Britain

John Bolton’s Alternative American Position On Brexit

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Former United States UN ambassador John Bolton provides a refreshingly different – and much more authentically American – position on Brexit to that of the sitting president

In marked contrast to President Obama – who treats his country’s closest ally with utter contempt by urging the British people to accept a continued loss of sovereignty and self-governance which America would never tolerate for herself – there are a number of other, more respectful American public figures who treat British democracy with the respect it deserves.

Some of these individuals not only recognise that the EU referendum is a sovereign decision for the British people alone to make without unwelcome hectoring from the Oval Office, but also appreciate that Brexit is the far better outcome for Britain, America and the world.

One such person is former US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who writes in the Telegraph:

President Barack Obama embodies the conventional wisdom, unabashedly supporting continued construction of a European superstate. Obama’s fascination with Brussels, however, reflects his own statist inclinations. His lack of international leadership perfectly mirrors the EU’s timid, ineffective defence of its own interests and values. Of course Obama loves the EU.

Arguing that today’s EU is collectively stronger than a continent of free nation-states misreads history, distorting it through a quasi-theological lens. The EU is less than the sum of its parts. Its politico-military “unity” is purest symbolism. Flags and anthems not only do not embody unity, but instead mask a poisonous, paralysing disarray.

Nor is unity reflected in incessant affirmations of Europe’s economic size, as if it were truly integrated. Indeed, if Europe had single-mindedly pursued a single market, abjuring political abstractions, it could have achieved more economic integration and broader political consensus together, rather than getting wrapped around the axle of “ever closer union”. And just as symbolic gestures do not ensure unity, reversing those symbolic gestures does not forestall Britain’s ongoing descent from representative government into Europe’s bureaucratic oligarchy. David Cameron’s proposed changes to London’s relationship with Brussels in no way addresses, let alone cures, the systemic failures inherent in EU decision-making structures.

Brilliant, stirring stuff. This blog does not often  share common cause with prominent neoconservatives in the model of John Bolton, but in this case he is absolutely correct. The point about Europe being less than the sum of its parts is particularly astute and counters the lazy (and never supported) trope that the EU amplifies our economic, military and diplomatic output, when in fact the European Union does no such thing.

The EU is far from a single, integrated economy – as John Bolton goes on to argue, the single-minded obsession with forging a political union has in many ways actually detracted from the creation of a true single market, such as could ever exist in a continent with such diverse cultures and no common language. Therefore, if we vote for Brexit, Britain will not be leaving some dynamic and prosperous unified economy – we will be leaving a political bloc dominated by an ill-fated currency union which imposes utter economic misery on the south and imposes financial obligations in the form of necessary transfer payments with the northern countries are unwilling to meet.

Bolton is also absolutely correct when he turns his analysis to the military and diplomatic angle:

America is partially at fault for the EU mirage because Nato, largely a US creation, has been so successful. For decades, sheltering under Washington’s military umbrella, Europe, including Britain, has recklessly shrivelled defence budgets and increased social-welfare expenditures. The results are not pretty. The EU has not only retreated from the world stage, it is becoming incompetent in ensuring security within its own “borders”. Europe’s loss of defence capabilities, as well as will and resolve, are deeply inimical to defending the West against today’s increasing global threats.

[..] If advocates of Britain remaining in the EU haven’t noticed, America’s international commitments are under attack from several populist directions in our ongoing presidential campaign. Some, especially among Democrats, simply do not value national security, preferring to focus on domestic issues, hoping – God forbid – to make America look more like social-democratic Europe. Others, especially among Republicans, think America’s allies have got a free ride, don’t appreciate US efforts, and should be made to fend for themselves. If Britain votes to stay In, this view may prevail across Washington. So be careful what you wish for.

These criticisms are entirely justified. Though Britain does best of the European powers in terms of maintaining any form of credible military, our armed forces have been pared back relentlessly while money is funnelled in an unearned peace dividend toward vote-winning social programmes.

And appallingly, many of the worst cutbacks have taken place under the current supposedly conservative administration of David Cameron, whose government’s disastrous stewardship of defence matters has left Britain with no maritime patrol capability and (far more crucially), no aircraft capability until the two (or possibly just one) new carriers currently being built come into service.

America has traditionally regarded Britain as her most stalwart ally because we have maintained moderate expeditionary capabilities together with the political will to use them where necessary. The political will has clearly ebbed away, as evidenced by the recent debacle with Parliament’s response to the Syrian crisis, and the expeditionary capabilities are gravely imperilled too. The Pentagon has always operated on the assumption that Britain could be relied upon to field an entire division operating independently of American forces in any joint action, but this is now being re-evaluated.

Part of the EU’s problem is that it has pretensions of significance on the world stage which are simply not matched by its willingness to divert money from generous social programmes to pay for them. Our defence is literally being guaranteed by the American working poor, who go without the kind of welfare perks (like working tax credits) and government-provided universal healthcare that we take for granted, in order to fund the American military machine.

Then there is also the issue of duplication. As well as spending far less on defence spending in real terms, the stubborn refusal of EU member states to give up the last vestige of sovereignty by abolishing national armies and contributing to joint European armed services means that there is massive duplication of HQ and some core infrastructure, while not nearly enough of everything else. There are probably enough European generals and admirals to fully man a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and yet Europe does not possess even one comparable ship (to America’s ten).

In all of these ways, the European Union fails to pull its weight, let alone punch above its own weight, and actively contributes to making Europe far less than the sum of its parts.

As Bolton rightly notes, flags and anthems do not embody unity. And in the European Union’s case, these ostentatious pretensions of statehood only mark the desperation of certain political elites to escape the irritant of accountability to their own electorates and instead dissolve themselves into the unaccountable anonymity of Brussels supranational governance. Or – to see the project in the kindest possible light – they reflect a desperate effort to create a single European demos through sheer force of will, the geopolitical equivalent of “if you build it, they will come”.

But no European demos came, and none is coming. The entire European Union is built on an imaginary foundation and cannot hope to succeed, let alone win the respect and devotion of an informed citizenry.

Ambassador John Bolton gets it. Tragically, Barack Obama does not.

 

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Announcing The Leave Alliance

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Leave Alliance Launch

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A campaign that Semi-Partisan Politics is proud to support

I have written a lot of uneducated bilge about the European Union in my time.

My natural instincts – supporting democracy, self-determination, the nation state and accountable government – were generally sound, but too often I lapsed into lazy confirmation bias and weak, borrowed rhetoric when arguing for Britain’s independence from Brussels.

I would still be churning out even more bilge today, were it not for the eureferendum.com site and the group of activist bloggers who are coalescing around Dr. Richard North and Flexcit, that rigorous, comprehensive plan for safely extracting Britain from European political union while minimising risk.

If this blog has gone somewhat quiet on the finer policy details of the Brexit question over the past year, sticking to the bigger picture, it is only because through slowly becoming familiar with this body of work, I have come to realise how much I have yet to learn and understand about the workings of the EU and the international regulatory environment – and how much I thought I understood that turned out to be completely wrong.

The upshot is this: this referendum should not be about David Cameron’s fraudulent “renegotiation” deal (even though it is yet more evidence of the EU’s inability to reform even under existential threat), any more than it should be about the arbitrary and misleading statistics about jobs saved or threatened, hospitals built or universities closed. All of these alarmist talking points can be fought to a draw on the 24-hour news channels by the SW1 talking head armies of the establishment Leave and Remain campaigns.

This referendum – this rare, great opportunity that we have been given – should be about our democracy. It should be about who governs Britain, how they govern Britain and how we exercise oversight over the people who make the key decisions affecting our lives. And one thing is certain: the more people learn about the true nature of the European Union – and the more they are encouraged to think like engaged citizens rather than fearful consumers – the more they come to realise that Brexit is an essential first step toward reclaiming our democracy.

That’s what The Leave Alliance is about. TLA is an alternative to the dumbed-down, uneducated major campaigns battling it out for lead designation in the referendum campaign, whose dismal and unforgivable failure to embrace a properly worked through plan for Brexit – and then promote it in the media – means that we are now fighting the referendum campaign with our hands tied behind our backs, David Cameron chuckling to himself all the while.

The Leave Alliance launches later today, in Westminster, and it will be a campaign that engaged citizens and thinking eurosceptics and Brexiteers across the country can actually be proud to support. It is a campaign which understands that Brexit is part of a process of much-needed democratic renewal, not a fixed destination in itself. And it is a campaign which will never condescend to the British people by reducing this great question of human governance and statecraft to a disingenuous war of competing statistics.

If you feel let down and embarrassed by the well-funded but utterly amateurish Leave campaigns, then The Leave Alliance offers you a home for this referendum campaign.

If you get angry when bumbling Johnny-Come-Latelys like Boris Johnson blunder onto the Brexit scene, stealing the limelight while making a complete hash of arguments which more intelligent eurosceptic voices have been making for years and even decades, then The Leave Alliance is for you.

And if you read Semi-Partisan Politics and generally find yourself agreeing with what is written here, then I ask you to follow my lead and abandon the mainstream Leave campaigns who are cheerfully leading us to defeat, and instead support The Leave Alliance, whose strong commitment to eurosceptic principles and intellectual rigour will campaign for Brexit – and to keep the flame of genuine democracy alive in Europe – for as long as it takes to achieve our cherished goal.

The Leave Alliance

Wednesday 16th March, 2.30PM

The Council Room

One Great George Street

London, SW1P 3AA

Donate here.

 

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Why The Real Elites Consistently Support Britain’s EU Membership

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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Professional and social elites are more likely to oppose Brexit for narrow personal reasons – which makes them bad citizens

James Delingpole writes in the Spectator that the real dividing line when predicting someone’s position on Brexit is where they fall on the posh / oik spectrum:

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit?

[..] So there I was at dinner the other evening with a delightful, erudite Old Etonian friend of mine. Let us call him ‘Kevin’ (not his real name). Kevin has an accent so deliciously plummy that if you could somehow tin it and sell it to the Chinese you’d become a billionaire. He is immensely cultured, civilised, wise and sensitive. I agree with him on everything, so naturally, when I asked him his views on Brexit and he launched into his eloquent diatribe on why he believed — and long had done — that the EU was the Abomination of Desolation, I listened in a state of near-ecstasy.

Kevin’s beautifully modulated speech went on for at least ten minutes. (There was hardly a shortage of material.) Then, suddenly, something weird happened. About 30 seconds before the end, Kevin shifted tack, and explained (or actually, hardly explained at all) that for all these reasons the only logical position was for Britain to remain in EU. Something to do with Europe being a lovely place and our having a moral duty to help it set the tone, I think.

And goes on to draw a interesting parallel with the Thatcher era:

What does all this tell us about snobbery and Tory politics? Quite a depressing bit, I’ve begun to realise. You can see much the same sort of thing going on in the Thatcher era. Who were her greatest loyalists, the ones most in tune with her radical programme? Why, they were grammar-school types with slightly suspect accents, such as Robin Harris and Norman Tebbit — not the plummy-voiced grandees such as Heseltine et al, who were the ones who eventually did for her.

This is also true, I think, of the upper social echelons’ attitude towards Nigel Farage. It’s not that they disagree with much of what he says: how could they, when he’s so refreshingly candid and reactionary and un-PC? But they’ve persuaded themselves that, like Ukip, he’s just a bit too spivvy and downmarket to deserve their open affiliation. This enables them to have their cake and eat it: privately enjoying his every home truth but never being tainted by that awkward, embarrassed feeling which tends to accompany frankly expressed views on matters like immigration.

Delingpole sees this as an elitism thing: the closer you are to the establishment or to the top of your field or profession, the more likely to are to have vested in the current  order of things and the more likely you are to sense Brexit (sometimes justifiably) as a threat to your current position.

I think that this probably holds true in all manner of fields, from education (How many university Vice Chancellors are brave enough to bite the hand that feeds them recycled British taxpayer money?) to the arts (for the same reason) to the world of business, which understandably cares a lot about economic stability and not so much about democracy.

But this blog maintains that one’s stance on the EU referendum is also determined by whether you consider yourself a citizen or a consumer first and foremost. As Delingpole’s anecdote makes clear, many of the European Union’s biggest advocates within the British establishment freely concede and attack its antidemocratic nature, but still refuse to countenance leaving the club. They are unable take this logical step because they are thinking with their wallets and their social reputation in mind, rather than the good of the country.

By contrast, someone at the sharp end of globalisation – who has experienced the negative aspects of free trade and free movement of people on their employment, living standards and public services far more than the person living in Mayfair – is more likely to vote on the kind of issues that a thinking citizen should vote on, because they are much more likely to be directly touched by those issues.

As this blog recently noted:

If you have grown up and prospered under the status quo, with Britain as a vassal state of a larger and ever-more tightly integrating political union, then it takes an extraordinary amount of curiosity, empathy or insight to come to any conclusion other than that the EU has been a resounding success on all counts. By contrast, if you are self-employed or work in a semi-skilled or unskilled job at the sharp end of globalisation, you are more likely to be negatively impacted not just by immigration, but by the inability of your vote to effect any kind of meaningful political change in Britain thanks to the cross-party pro-EU consensus.

[..] It is those who think primarily with their wallets, as consumers first and foremost, who are most likely to be susceptible to the Remain campaign’s Project Fear and scaremongering tactics about the hysterically hyped “costs” of leaving the European Union, while those who think as engaged citizens and global stakeholders who are most likely to question the European project.

That doesn’t mean that the Oik (in Delingpole’s parlance) is not also often voting for his or her self interest. They may well want to see Brexit as part of a broader package of counterproductice protectionist measures, which would inevitably do Britain more harm than good. But regardless of their personal motivation, they are more likely to discuss the issue of Brexit in terms of policy and of democracy. The oiks thus often act like a better, more engaged citizens than the elitists who lazily support the Remain camp to virtue-signal their distaste at UKIP while overlooking the democratic question.

As for myself, I enjoyed the delights of a state education, worked to get myself into Oxbridge, but then left Cambridge University and went to Warwick. I suppose all of that places me firmly in the “Oik” category, a position I shall hold with even more pride now that it is also a marker for principled euroscepticism.

 

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A Chuka Umunna Leadership Bid Now Would Destroy The Labour Party

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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The current Labour Party will not transition seamlessly from Jeremy Corbyn to Chuka Umunna, and any leadership coup proposing an Umunna-like replacement for Corbyn will make the Republican Party presidential primary look like a model of restraint and civility

Clearly the EU referendum and upcoming Budget are not providing enough excitement for Fraser Nelson, because he is also busy agitating for an immediate (and almost certainly ill-fated) coup to depose Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership of the Labour Party and replace him with exactly the kind of person who the Labour grassroots detest with every fibre of their souls.

Yes, that would be Chuka Umunna:

It’s the Ides of March today, and there are pitifully few signs of a Labour plot. I was on ITV’s The Agenda last night with Chuka Umunna, one of the putative successors to Jeremy Corbyn, who was teased by Tom Bradby about his ambitions. He came out with the usual hedged denials (“there’s not a vacancy.,, I’ve said I would never say never”) but then came out with the rationale for ousting Corbyn.

The problem: most Labour members were not members this time last year. The party has been taken over by Corbynistas and while Labour MPs could technically change the leadership it’s harder to change the membership. Chuka agreed- but then gave the democratic case for deposing Corbyn, in defiance of the wishes of party members.

“Clearly, Jeremy has a very strong support amongst our membership. But then if you look at the parliamentary Labour party they have a direct mandate from 9.3m Labour voters. If you look at the research on things like Trident the parliamentary party would be closer to the views of the voters than the members and there’s that tension.”

So how to resolve the tension? I do hope the Labour moderates come up with a way soon, and bring this sorry pantomime to a close. PS At the end of The Agenda, guests are invited to present a fantasy front page. Mine was intended to give some encouragement to the Labour moderates.

Fraser Nelson’s pitch for a Chuka Umunna leadership bid consisted of this rather unlikely picture:

My views on Chuka remain unchanged until new evidence (of the non-hagiographic kind) prompt me to revise them:

Just what the Labour Party needs. Another dazed and confused London career politician stumbling shell-shocked and bewildered beyond the M25 in a belated effort to understand why so many working and middle class people – Britain’s strivers – spurned his party at the general election, totally unconvinced by a Labour manifesto and message conceived in Islington but barely embraced even in Hampstead.

At a time when David Cameron is building an inclusive Tory cabinet which conspicuously harnesses the talents of women and MPs from working class backgrounds, for Labour to respond by crowning a well-moneyed, metropolitan, UKIP-hating elitist such as Umunna would only serve to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about the party.

And those suspicions are that the modern, virtue-signalling, style-over-substance Labour Party would rather dwindle to an angry, self-righteous, ideologically pure talking shop for the London dinner party set than do the hard work of rebuilding in order to actually help the people it claims to represent; that it lacks the wisdom to recall its ideological roots or the humility to reach out to its scorned party base.

The notion that the Labour Party as it is presently constituted could go from being led by Jeremy Corbyn to the stewardship of someone like Chuka Umunna without about three transitional leaders to ease the way is absolute fantasy. While New Labour centrists and wistful media types may wish it were otherwise, the Blairite Labour Party is in a state where it cannot simply be rejuvenated with a click of the fingers and a telegenic new leader.

At this point, even managing to replace Corbyn with somebody like Ed Miliband (himself considered unpalatably left wing by much of the country) would be a major achievement, and even that is highly unlikely. The fact that Dan Hodges – the columnist whose finger is closest to the pulse of Labour Party plots – thinks that the party’s current greatest hope is Angela Eagle, of all people, shows just how far the ground has shifted to the Left under Labour.

Fraser Nelson was hopefully just making a lighthearted joke when he suggested that Chuka Umunna succeed Jeremy Corbyn after a leadership coup which would be sure to enrage over half of the party’s membership. Because to even attempt to go from Jeremy Corbyn to Chuka Umunna in one step would precipitate such a period of rancour and infighting that it would make the Republican Party’s rage at its ongoing takeover by Donald Trump look like the model of civility and restraint.

 

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Jeremy Clarkson: Refreshingly Frank Federalist Or Craven Castrato?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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One Jeremy Clarkson column, two very different reactions

To say that Breitbart’s James Delingpole disagrees with me about Jeremy Clarkson’s column calling for Britain’s dissolution into a federal European state would be putting it mildly.

While I praised Clarkson for being one of the only people in the whole sorry Remain campaign to honestly and openly admit their love for the European Union, Delingpole accuses him of “chopping off his own balls”:

There are lots of piss-poor columnists out there who you can easily imagine churning out this kind of bilge. But Clarkson really isn’t one of them. For a start, he has forged his entire career on tell-it-like-it-is-outspokenness and political incorrectness (especially where uppity foreigners are concerned). Also, he’s not stupid. The reason his collected columns tend to go to the top of the bestseller lists is partly because they’re funny but partly because they’re true. He has a gift for boiling down the political concerns of our time into a punchy but chatty style, replete with colourful images, witty asides and broad jokes which make them accessible to everyone.

Here, though, he’s not doing any of that. There is no way – in the unlikely event that he could ever bring himself to reread those words – that Clarkson will ever be able to look at that column and go: “Yup. I really nailed it, there.” Because he patently hasn’t. This isn’t just a fail. It is, by some margin, the worst Jeremy Clarkson column ever. Or at least the worst of the many I have read and (invariably) admired.

In fact what strikes me most is that here is the very exemplar of the kind of column you write when your heart just isn’t in it, when you’re making an argument you simply don’t believe in.

[..] I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at Clarkson in the same way again, however good his Top Gear replacement series is, because all I’ll be thinking is: “You had a choice, Jeremy. Either to go to the wall for the cause you believe in. Or to sell your soul to something you don’t believe in just because you live near the Prime Minister in the Cotswolds, share the same circle of posho friends and want to curry favour with the smart set.”

By contrast, I remarked:

But what is surprising (and actually rather impressive) is the full-throated way in which Clarkson embraces his support of the EU.

Unlike nearly every leading politician and personality in the Remain camp, Clarkson does not attempt to flatter us or pretend that he “gets” our concerns about Brussels gradually usurping our democracy. Unlike the deceitful-yet-ingratiating Sajid Javid, Clarkson makes no promises to go back to ranting at Brussels the moment he has helped doom us to continued membership of the EU (though in Clarkson’s case, more ranting is all but guaranteed).

Jeremy Clarkson actually does something which almost nobody in the intellectually squalid, fear-based Remain campaign dares to do – he owns his pro-Europeanism and wears it as a badge of honour, rather than doing what so many Turncoat Tories and others have done, prancing around like the World’s Biggest Eurosceptic before meekly running to David Cameron’s heel and supporting Britain’s continued membership of the EU as soon as the prime minister snapped his fingers.

Delingpole is also adamant that Clarkson’s full-throated support of European federalism was part of an effort to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and his circle of friends, whereas I tend to be a bit more generous, believing simply that because they both came of age during a long period of British decline, Clarkson and David Cameron almost inevitably share the same defeatist, pessimistic view of Britain’s capabilities and prospects as an independent country:

Our prime minister and foreign secretary may hold our country, its history and present capabilities in astonishingly low esteem, but fortunately the same cannot be said for many of the people. Many of us correctly believe Britain to be one of the few truly indispensable nations on Earth, that our contributions to the arts, sciences, commerce and global security are almost unmatched, and that we could throw our weight around in the world accordingly, if only we cared to stand up for our own national interest once in awhile.

But such views are unheard of outside the Chipping Norton set, the middle class clerisy in general and the fawning circle of friends and admirers surrounding David Cameron (of whom Jeremy Clarkson is one). These people, many of whom came of age at the peak of 1970s declinism and economic doldrums, have at their core a deep pessimism and scepticism about the ability of Britain to survive and prosper as an independent actor on the world stage.

So deeply have they internalised this self-doubt and self-loathing that no matter how much evidence you show them to the contrary – the examples of Australia and New Zealand, say, somehow surviving in the world without being part of an Asia Pacific Union and sharing a common parliament and court – they bat it away without even stopping to think.

Regardless of his motivation, I still think that Jeremy Clarkson made a more honest case for Britain staying in the EU than nearly anyone else in the Remain camp, with their bogus scaremongering statistics and artfully disguised vested interests.

Whether that happens to be Clarkson’s own honestly expressed view, or if he was channelling the honest view of others (like our prime minister, who is too cowardly to talk frankly about his commitment to Brussels, or nearly any other subject), remains a dirty secret known only to Jezza himself.

And maybe Delingpole is right that the column reads as though Clarkson doesn’t have his heart in it. But still: what other high profile public figure has expressed their desire for Britain’s participation in a federal European state so strongly? The answer is none. Tumbleweeds.

And that alone makes Jeremy Clarkson’s column quite significant, if not personally brave.

 

British television presenter Clarkson returns to his home in west London

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