UK Current Affairs

The Other European Election

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

 

EU British flags

You may not realise it, but there’s an election campaign in full swing at the moment.

No, not the one in the news where everyone screams about immigration and take turns accusing one other of being either fascists or traitors – that campaign is certainly happening, but it’s an exclusively British affair. The rest of Europe, on the other hand, is engrossed in quite a different campaign, focused on the policies and initiatives to be pursued by the European Union.

There’s a cuddly-looking German chap named Martin Schulz running for José Manuel Barroso’s soon-to-be-vacated job as President of the European Commission – in fact, Schulz is quite likely to win. He has been busily campaigning for the job, holding events in cities throughout Europe, but you won’t see him talking to prospective voters anywhere in Britain. People here would be bemused to see him even if he came, failing to understand the significance of the role he seeks or the details of his specific policies (such as they are).

In short – Britain is continuing its introspective (and perpetually unresolved) debate over whether or not to remain a member of the European Union, while the the twenty-seven other member states discuss how to shape and influence European policy, having already decided (or resigned themselves) to their secure place within the EU club. Guess whose voices are heeded and turned into tangible actions, and whose voice is either politely ignored or never heard at all?

He's running for President of something...
He’s running for President of something…

 

There is plenty of blame to go around for this wretched and depressingly familiar state of affairs.

The lions share of the blame must rest with successive British governments and prime ministers who failed to check back with the British people as the European Community (which won 66% approval in the 1975 referendum) slowly morphed into something much grander and more far-reaching than the common market that so appealed to the voters in Harold Wilson’s day. Each subsequent treaty and tightening of the ever-closer union served only to increase the disquiet and pushback against what was happening, and rather than hold a fresh debate over Britain’s membership or make ratification of the new treaties subject to a national referendum, the British government cut the people out of the loop on fundamental matters of sovereignty.

There is plenty of blame to be lavished on the europhiles, too. For decades now, their mantra has been that “of course Europe needs reform”, but that this can only be achieved with Britain as an active and participating member, not as a surly observer from the sidelines. Unfortunately, by continually fighting the eurosceptics to a draw, Britain’s negotiating stance has barely budged in all that time – we neither became deeply committed members at the vanguard of European policymaking, but neither did we leave our continental neighbours to their own devices.

But there is also blame for the eurosceptic movement, whose chief advocates have often been their own worst enemy when it comes to advancing their agenda. Doom-laden apocalyptic predictions of Britain’s demise within a suffocating EU were revealed time and again to be overblown. The EU was certainly a drag on economic growth and job creation, but  it was not the nail in the coffin of the UK as an independent entity that some insisted it would be.

More recently, eurosceptics – particularly UKIP – have been at fault for focusing so much of the debate on immigration, specifically the number of economic migrants entering the UK from eastern Europe in order to work. In their effort to ride the tiger of British anti-immigration sentiment, UKIP has become a lightning-rod for criticism about their real motivations (read: accusations of racism) and the immigration debate has drowned out many of the other eurosceptic points about loss of sovereignty, burden of regulation and misspent money.

In all of these failings, the British media have been complicit. Given the choice between explaining the technical workings of a byzantine EU organisation structure and policy debates or playing exciting footage of Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage ripping chunks out of each other in a televised debate, the press has consistently taken the low road, abdicating any real responsibility to inform and educate.

And so it is that with the European Parliament up for election and powerful EU positions also in play, the campaign in Britain is being fought almost exclusively along domestic political lines. If you like the Labour Party and plan to vote for them in the concurrent local council elections, chances are you will vote the same way when you fill in the European election ballot paper. Complex issues such as regulation or taxation of financial transactions, and other contentious policy debates that will occupy Europe in the months ahead, are covered only from the topmost level of detail (regulation good / regulation bad) with none of the detail and nuance that makes for informed decision-making.

This blog is unabashedly eurosceptic, appreciating what the EU has done to forge links between the nations of Europe and prevent further twentieth century bloodshed, but balking at the fact that the goals of ‘ever-closer union’ and the creation of a supra-national and undemocratically accountable superstate are being so vigorously pursued without the full cognisance or permission of the people of Europe. Nonetheless, given the extent to which EU laws, regulations and institutions are currently intertwined with the fabric of Britain, on balance it could well be better for Britain to enthusiastically embrace the EU than to maintain the current harmful ‘half-in, half-out’ status quo.

Today we in Britain truly do enjoy the worst of both worlds – subject to all of the rules and requirements of EU membership but only half-committed to the decision making process, and alarmingly ignorant of the European institutions and how they work. While a negotiated and amicable secession would be the best option, better to join France as the EU’s co-head cheerleader than remain dissatisfied on the margins any longer.

This is why David Cameron’s proposition to the electorate – that we vote Conservative in exchange for an in-out referendum in 2017 after certain nebulous ‘concessions’ have been negotiated for Britain – is so unappealing. Putting aside the fact that promises to hold referenda are routinely discarded by politicians without a second thought, endorsing this policy only condemns Britain to two more years of limbo and unnecessarily limited influence over EU policy while any potentially fruitless renegotiation takes place.

There are two parties who proudly distrust the British people to make an informed decision and advocate for continued membership of the European Union, public opinion be damned – but since the Liberal Democrats are likely to be wiped out as an electoral force at these elections based on current polling, Labour is the party to choose if you adhere to this vantage point. And this essentially makes it a two-horse race.

UKIP vs Labour. Amicable secession from the EU vs continued membership and slightly more enthusiastic engagement with Brussels. At this point either option will do. What we cannot, must not do is continue to have the same navel-gazing debate for another wasted decade.

If Britain is to continue going to the trouble and expense of sending elected representatives to Brussels (and Strasbourg), her people deserve a real European election campaign.

UKIP Take The Low Road

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

UKIP protest

 

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the relentless barrage of attacks on the party in recent days, but today marks the day that UKIP made a mistake, took a page from the conventional political handbook and played into their opponents hands. Their folly? Allowing three of their European election candidates to go running to the police, demanding that any demonstrators who call them ‘fascists’ or hurl other insults be arrested for committing a hate crime.

The Huffington Post reports:

Ukip has asked police officers to arrest demonstrators for a hate crime if they call their supporters “fascists” at a public meeting held by the party.

Three of the party’s European election candidates said, in a joint statement, that they had asked Sussex Police to arrest “any protestors who call our supporters ‘fascists’, hurl other abuse or any physical assault, for ‘hate crime’ or under the Public Order Act” at the Hove meeting on Tuesday night.

It has become fashionable in left-wing circles to talk about how UKIP represents next great fascist threat to the United Kingdom, and that its leader Nigel Farage is the reincarnation of Oswald Mosley with a sprinkling of Enoch Powell. Such outraged left-wing hysteria is only fuelled by the propensity of organisations that really should know better – such as Unite Against Fascism – to picket and protest UKIP’s political gatherings under the (either incredibly stupid or breathtakingly cynical) pretext that opposition to economic migration automatically equals racism.

That UKIP have been taking fire – often unfairly and excessively – from all sides is incontestable. But by doing what they claim to loathe, running to the government for protection and redress every time they get their feelings hurt in the rough and tumble of British political discourse, UKIP are undermining one of their most endearing aspects – the ‘no nonsense’ individualist approach that scoffs at today’s entitlements culture and the right to live life unoffended and unchallenged.

This impulse to hit back is partly understandable. For months, UKIP and their supporters have been heckled and jeered and accused of unpleasant things by every left-leaning organisation with a megaphone, while mainstream politicians rode the wave of anti-UKIP hysteria and stood in front of television cameras cynically repeating many of the same allegations and unpleasant talking points. For some in the party, used to seeing their own ‘kind’ on the receiving end of police harassment – for skirting too close to the wrong side of the law when speaking about immigration or gay marriage, for example –  it must be cathartic to imagine the police handcuffing and carting away the person who has heckled their every campaign stop or policy launch.

But just as opposing economic migration does not automatically make one a fascist, calling someone a fascist is not close to being a hate crime – fascists not being viewed as an especially sympathetic or endangered minority, for one reason. And if we as a country do decide to expand the (already overly-long) roll call of groups entitled to hate crime protection and the list of words whose utterance will prompt a police visit – to include new additions such as ‘hypocrite’ or ‘idiot’ for example – before long there will be no politicians, journalists or bloggers left.

One of UKIP’s core strengths – the thing that made them a breath of relatively fresh air in the very stale British political system – is the fact that they always pushed back against the growing nanny state-ism that values freedom from being offended over freedom of expression. What’s more, they have done this at a time when the bulk of British elite opinion has trended strongly in the other direction, almost sanctifying the ‘right’ of the individual to coast through life without ever being shocked or offended or insulted. Their motives for supporting free speech have not always been pure, but this is yet another indictment of the major political parties – the fact that it has often been left to a strident outlier party to speak out in defence of such a core British value.

At present, UKIP remain well placed to triumph at the upcoming European elections, but the result will be close and even the smallest missteps or scandals could tip the balance. If Nigel Farage’s party choose to surrender their successful and appealing ‘happy warrior’ image and replace it with the outraged snarl of the perpetually wronged victim, the danger is that they will start to resemble the very thing that their opponents accuse them of being – a sort of British National Party Lite, full of little-Englanders nursing a grudge.

UKIP have come too far – and enliven the British political debate too much – to allow this to happen.

The N-Word

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

N word

 

One special word has been trending heavily in the British media over the past week, but you are unlikely to have seen it spelled out in print or on screen. Like the character Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, prevailing opinion and political correctness (albeit of the most well-intentioned kind) decree that it shall not be uttered, but only alluded to or heavily disguised for fear of the harm that it may do in its raw form.

Lord Voldemort burst back into the British news this time when popular television host, columnist and author Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear fame) had to plead for his job after being caught uttering the word while reciting a rhyme. Such was the frenzied speculation over whether Clarkson had indeed said the word that the Daily Mirror, in possession of the video clip, hired forensic audio experts to analyse the soundtrack in an attempt to decipher the contentious mumbled phrase. In the event, Clarkson apologised as he has never apologised before (rightly so), and lives to offend another day.

But as usually happens when making policy based on political correctness and overwhelming fear of public opprobrium rather than sound reason, the application tends to be panicked, sporadic and contradictory. So it was that after the A-list Jeremy Clarkson was let off the hook with a ‘final warning’ from the BBC and allowed to keep his position despite actually saying the word out loud with his own mouth, the decidedly C-list David Lowe, a provincial radio DJ, was peremptorily asked by the Corporation to resign for unwittingly playing a song containing the same word.

(BBC policy apparently decrees that as you move up the fame hierarchy you can earn the right to skate closer to explicitly saying the word in public without being fired. If the BBC’s top ten stars banded together and offered up their annual vacation allowance and overtime, presumably they could sing the word in the style of a four-part Bach fugue at the start of the Nine O’Clock News.)

What is more concerning than a BBC television star’s casual utterance of the word or the network’s inconsistent treatment of those who fall foul of the complex web of unwritten rules that govern its use, though, is the craven way that the media, almost without exception, voluntarily choose to censor themselves when reporting these stories. Somewhere along the way it was decided that not only is it wrong to say the word in anger (quite rightly – no decent person should), neither is it okay to write or speak the word in the course of a dispassionate news broadcast. And so news consumers are patronised with that childish and awkward compromise, the N-word.

Make no mistake: the word-that-shall-not-be-named is a hateful thing. It brings forth horrible echoes of enslavement, beatings, lynchings and repression, the worst that humanity can do to its own kind. And within some people’s living memory it evokes painful recollections of segregation, discrimination, bullying, voter disenfranchisement and domestic terrorism. But driving the word out of the public discourse completely cannot undo any of these wrongs – the main effect is only to spare us from having to face up to the brutal connotations that come along with it. We may claim to disguise the word for fear of causing offence, but it is just as much an evasion to spare ourselves from feeling discomfort.

The comedian and great observer of human nature, Louis CK, captures this evasion-disguised-as-concern perfectly in his stand-up HBO special comedy routine, “Chewed Up”:

Everybody has different words that offend them, different things that they hear that they get offended by… To me, the thing that offends me the most, is every time that I hear “the N-word.” Not “nigger” by the way. I mean “the N-word.” Literally, whenever a white lady on CNN with nice hair says, “The N-word,” that’s just white people getting away with saying “nigger,” that’s all that is. They found a way to say “nigger.” “N-word!” It’s bullshit ’cause when you say “the N-word” you put the word “nigger” in the listener’s head. That’s what saying a word is. You say “the N-word” and I go “Oh, she means ‘nigger’.” You’re making me say it in my head! Why don’t you fuckin’ say it instead and take responsibility, with the shitty words you wanna say.

CK is right inasmuch as that journalists are not really letting themselves off the hook by referring to the ‘N-word’ rather than its expanded form. Since journalists are effectively planting the word in peoples heads when they refer to the ‘N Word’ in a story, all that refusing to spell or speak the word out in full does is imbue that specific arrangement of letters with some nonexistent, mythical power that must be feared and respected.

The media’s unwritten policy would be slightly more understandable if it applied equally to other racially derogatory terms, but this is not the case. When three football supporters were charged with racial aggravation for chanting the word “yid” at two football matches, the BBC reported on the story and included the word “yid” in the headline. And several years ago BBC Four broadcast a documentary entitled “Kike Like Me”, in which the film maker “goes on a personal journey to find out what it means to be Jewish in the modern world”. But no matter how clinical or non-aggressive the context may be, the word occupies an exalted place among the racial slurs requiring it alone to be diluted before publication.

Yes, the word ‘nigger’ is about as deeply unpleasant a word as can be said. Used as a derogatory term, it has an abiding power to hurt – your blogger speaks from occasional painful experience on the receiving end. But because the word is so hateful, let those in the business of reporting the news show the word’s use in anger to be the outrageous and insensitive thing that it is – by repeating it, straight-faced and in all of it’s ugliness, not by sugar-coating it in the form of a child’s euphemism.

If, in the year 2014, someone in a position of prominence still decides to use the word ‘nigger’ in a derogatory or throwaway manner, we shouldn’t report it euphemistically as though we were embarrassed children tattling about a schoolyard transgression or other act of naughtiness to a teacher – “he said the F-word, she said the C-word!” – we should report it with the honest and brutal simplicity that the facts dictate.

This isn’t school. We are all grown-ups here. So let’s reflect that in our journalism, and put the N-word to bed.

Abusing UKIP Supporters Will Backfire Horribly

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

UKIP attack

It’s official – there is nothing more fashionable in British politics than to accuse UKIP and their supporters of being closet (or indeed overt) racists. Everyone is at it, from the Scottish “artist” who has taken to painting over the party’s election billboards with grey paint to the scores of people who turned out to heckle and jeer at the UKIP public meeting in London on Wednesday.

Cooler heads might wonder if opposing unchecked immigration from European Union countries (as bad a policy as that may be) is actually more of an economic argument than a race-based one, and that fearing competition from eastern European workers actually indicates rather a high degree of respect for their work ethic and productivity rather than the sneering superiority of an English racial supremacist. But cooler heads are in short supply, and the three main political parties (with some noble exceptions in their ranks) are only too eager to pile on the attack to stave off their own looming electoral humiliation.

The fact that organisations such as Unite Against Facism think it worthwhile to picket UKIP events speaks to the success with which the liberal left have been able to equate opposition to economic migration with racism and nationalism, but more importantly it cheapens and diminishes the important work that they do. UAF rightly stand against racism and bigotry wherever it threatens, but using their name and status to attack a legitimate and moderate political party will rightly be construed by many as “crying wolf”, lessening the impact of their more considered protests.

The commentariat class seems amazed and bewildered that the non-stop repetition of the UKIP-racism mantra and frequent articles about wayward UKIP candidates is not causing a mass exodus among UKIP’s supporters. According to the conventional wisdom, we should all read these stories and extrapolate the bizarre or hateful opinions of the few to represent the many – if one UKIP candidate turns out to be an epic racist, so must all of the others, and the people who support them.

If they had slightly more awareness of their own personal biases and a lot less contempt for the British electorate, these commentators might realise that the yawning gap between reality and what they think should be happening results from the fact that the British people, broadly Eurosceptic and increasingly supportive of UKIP’s goals, are perfectly able to distinguish between the unhinged crazy people who exist at the fringe of a political party (and sometimes sneak through the vetting process) and the general goals and intentions of the party as a whole.

Critique the ideas, don't attack the messengers
Critique the ideas, don’t attack the messengers

 

UKIP’s stubbornly persistent high poll numbers are not some terrible reflection of the fact that British people turn a blind eye to racism and bigotry, but rather reflect the fact that voters know that the racist and bigoted people seizing the spotlight do not speak for the whole, and that opposition to economic migration (right or wrong) does not equate to racism.

The distinction is lost on much of the mainstream media and those in the public who are opposed to UKIP’s aims, largely because it suits their purposes to tarnish a growing political party and electoral threat with the toxic smear of racism. But these people delude themselves if they think that calling a moderate political party “racist” and insinuating that their many supporters are either nationalist sympathisers or credulous fools will come without a significant cost.

UKIP devotes its energies campaigning for what it sees – again, rightly or wrongly – as Britain’s national interests and has little to say about the main political parties other than pointing out that when it comes to addressing the inexorable growth of the European project, there is nothing to choose between them. The established parties, however, bereft of any honest or coherent arguments of their own when it comes to defining Britain’s relationship with Europe, have resorted en masse to base character attacks and smears.

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats once liked the idea of a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, but now they disown the idea, the thought of consulting the British people only being appealing when they could be trusted to give the desired answer. David Cameron talks in woolly platitudes and promises negotiated EU reforms and British exemptions that he is unlikely to be able to deliver. None of the political parties who have had the chance to attempt meaningful reform of Britain’s relationship with the EU have followed through on their prior promises, and so the public are hardly fools – let alone racists – to reach out to the one party that has not yet let them down on the matter.

Some of the more intelligent critiques of UKIP have attempted to draw comparisons with the Tea Party movement in the United States. This is a lot closer to the truth. Nigel Farage would have no truck with Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (despite the attempts of some to draw out similarities), but would probably get on famously with the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Rand Paul of Kentucky, both of whom, for all their flaws, have strong small government credentials.

Read UKIP’s manifesto or campaign literature and what you will see overall is a small-government oriented, non-interventionist party that believes in maximum personal freedom. They even support libertarian goals such as the establishment of a flat-rate income tax. Like the American Tea Party, an element of cognitive dissonance creeps in when you observe the discomfort with/opposition to gay marriage, but the general thrust of their policies is toward empowering the individual over the government, and the British government over undemocratic decrees from Brussels.

There is no excuse for ignorance about UKIP’s past and present policies – they are readily available on the internet, and any British political commentator still willing to throw around the accusation of racism should be able to draw on supporting evidence from these manifestos in order to maintain their credibility. But the anti-UKIP brigade will search in vain – the ‘smoking gun’ of racist or nationalist invective is simply not there to be found.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” In the panic and scramble by the British political establishment to respond to the surging popularity of UKIP, there has been talk of events and an inordinate amount of talk about individual people – rogue candidates and their wacky, off-message personal views. The volume of discussion – and intelligent criticism – of UKIP’s actual policies, however, has been negligible. Small minds predominate.

Interestingly, the one and only time that UKIP’s ideas were put to the test thus far (in nationally televised debates),UKIP triumphed and the establishment lost, badly. So is it any wonder that armed with such unpopular policies of their own and facing a huge credibility gap, the major political parties and their respective cheerleaders in the media have been only too happy to promulgate the idea that UKIP is a racist party?

The only problem with their strategy is this: millions upon millions of normal, decent and tolerant people support UKIP’s stance on Europe and other matters. The establishment’s response to this fact so far has been either to pen hand-wringing and patronising columns fretting about how the public’s inchoate anger at politics-as-usual is causing them to be duped like fools into supporting a nascent far-right party, or to accuse them outright of harbouring racist views. In other words, as the establishment would have it, UKIP supporters are either racists or gullible fools. The third option – that they might be semi-intelligent people with a legitimate political point – is not widely accepted.

On Thursday 22 May, the British political establishment – Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative alike, and their friends in the press – will find out whether shaming and insulting up to one third of the electorate in the run-up to an election increases or decreases their resolve as they enter the voting booth.

If the aftermath is messy and humiliating for them, it will be no more or less than they deserve.

End The Scandal Of Squalid Army Accommodation

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Catterick Garrison

 

An overlooked article in the Telegraph reveals that serving British soldiers continue to endure crumbling substandard living accommodation at a time when the political elites in London are more focused on averting a tube strike and pandering to the whims of the RMT union and its overpaid train drivers than looking after the welfare of those who do a truly difficult and irreplaceable job.

The article quotes a complaint written to the letter’s page of Soldier Magazine, detailing conditions that should rightly cause many red faces at the Ministry of Defence:

The letter from an unnamed soldier complained: “We are constantly without hot water, have only three showers per platoon and not all of them work.

The rooms at Somme Barracks in Catterick are “falling to bits”, the soldier wrote.

“We have made every attempt to make them bearable to live in, but their poor condition is now starting to affect the lad’s morale.”

The response given to the soldier by the Ministry of Defence spokesman is breathtakingly dismissive and arrogant, and is worth quoting in full:

The accommodation at Somme Barracks is not condemned. The MOD has already invested some £1.2 million in improving the site in 2011 and 2012, redecorating and upgrading a number of areas including flooring, toilet facilities and utilities rooms.

We will continue to invest in the barracks and are replacing boilers supplying hot water to blocks 11 and 12. This work should be finished by May 2, 2014.

Comprehensive maintenance service is provided but occupants must report any problem promptly to the help desk or repair work may be delayed.

Essentially, the government’s response to a serving soldier’s complaint about appalling accommodation is to call him a liar, boast about supposed renovations that clearly delivered no noticeable improvement when they were completed two years ago, and then to blame the squalid conditions on the soldiers themselves, claiming that they did not report the issue to the help desk as one would a malfunctioning BlackBerry.

Compare the serving soldier’s description of substandard British army accommodation with this grim account of army housing in backward-sliding Russia, taken from the excellent book “Putin’s Russia” by the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya:

[The soldier’s] home is a dreadful officers’ hostel with peeling stairwells, half derelict and eery … The windows of many now uninhabited flats are dark … We go up to the second floor, and behind a peeling door is a squalid, spartan room … There is no hot water, and it is cold, draughty and uncomfortable.

It is a much overlooked outrage that some in the British army live in accommodation that can be described in very similar terms to Russian army lodgings, the Russian army being synonymous with mistreatment of its soldiers. The comparison is even more galling when one considers the fact that the Chief of the Defence Staff earns £250,000 per year, and the Permanent Undersecretary of Defence an impressive £185,000 for his bureaucratic skills.

The story has gained very little traction in the media aside from the Daily Telegraph story, and with much of the national media’ attention focused on the upcoming European elections it is unlikely to do so. But even if the Conservative-led coalition government remains committed to its policy of diminishing Britain’s military capability though underinvestment and spending cuts, ministers could at least ensure that all serving personnel have the dignity of adequate housing.