Another passionate and articulate voice joins the ranks of The Leave Alliance, recognising that while UKIP may have helped get us the EU referendum, neither they nor the freshly-designated Vote Leave are in a position to do anything more than preach to the converted.
So don’t listen to the formal leave campaigns you see on the TV news or read about in the newspapers. I’m talking about Leave.EU, Grassroots Out, Vote Leave, and of course UK Independence Party (UKIP). I used to be a UKIP member because I wanted a referendum, and now we’ve got one, they are doing more harm than good.
These groups want to take the EU marriage certificate and tear it up in front of the EU, in some sort of dramatic gesture, and then walk away and have a bonfire of regulations, and start from zero, with great bravado, to create a bespoke trade deal with various countries around the world, which would probably take 5-10 years (it has taken Switzerland 16 years and their position is good, but not ideal).
That’s all bollocks, obviously.
This is a referendum, not an election. We are only being asked whether we want to stay in the EU or leave the EU. Nothing more.
If we as a nation decide to leave, nobody gets elected, not Nigel Farage, not Boris Johnson, or anyone else. They won’t even get seconded to some transitional team to work on extricating ourselves from the EU. So don’t even listen to them.
It is the current government who would be tasked with the leave process and the end state. This means Whitehall (civil service) and the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office).
So ask yourself: what process and end state would the current government choose?
I’ll tell you. They would choose to leave by Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty (sorry to be an anorak), and they would choose to enter the EEA (European Economic Area) as a member of EFTA (European Free Trade Association), of which we were originally a member.
Why? Because that is the solution that most closely resembles the current membership of the EU that we already ‘enjoy’.
What this means is that we would still be a member of the Single Market, we would still pay into the EU budget (about 20% of what we do now, based on Norway), and most importantly, we would still sign up to freedom of movement of people, capital and goods.
It is this last point that is the reason why you have not heard the Norway Option being promoted. UKIP, the progenitor of the leave impetus, is all about immigration, so the Norway Option does not address their issue.
Pick a number, but there are about 30% of people who want to leave, 30% of people who want to stay, and 40% of people who are undecided.
The UKIP immigration concern has a plateau, which has already been reached, and will not win the referendum. The undecided middle listen to all the ridiculous messages from both ends and, when push comes to shove, will probably plump for the devil they know, even though that devil is not a status quo, because the EU is proceeding towards political integration and that’s unstoppable.
So the thing about EFTA / EEA is that it is not a big risk. There is no bonfire of regulations, no loss of access to the Single Market, and no change to freedom of movement. But we do regain our sovereignty and self-determination. That’s the only real change we are after.
It’s a stable, low-risk departure lounge, from which we can consider other matters later.
That’s what the undecided 40% of voters need to know. That’s what will actually happen if the government is charged with leaving the EU.
If you want to know more about my point of view, look for Leave HQ and search for The Leave Alliance.
David Taylor, like me, has been on a political journey to reach this point. Readers may recall that I reluctantly gave my vote to UKIP in the 2015 general election, in protest of a thoroughly un-conservative Conservative Party and the desire to reward what I saw as genuine political courage from Nigel Farage’s party in speaking up for a segment of the British public – and for certain ideals – which for too long had been high-handedly ignored by the entire political establishment.
Such people should be welcomed into The Leave Alliance – despite our growing social media and online reach, it is still not easy for members of the general public to become aware that there is another, better eurosceptic game in town than that offered by the likes of Boris Johnson and Vote Leave.
Our national media holds the independent political blogosphere in something near contempt when they think about us at all, which makes it very difficult to cut through the noise and reach people with our message (it would be altogether impossible without the levelling effect of social media).
The British press will gushingly write up almost anything that BoJo does, but are seemingly incapable of acknowledging the incredible work and research undertaken by The Leave Alliance’s largely unpaid team of citizen bloggers, and so it is up to all of us to amplify the message until it can no longer be ignored.
If you have strong doubts about Britain’s continued place in the European Union but feel alienated by the superficiality of Vote Leave and worried about the potential economic consequences of Brexit, know that there is an alternative campaign with a compelling, comprehensive plan for safely leaving the EU in a controlled manner.
The Remain campaign are going to tell lots of apocalyptic, scaremongering and false tales about how leaving the European Union would destroy the NHS. But that does not mean that Brexit campaigners should stoop to their level
This is – to use the nicest words possible – completely amateurish and stupid.
Conservatives – especially real ones who aren’t all that keen on the state being a monopolistic provider of healthcare – don’t make very plausible knights in shining armour when it comes to defending the NHS, especially in the minds of voters conditioned by years of hand-wringing left-wing rhetoric that the Evil Tories are perpetually one step away from turning poor people away from hospital.
Besides, the high figure of £350 million fails the common sense test even for the lowest of low information voters. The risible suggestion will do nothing to persuade those who already mindlessly worship the NHS like some kind of secular new age religion and fear that Brexit will hurt their idol, while it offends the more intelligent voter by treating them as though they are stupid.
What is unlikely to impress, to any one who has the first idea of the issues, is the sort of slogan shown above – the £350 million claim. Vote Leave know it isn’t true. That makes it a lie. Why they go ahead with a deliberate lie, I don’t know. They must think there is some advantage to it.
I find the lie offensive. But then the other side is lying as well. I also find that offensive, but it doesn’t worry me. In fact, I welcome it – it shows weakness, reduces their credibility and gives us leverage. It does worry me when our own side lies – for exactly the same reasons: it shows weakness, reduces our credibility and it gives the other side leverage.
Throughout my campaigning career, I’ve made a point of seeking accuracy – as best I can. For the very opposite reasons that the lie is a bad idea. It shows strength, it increases our credibility and it denies the other side leverage.
In other words, accuracy is the embodiment of good campaigning. The lie is the opposite. That matters. We don’t. We need people to grow up and realise that. There is far too much at stake for us to be playing these silly games.
For libertarians and conservatarians, one of the most depressing aspects of nearly all the Leave campaigns is the idea that any money saved through Brexit (and the sums we are talking are likely to be so small in either direction as to be insignificant) should not be handed back to the taxpayer in the form of tax cuts, but merely re-allocated to some other area of the state which is crying out for more funding.
Apparently there is precisely zero demand in this country for a campaign, or politicians, who dare to suggest that we should aim to reduce government expenditure in one area not to free up cash for another, but rather to return the money to the people who earned it and who create value in the first place. Therefore it is unsurprising that the NHS proved too shiny and appealing a target for the dilettantes at Vote Leave to resist. They know we worship the NHS uncritically, and so they think that we will be highly susceptible to any messages which link Brexit with the idea of helping the NHS.
Unfortunately, they also lack the intelligence to realise that making this campaign about our socialised healthcare system means fighting the EU referendum campaign on ground which is uniquely favourable to the mostly Remain-supporting Left. And there is simply no way that a Brexit campaign supported mostly by those on the Right wins a “Who Loves The NHS Most?” contest against the arrayed forces of the Labour Party and every virtue-signalling keyboard warrior in the country.
Whether we vote to leave the European Union or remain in the burning building, the NHS will continue to exist. We can’t seem to shake it. And it will continue to churn out moderately priced but increasingly substandard levels of care while nearly the entire population gathers round to uncritically praise the holy creation of St. Aneurin Bevan of Tredegar from dawn to dusk. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.
Do you really believe Britain Stronger in Europe when they suggest that “medical innovation” will cease or be harmed if Britain leaves the political construct known as the European Union? Exactly what is it about forsaking a foreign flag, anthem and parliament which will slow down the cure for Alzheimer’s?
Or do you seriously buy this idea that Brexit means that we can throw up a brand new hospital in every major British city within a year, and keep on doing that until the NHS is not only our largest employer but our only employer?
Don’t be taken in by this execrable, manipulative, transparently idiotic nonsense from the major Leave and Remain campaigns, all of which seem to be managed by B-student politicos and all of which are operating on the hopeful assumption that you are a frightened, credulous simpleton.
In order to have a shot at winning the referendum on 23 June, Brexit supporters must stop getting sidetracked by glitzy distractions like promising to funnel non-existent money towards the NHS, and focus instead on neutralising many voters’ fear of the potential economic impact of Brexit.
As Dr. North correctly points out:
The least important people in the referendum campaign are those of us who have already made up their minds which way they are going to vote, and will not change their minds under any circumstances.
[..] Those who matter are the people who are undecided or who think they have a position but are genuinely open to persuasion. Those are the people who will decide the referendum.
The EU is by no means beloved. If the Brexit campaign could only negate all of the mostly baseless economic fears surrounding Brexit, they would win the referendum by a landslide. But to do so means communicating a Brexit plan which clearly de-risks the process and shows people that it is quite possible to leave the political construct known as the European Union while still participating fully in regional and global trade.
Every day that those with the biggest platforms and media profiles waste their time making implausible and unconvincing promises about the NHS – hostile ground where the fighting is hugely favourable to the pro-EU Left – is a day which is not spent promoting a clear Brexit plan and neutralising the one issue (economic concerns) which is preventing this decision from being a landslide 65-35 in favour of leaving the EU.
It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.
With a captain like Boris Johnson and the hotshots at Vote Leave, all bizarrely exhorting us to leave the European Union in order to Save Our NHS, who needs a Remain campaign anyway?
More on the attempts by both sides to weaponise the NHS for the coming EU referendum here and here.
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Voting to stay in the EU in the hope that a left-wing movement might make the organisation simultaneously more socialist and democratic is like moving to North Korea in the expectation that a friendly word with Kim Jong Un will see the country immediately become a capitalist land of plenty
Yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn gave his much-heralded intervention in the EU referendum debate, which is worth analysing as perhaps the single biggest disappointment of Corbyn’s tenure as Labour Leader thus far.
The Labour Party is overwhelmingly for staying in because we believe the European Union has brought: investment, jobs and protection for workers, consumers and the environment, and offers the best chance of meeting the challenges we face in the 21st century.
In fact, Britain’s bounce back from (Labour-inflicted) 1970s decline was due to the free-market policies of the Thatcher Conservative government. The limited extent to which our membership of the European Union helped bring jobs and investment to Britain are the very same reasons why Corbyn now dislikes the current EU – because it is “neoliberal”, market oriented and has awkward rules about state aid and nationalisation of industry.
By voluntarily placing Britain in the EU’s regulatory straightjacket at a time when we were most decidedly mad (with price and wage controls and vast nationalisation of industry) we were indeed prevented from inflicting more harm on ourselves. But Corbyn pines for all the edifices of state socialism which were worn down by Thatcherism and constrained by the EU.
Corbyn basically wants 1970s declining Britain, repeated at a European level. He may admire the social, employment and environmental regulation, but he will not be happy until member states are free to pursue strongly left-wing policies without interference or blocking from Brussels. And of course this is a hopeless fantasy, because the EU is travelling in a direction where member states are able to do fewer and fewer things autonomously in their own national interest, while the euro crisis demands more, not less, convergence.
Corbyn continues:
In the coming century, we face huge challenges, as a people, as a continent and as a global community. How to deal with climate change. How to address the overweening power of global corporations and ensure they pay fair taxes. How to tackle cyber-crime and terrorism. How to ensure we trade fairly and protect jobs and pay in an era of globalisation. How to address the causes of the huge refugee movements across the world, and how we adapt to a world where people everywhere move more frequently to live, work and retire.
All these issues are serious and pressing, and self-evidently require international co-operation. Collective international action through the European Union is clearly going to be vital to meeting these challenges. Britain will be stronger if we co-operate with our neighbours in facing them together.
Not one of these issues is something which cannot be tackled by determined, well-executed inter-governmental co-operation between sovereign member states. There is nothing mysterious about climate change or terrorism or free trade which can only be solved if the countries of Europe dissolve themselves into a single supranational political entity which sits above them, its unelected leaders making decisions on their behalf.
So what is the answer to the European Union’s problems if not recognising that it is a terminally flawed, anachronistic holdover from the early twentieth century, and pulling the eject lever before we impact with the ground?
Corbyn’s solution:
So Europe needs to change. But that change can only come from working with our allies in the EU. It’s perfectly possible to be critical and still be convinced we need to remain a member.
[..] I have listened closely to the views of trade unions, environmental groups, human rights organisations and of course to Labour Party members and supporters, and fellow MPs. They are overwhelmingly convinced that we can best make a positive difference by remaining in Europe.
Then they are all part of the same collective delusion. The European Union is not shy about its ultimate goal of ever-closer, not simply more perfect union. And the juggernaut has continued to trundle inexorably in the same integrationist direction for decades. What, exactly, gives them hope that a twinkly-eyed, bearded British socialist and his starry eyed chums like Greece’s Alexis Tsipras (who was pretty much castrated by the eurogroup on live television during last year’s euro crisis) are going to change the direction of travel?
Don’t expect an answer. Every EU apologist from the dawn of time has been ready with mealy-mouthed protestations that “of course the EU is flawed” and “of course we need to push for reform in Europe”, but there are two problems. One is that the European Union is not interested in their kind of reform, and the second is that the EU apologists lose all interest in actually agitating for reform after awhile. Running into a brick wall at full speeds begins to lose its appeal, after awhile.
Then we get to the meat of Corbyn’s speech:
When the last referendum was held in 1975, Europe was divided by the Cold War, and what later became the EU was a much smaller, purely market-driven arrangement. Over the years I have been critical of many decisions taken by the EU, and I remain critical of its shortcomings; from its lack of democratic accountability to the institutional pressure to deregulate or privatise public services.
Except that what the EU does is not so much lavish spending on cash-strapped institutions being starved to death by the mean Tory government in Westminster. What it actually does is bribe citizens with their own money. In the case of a huge net contributor to the EU budget like Britain, that means sending our taxpayer money to Brussels where it goes through the bureaucratic machine, before a portion of those funds are redistributed to organisations and councils within Britain, to be spent in the way agreed with the EU.
That so many academic, artistic and cultural leaders are so desperate for Britain to remain in the EU should indeed tell us something. It should tell us that they are either stupid for not realising that they are being bribed with their own money, or that they are very smart and cynically think that the EU’s anti-democratic nature is a great way to get taxpayer funding for things which are either so pointless or so much more at home in the private sector that the British public would never countenance spending the money.
So what exactly are these never-gonna-happen reforms supposed to look like? Corbyn sets out his vision:
But we also need to make the case for reform in Europe – the reform David Cameron’s Government has no interest in, but plenty of others across Europe do.
That means democratic reform to make the EU more accountable to its people. Economic reform to end to self-defeating austerity and put jobs and sustainable growth at the centre of European policy, labour market reform to strengthen and extend workers’ rights in a real social Europe. And new rights for governments and elected authorities to support public enterprise and halt the pressure to privatise services.
So the case I’m making is for ‘Remain – and Reform’ in Europe.
Today is the Global Day of Action for Fast Food Rights. In the US workers are demanding $15 an hour, in the UK £10 now. Labour is an internationalist party and socialists have understood from the earliest days of the labour movement that workers need to make common cause across national borders.
Working together in Europe has led to significant gains for workers here in Britain and Labour is determined to deliver further progressive reform in 2020 the democratic Europe of social justice and workers’ rights that people throughout our continent want to see.
But real reform will mean making progressive alliances across the EU – something that the Conservatives will never do.
Ah, so “reform” actually just means lashings more socialism in Europe.
Anyone proposing a change to the workings of the EU based on a single political ideology is immediately doomed to fail, because they are by their own admission less interested in democracy, governance and international co-operation, and more interested in inflicting their own worldview and values on others. And so it is with Jeremy Corbyn’s vision of a left-wing Hands Across Europe movement.
Corbyn has no interest in working with conservative or centrist voices in Europe to create a better-functioning set of institutions and rules, because for him (and many on the left), policies and structure are inseparable. Corbyn doesn’t really care that the EU is antidemocratic – after all, right now he is grateful that the EU is undemocratically imposing on Britain various employment and social directives with which he agrees. Therefore his only interest is seeking out other like-minded people on the continent to grab as much power as possible, only then considering changes to the structure of the organisation to make it harder for conservatives to mount a counter-attack.
And when it comes to partisan point-scoring against conservatives, Jeremy Corbyn’s extended diatribe against tax avoidance incidentally reveals the single biggest hypocrisy in his entire position on Europe.
Corbyn begins this section:
The most telling revelation about our Prime Minister has not been about his own tax affair, but that in 2013 he personally intervened with the European Commission President to undermine an EU drive to reveal the beneficiaries of offshore trusts, and even now, in the wake of the Panama Papers, he still won’t act.
And on six different occasions since the beginning of last year Conservative MEPs have voted down attempts to take action against tax dodging.
But then he dramatically overreaches:
Left to themselves, it is clear what the main Vote Leave vision is for Britain to be the safe haven of choice for the ill-gotten gains of every dodgy oligarch, dictator or rogue corporation.
They believe this tiny global elite is what matters, not the rest of us, who they dismiss as “low achievers”.
For any apologist or supporter of the EU to stand up in front of a room full of people and declare that it is those fighting for Brexit who are the elitists takes real cojones, and an inscrutable poker face. Because back in the real world, nothing epitomises the desire of a small political and financial elite to escape national democratic accountability for their actions more than the existence of the EU.
The EU is not, as its cheerleaders claim, a coming-together of European peoples. Rather, it represents the outsourcing of key parts of national political life to the unaccountable, unreachable realm of the European Commission and other Brussels-based bodies. It directly waters down our democratic clout through granting ever-greater authority to institutions like the EC and the European Court of Justice, whose edicts and rulings can be imposed on nations regardless of what national governments, far less national plebiscites, think of them. That is anti-democratic. End of. And it should be viewed as intolerable by anyone who considers himself progressive, and who recognises that every radical, inspiring leap forward in modern times – from the Levellers to the Chartists to the Suffragettes – has been about people wrestling from the authorities the right to choose who governs them; the right to political say-so.
The EU is a union not of peoples, but of elites. It has in recent decades become the sphere in which national elites, feeling ever more estranged from their national electorates, have effectively taken refuge. In pooling their national sovereignties into the EU, our national rulers absolve themselves of the responsibility to have tough, testy debates with us about various political and social matters, in favour of seeing such issues discussed and resolved by the commissioners and self-styled experts of this rarefied zone.
The EU is not any kind of internationalist or cosmopolitan project, as its supporters claim. Nor is it a conspiracy of French and German blaggards to do over decent Blighty, as its detractors insist. Rather, it is the institution that has grown from and been constantly fed by national elites’ own growing feeling of exhaustion with democracy – and with democracy’s engine: the demos – be it politicians who would rather an aloof court decided something they haven’t got the stomach to debate or advocacy campaigners who agitate for an EC regulation because nothing repulses them more than the idea of trying to win over the plebs of their own nations.
And O’Neill’s conclusion in the same piece could be aimed directly at those left-wing EU supporters who, like Corbyn, insist that we must stay locked in unwanted political union to protect our “rights”:
All those things that the Remain lobby claims will be better if we stay in the EU – workers’ rights, freedom of movement, anti-terror security measures – are things that should be discussed and decided by us. To say the EU does ‘good things’, even though it does them without any real democratic oversight, is to support a benevolent tyranny. A tyranny enacted not to crush us but to save us – the worst kind.
But of course Jeremy Corbyn (and much of the Left) do not trust us to make the “correct” decisions on these or any other issues, so they are more than happy for democratic control of these things to be outsourced to a supranational European level of government which is more amenable to their demands.
So to summarise – Jeremy Corbyn supports Britain remaining in the European Union on the basis that the EU may one day magically reject capitalism and seek to become a socialist paradise. And yet no serious watcher of the EU or its member states believes that this is remote possibility, whatever Yanis Varoufakis and his Democracy in Europe Movement may say.
Therefore Jeremy Corbyn is willing to subject Britain to the ongoing uncertainty of remaining part of a relentlessly integrating supranational political union (not to mention the probability of a violent, uncontrolled Brexit further down the line when the EU either disintegrates or takes another major step toward federalisation) because he is holding out the flimsy hope that a ragtag assortment of socialist and communist groups across Europe will get together and take over the EU’s institutions, recasting Brussels in their own image.
Of all the grandiose claims from both official sides in this referendum campaign, how likely does this proposition seem to you?
Exactly. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that any of the things that Jeremy Corbyn freely admits to finding most objectionable about the European Union will change any time soon. Deep down, Jeremy Corbyn knows this, and yet here he is, telling us about the wonderful, socialist-friendly EU which could soon be ours.
When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership contest and almost immediately recanted his long-held euroscepticism, this blog remarked:
There are lots of words you can use to describe the Labour Party’s fawning and uncritical “IN at all costs” attitude toward the European Union, but it is certainly not the “new politics” promised by Jeremy Corbyn.
And as Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party continues, it will be very interesting to observe where he chooses to make a stand in defence of his left-wing principles, and where else he is willing – or forced – to make concessions to the majority centrists of the parliamentary party.
On nearly every other issue – armed intervention in Syria, Trident nuclear weapons, you name it – Jeremy Corbyn has been more than willing to provoke rage and hysteria within his own party by treading a different path and rejecting a number of sacred New Labour shibboleths. But when it came to the European Union, Corbyn didn’t simply send out Hilary Benn to give the doe-eyed, europhile position. He swallowed his pride and did it himself.
One might call it a rather bold act of leadership by Corbyn, were it not also such a grotesque betrayal of his own beliefs on the subject of Europe.
Ultimately, Jeremy Corbyn wanting to stay in the European Union to bring about democratic socialist reform is like me wanting to go to North Korea to single-handedly convince Kim Jong Un to surrender power and help his country transition away from totalitarian dictatorship. The aim is certainly ambitious, maybe even noble, but the audience’s receptiveness to the message is decidedly limited. And both are equally doomed to failure.
The only difference is that as a private citizen, I am free to indulge in as many far-fetched daydreams as I like without consequence, whereas Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party and the official Opposition.
When I waste my time and energies advocating for a futile cause, it harms nobody. When Jeremy Corbyn does the same, as he did at Senate House yesterday, he betrays not only his conscience but also the people who voted for Corbyn trusting him to speak his true mind and defend their interests.
In his Morning Briefing email today, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty disparaged last night’s latest Democratic Party primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders with these words:
‘Yeah, There Was Another Democratic Debate.’ (Stifles Yawn)
Thursday night’s Democratic debate in Brooklyn basically amounted to Bernie Sanders’s repeating all of his familiar attacks against Hillary and her insisting they’re baseless; and her charging that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, at which point he would counter-charge, “THE GREED AND THE RECKLESSNESS AND ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR OF WALL STREET BROUGHT THIS COUNTRY INTO THE WORST ECONOMIC DOWNTURN” — sorry for the all caps, it’s the only way to accurately capture the volume of Sanders’ high dudgeon voice — “SINCE THE GREAT RECESSSION OF THE THIRTIES, WHEN MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LOST THEIR JOBS AND THEIR HOMES AND THEIR LIFE SAVINGS, YOU’VE GOT A BUNCH OF FRAUDULENT OPERATORS AND THEY’VE GOT TO BE BROKEN UP!”
Below are a couple of highlights, to the extent there were any:
Clinton, last night, defending her judgment: “President Obama trusted my judgment enough to ask me to be secretary of State for the United States.”
Yeah, that line may work really well in a Democratic primary, but you can apply the same “hey, if Obama picked me, I must know what I’m doing” argument to former HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, VA secretary Eric Shinseki, short-lived Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, all of those wealthy donor ambassadors who knew nothing about the countries where they would represent the U.S . . .
Hillary Clinton: “It may be inconvenient, but it’s always important to get the facts straight. I stood up against the behaviors of the banks when I was a senator.
I called them out on their mortgage behavior. I also was very willing to speak out against some of the special privileges they had under the tax code.”
Bernie Sanders: “Secretary Clinton called them out. Oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this. And was that before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements? So they must have been very, very upset by what you did.”
I’m sorry, does a political debate no longer count as interesting or exciting unless a deranged mob of populist Republicans are flinging feces at each other or comparing the size of their junk?
Are Sanders and Clinton repeating themselves a lot? Yes – as someone who is deluged by campaign emails and briefings from both sides, that much cannot be denied. But at least the things that they are saying actually matter. They relate to foreign policy, trade policy, crime and punishment, campaign finance and the influence of Wall Street.
The argument in the GOP primary has devolved into little more than pledges to revoke ObamaCare faster than the other (“I’ll abolish ObamaCare by executive order at the beginning of my inaugural address!”) and competing visions for exactly how high the wall should be between the United States and Mexico.
Debates on both sides probably shed a lot more heat than light, but anyone who has watched a few of these things in the 2016 cycle would have to admit that more of substance has been learned on the Democratic side than the Republican side this time round – with the same going for 2012 too, when the Republicans treated us to Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain.
There is a group – and I can’t say how large it is, but I know it exists from my time living in America – of liberty-minded conservatives out there who are thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats’ record in office and the general direction of the country, but who will stay home or hold their nose and vote for Hillary Clinton before they see Donald Trump or even Ted Cruz in the White House.
(And to those Trump supporters who protest, I would simply say that fighting back at the establishment and sticking it to the man does not have to mean vocally supporting torture and eroding the constitution. In fact, as Britain’s Nigel Farage discovered, it is actually better when the establishment come at you equally hard for holding mostly reasonable position, as their desperation to kill the challenge to their power is then exposed for what it is).
Though I am not yet a US citizen, if I had voted in the 2008 election I would have voted without hesitation for Barack Obama over the John McCain / Sarah Palin freak show. Many others did the same. So forget trying to attract massive new demographic groups to the side of the Republican Party – maybe the GOP should focus more on simply not alienating those people who will reliably vote for any serious-minded conservative, but who are constantly chased away from the party by the carnival of idiots who keep making it to the primary debates.
You can sneer that it is cultural snobbishness at work (and a bit of it is – though not the majority), but it goes deeper than that. And the good news is that the Republican Party will soon have another chance to reinvent itself for a new era as they spend another presidential term in dreary opposition. Hopefully they will not repeat the mistake of 2008, and actually have serious discussion this time about who they want in the party and who they want out, and whether they want to appeal to the better angels or the darkest fears and prejudices of those who are invited to remain.
That process can begin soon. But in the meantime, let’s not get cocky about the Democratic Party primary process, which has seen left-wing politicians with substantially different worldviews tearing chunks out of each other on policy and substance – which is precisely what should happen.
That is the debate that the GOP should have been having this election cycle were they still a functioning party, and were they not now being forced to pay in a lump for every cynical act of alarmism, obstructionism and posturing they have taken since the inauguration of Barack Obama.
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There is seemingly no limit to what coddling and overindulgent (or scared and intimidated) university administrators will do to keep identity politics-wielding student cultists happy and quiet
Late last year, an undercover reporter from Project Veritas posing as a student went to university administrators in several colleges to complain about somebody handing out copies of the US Constitution on campus. The Constitution, explains the student, is having a triggering effect and causing her panic attacks because of the document’s inherent racism and oppression.
We all know what comes next. Naturally, the university administrators tell the student to grow up and stop being silly, and that even if the United States Constitution (with all its brilliance and acknowledged flaws) was not an almost sacred document and the guarantor of every single one of their liberties, they would no sooner ban it from campus than they would ban any other book or document.
Except that that isn’t close to what actually happened. In real life, infantilising student welfare administrators listened with concerned attention to the undercover reporter’s tale about being made to feel unsafe by America’s foundational document, nodding along sympathetically at every turn.
And not only did these professors and equal opportunities directors fail in each case to push back against the reporter’s tremulous plea for their respective colleges to create a safer space by removing all copies of the Constitution from campus, in one case they actually offered – unprompted – to destroy the document there and then as a means of providing catharsis and healing to the student.
At Vassar College in New York state, the “student” told Kelly Grab, the Assistant Director of Equal Opportunity:
Last week something kind of happened on campus that kind of really upset me and I ended up having a panic attack.
[..] They were handing the Constitution out on campus. I don’t know, they were handing it out and as soon as I saw it, you know, I started to not be able to breathe, hyperventilating. My vision went blurry and I just – kind of just lost control.
[..] I didn’t think that this would happen, but I realised that the Constitution is kind of a trigger for me.
And rather than telling the undercover reporter to take a hike, Grab responded:
So what I think you are sharing with me is that your interaction in receiving this was harming, right? And that’s what we certainly want to avoid. We don’t want to limit people in exchanging ideas or having opposing viewpoints, but when it’s disruptive or causing harm…
While at Oberlin college in Ohio, Professor of History and Director of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Carol Lasser, tells the person she believes to be a student traumatised by the Constitution:
The Constitution is an oppressive document. The Constitution makes change slow, it intends to make change slow.
And then adds, sotto voce:
Right now, given who is in charge of the US House of Representatives, I think it’s a good thing.
Darn that pesky Constitution and its checks and balances for making it hard to impose the latest left-wing thinking on an uncertain America all at once. But at least it is also making it harder for those evil, knuckle-dragging Republicans to kill anyone who is not white, male and on at least $100k a year. Amiright?
But the best response comes from Colleen Cohen, then Director of Affirmative Action and Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College:
It’s horrible that this is something that has caused you such pain. And unless the people are from off campus we can’t keep them from disseminating it.
[..] Can I destroy this? Or do you want to hold on to it?
But until now, many of the horror stories had an apocryphal feel to them – or worse still, they smacked of Daily Mail alarmism. No more. Now, we have hard evidence of exactly how these inclusivity gurus interact with students, and the extreme trade-offs they are willing to make between academic freedom and the rights of the “oppressed”.
And in a battle between the foundational document of the United States government and the rights of any random student to have things which they dislike purged from campus, it turns out there is no contest. The Constitution literally goes in the shredder, while the tearful student (in these instances an undercover reporter) is continually validated and told that they have every right to be upset and to want censorship in response.
Goodness knows how many other similar conversations have been taking place on other university campuses, only with real students. In order to emphasise their own message, Project Veritas deliberately chose very liberal colleges as their guinea pigs – the undercover reporter certainly would have received a much more refreshingly forceful reaction had they attempted the same stunt at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, for example.
But regardless of the obscenity of college administrators actually shredding the United States Constitution (certainly doing so is itself a protected act of free speech), something is seriously wrong when those in authority either buy in to the same identity politics dogma as their students and see eye to eye with them, or when they perhaps vehemently disagree with their students but are too afraid for their jobs to stand up to the students and call them out for behaving in a manner utterly inconsistent with the ethos of a university.
So forget the shredding of the Constitution itself. Far more worrying in practical terms is the fact that when dealing with student complaints, the default response from university administrators is that the student’s feelings, whatever they happen to be, are sacrosanct, and that anything which they perceive as a threat or an insult should be treated as such by campus authorities.
And at this point, you have to defer to age – it is the older adults in charge of universities and campus diversity schemes who should exhibit the wisdom and character to push back on ludicrous student demands when they are made, and tell the adult baby students that their own personal feelings are in fact not the overriding concern of the university authorities. Right now, they are failing in this most important responsibility, and the thought of any university administrator dispensing much needed tough love is apparently completely unrealistic at Vassar and Oberlin colleges.
This undercover reporter managed to get at least three separate copies of the US Constitution shredded – literally fed into a shredder machine and destroyed while she stood and watched approvingly – simply by claiming that the document made her feel threatened and oppressed. Imagine the emboldening effect experienced by real students every day when their equally ludicrous demands are taken deadly seriously and cravenly pandered to by those in charge. Imagine the sense of entitlement and self-regard that it must build.
And imagine the almighty collision with reality which these students face when they graduate and (some of them, at least) enter the real world.
Postscript: This insufferable Vassar student’s aggrieved response to the Project Veritas undercover filming shows the level of intellectual disconnect here. The student is utterly incapable of understanding the reason for conducting the undercover filming, perceiving it as an attack on the confidentiality of real students (none of whom had anything more than a walk-on bit part) and the mental wellbeing of the very administrators who were so happy to destroy the US Constitution.
I don’t know how one can possibly reason with people like this, or communicate meaningfully with anybody who has percolated for so long in a victimhood culture, and who speaks only in the hierarchical grievance language of identity politics.
While there are things we can do now to change the way we raise kids, like re-learning the importance of building resilience and anti-fragility – what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger – in our children, it is hard to view the current cohort of identity politics practising students (appreciating that they are hopefully just about still a minority among their peers) as anything other than a lost generation, whose best and last hope rests on a harsh but highly instructive collision with the real world after graduation.
That is, if they survive the impact.
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Semi-Partisan Politics 