local and Scottish elections will be the first electoral test of Corbyn’s leadership. With Labour already so deeply divided, what will the voters do?

Remember Harold – in stone

Harold Wilson, who knew about Labour disunity as the prime minister whose cabinet split over the 1975 referendum, was born 100 years ago this week. Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield who has long campaigned for a statue of Wilson to be erected in the House of Commons alongside other great premiers, told Cameron at PMQs that Wilson “stood up to the rebels in his own party and secured a yes vote for staying in Europe”.

This is only half the story, of course: after the Yes vote Labour was still riven over Europe, and this eventually led to the breakaway SDP. However, Sheerman has a point about a statue: Wilson served for two terms and had wide popular appeal. Many places in the UK have a connection to the former PM: he was born in Huddersfield, went to Oxford University, was MP for both Ormskirk and Huyton in Merseyside and became Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, after the abbey in North Yorkshire. There are statues and tributes to him all over the country except in the Commons, so isn’t it time he was recognised in Parliament?

Grayling’s decision isn’t funny

Chris Grayling, the Leader of the Commons, dismissed calls for TV programmes such as Have I Got News For You to be able to use footage from inside Parliament. This is an utterly bizarre anomaly, given that factual programmes which deploy some humour, such as the BBC’s This Week, are permitted. Like MPs’ pay and pensions, this is yet another area where politicians are allowed to regulate their own business and we voters can do absolutely nothing about it. Which I guess is satire, on one level.

Twitter: @janemerrick23