Culture

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 27 – Ohio University, Tear Down This Wall

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Ohio University - Trump 2016 - Chalk - Hispanic Latino Student Union - Cultural Sensitivity

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At Ohio University, mortal offence is in the eye of the beholder

Another day, another American university cravenly submitting to the identity politics bullies and their weaponised mental weakness.

Now, the president of Ohio University has apologised to students in a letter because unknown other students dared to exercise their First Amendment rights by spraying a political sentiment (expressing support for Donald Trump – pass the smelling salts!) on the university’s famous Graffiti Wall.

The Athens Post reports:

The graffiti wall by Bentley Hall was found painted over with the words “Trump 2016” and “Build The Wall!!” on Thursday.

Some Ohio University students were upset by the display.

“I felt disgust, frustration and I expected more from this campus,” Joshelyn Smith, a senior studying communication and public advocacy, said.

The Hispanic and Latino Student Union at OU put together an emergency meeting that took place in OU’s Multicultural Center after finding out about the mural and ultimately painted over it at 3 p.m. Thursday.

“The goal of the meeting was to start a discussion,” Carla Triana, Hispanic and Latino Student Union president, said. “We heard about (the mural) at 9 this morning, and we had to do something instantaneously. We had to educate people on why this was offensive.”

Yes – clearly nothing was more important than holding an “emergency meeting” to explain why declaring support for a political candidate on a wall honouring free speech is so “offensive” as to warrant seeking out and punishing the perpetrators.

Sadly, much as we saw with the college Equal Opportunities administrators who gleefully shredded the US Constitution in an attempt to soothe the hurt feelings of a student (really an undercover reporter) who claimed to feel “triggered” by the document, Ohio University was lightning quick to apologise to the outraged students.

Even though these students are nothing but bullies, attempting to use their hurt feelings as a weapon to shut down the fundamental free speech rights of others, Ohio University leaders could not find it within themselves to stand up to the identity politics cultists and tell them to grow a thicker skin.

Campus Reform reports:

The president of Ohio University sent a campus-wide email expressing sympathy for those “hurt” by pro-Trump slogans written on a free speech wall last week.

[..] The Hispanic and Latino Student Union called an emergency meeting—attended by university president Roderick McDavis— to “start a discussion … on why this was offensive,” after which they decided to paint over the messages.

[..] McDavis assured attendees that he shared their concerns, and was working to accelerate the development of a cultural competency element for freshman orientation, following that up the next day with a message to the campus community discussing the “beauty and power” of words in the context of sympathizing with those offended by the Trump-inspired messages.

“Yesterday, I met with students and members of our Hispanic/Latino community who saw words that troubled them on the Graffiti Wall,” McDavis wrote. “Indeed, this wall is a place of free speech and expression; however, the words painted were troubling because they had a very different meaning to some than they may have to others viewing the message or even to those who painted the message.”

But this frantic attempt by McDavis to mollify the angry students by adopting their identity politics language and accepting the premise of their complaint is exactly the problem. When you move away from an objective standard of what constitutes unacceptable (or “problematic”) free speech toward a worldview where speech can be restricted or punished based on the subjective feelings and interpretation of certain third parties, then you no longer have anything like freedom of speech.

If the words “Trump 2016” or “Build the Wall” were troubling to some students because they chose to interpret them as “I hate Hispanic/Latino people” rather than “let’s adopt this policy in a (counter-productive) attempt to enforce our border”, does this mean that the political idea can no longer be expressed for fear of upsetting those who apply the worst possible interpretation of the words in their minds?

What about other political statements? If one follows this logic, do we not end up in a situation where any conservative sentiment is liable to be banned after being wilfully misinterpreted by angry students wielding their fragile “mental safety” as a weapon?

(And incidentally, although it does not excuse Trump’s worst rhetoric about immigration, the fact that the identity politics practising American Left immediately interpret any call for immigration control as smoking gun evidence of deep racism – meaning that the political opinions of countless people are effectively made taboo – is one of the reasons why Donald Trump is now serving as such a successful and dangerous pressure release valve for years of previously unchannelled anger).

This is a textbook case of how not to respond to an identity politics-based student power grab on campus. As soon as university administrators conceded the premise of the complaint – that words spoken, written or painted can cause “harm”, and that this is unacceptable even if the harm is only incurred by applying the worst possible interpretation of the speech in question – they lost the war. They frantically scrambled to mollify the students in an attempt to buy themselves peace, but they will only succeed in emboldening the student activists to take offence even more easily and demand even greater concessions in future.

One can predict with reasonable confidence that there will now be one or more forced resignations from the Ohio University faculty or administration in the coming year, either as a result of what has already happened or because of some future non-existent transgression against the student population. And it will be richly deserved, for those who fail to defend academic freedom and free speech have no place running our universities.

 

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Love Our NHS? Prove It With Your Vote In The EU Referendum, Part 3

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

Vote Leave campaign rally - Save Our NHS - 350 million - Brexit

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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

Vote Leave are going all-in with their risible, childish lies about saving £350 million a week in the event of Brexit, and offering the money as a sacrifice to Our Blessed NHS instead.

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.

Richard North, much like this blog, is not having it any more:

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.

As this blog recently pointed out:

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.

In other words, fighting this referendum with Vote Leave hogging the limelight on the Brexit side is like – well, Geoffrey Howe (of all people) said it best in his 1990 resignation speech in the House of Commons:

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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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 26 – Literally Shredding The Constitution

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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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

Watch this video.

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?

We already knew that there is a dramatically expanding “equal opportunities” sector within (particularly American) academic institutions, with faculties growing to accommodate ever more impeccably credentialed and highly paid experts brought in to help universities submit more quickly and smoothly to the identity politics revolution.

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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Introducing Camsurf Safespace – The Social Network For Safe Space Dwellers

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Camsurf Safespace

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Behold our victimhood culture’s latest creation: a new G-rated social media platform for those too delicate to use Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Chatroulette…

Well, here it is – the logical end result of a victimhood culture in the grip of an identity politics feeding frenzy. Camsurf present to you their new Safespace social network – a heavily monitored video chat site for people (including grown adults) for whom all of the existing online platforms are simply too unsafe to ever contemplate using.

Camsurf describes Safespace in these terms:

Camsurf is a family friendly, G-rated Chatroulette platform and as such is strongly against all forms of bullying. To help combat cyberbullies, Camsurf is moderated by a team of professionals who are trained to spot when users of our service are being bullied. We have a zero tolerance policy against bullying and will ban all bullies from using our service.

However, it is also important that our users are able to recognize, understand, and deal with different forms of bullying. To help any users of our service who want to know more about bullying or feel they are being bullied we have created “safespace”, a place where you can learn about cyberbullying, its effects, how to deal with being bullied online, and much more.

While the press release notes:

Camsurf is delighted to announce the launch of the world’s first ‘Safe Space’ social network, an innovation designed to put a stop to cyberbullying through education and active participation. The idea behind the campaign stems from the rise in bullying and harassment on the web, specifically on social networks such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, a phenomenon which has grown rapidly in recent years to become more prevalent than bullying in the real world.

Users of Camsurf, and anyone else who feels overwhelmed by the rise in cyberbullying, can access the online arena and find a range of educational material and statistics, ask questions anonymously, and interact with other users in a safe and understanding environment. Participation in ‘Safe Space’ is solely focused on putting a stop to cyberbullying and all forms of online harassment. It is the first social network to openly place an emphasis on discussing and eliminating cyberbullying in a dedicated environment.

Camsurf Safespace is not merely a social network which takes a strong stance against cyberbullying. The whole ethos of the site sits in the shadow of cyberbullying – the “About” page says almost nothing about the technical or social features of the site, focusing exclusively on all of the measures in place to protect their oh-so-vulnerable users from ever being made to feel “uncomfortable” (a word that crops up frequently in the FAQs). And it freely uses the university campus-derived, identity politics terminology of safe space theory to promote itself.

But note the picture on the front page. These are not teens or tweens shown using the site, but fully grown adults – the woman is dressed in distinctly professional-looking attire, and the man is likewise dressed for work a shirt and tie. Safespace is not targeted specifically at schoolchildren (the group most likely to suffer from legitimate cyberbullying), but at people with jobs and mortgages and maybe even kids of their own – people who presumably shoulder all of the normal burdens of life, and yet believe themselves unable to participate in the same social networks as the rest of us for fear of being made to feel uncomfortable.

In fact, Safespace goes to great lengths to emphasise that adults are often the victims of “cyberbullying” too:

Q. Are teens the only people who get cyberbullied?

A. Not at all. Cyberbullying is a problem that affects both teens and adults. Although many adults would not like to admit it, cyberbullying is said to affect up to 40% of adults who use the internet. Cyberbullying transcends age or sex and anyone can be the victim of an online bully. In fact, many adults who are cyberbullied lash out by becoming bullies themselves. It is therefore extremely important to confront the problem by taking to someone rather than keeping it all locked up inside.

Yes, Safespace would have you believe that nearly every one in two adults are being persecuted online by nefarious cyberbullies right at this moment (of course, the term “bullying” has been defined downward to the extent that it includes any interaction which sees the victim come away with anything less than warm and fuzzy feelings of contentment).

And worse still, if these adult victims fail to take the correct protective actions and run to an authority figure (either a Safespace moderator or perhaps a trained counsellor) then they are at the risk of turning into a cyberbully too. Apparently being a cyberbully follows the same contagion principles as becoming a zombie.

Fortunately, Safespace has all manner of tools at its disposal to ensure that nothing remotely interesting or controversial ever takes place within its boundaries:

How Camsurf is Standing Up to Bullies

Our aim at Camsurf is to create a bully-free and family-friendly environment that is welcoming to all. As part of that mission we are taking a stand against cyberbullies by implementing various schemes to catch bullies and bar them from our service. We employ a team of moderators who monitor the chat platform for nudity, inappropriate behavior, and signs of bullying. All of our moderators undergo a course in understanding online bullying and how to spot the signs of someone who is being bullied. We are also implementing a series of informative articles and guides to help any victims of bullying and to educate our users to spot the signs of bullying. By taking these steps we will create the safest and friendliest Chatroulette platform online.

And they are very clear that when in doubt, users should err on the side of banality:

Q. Am I a cyberbully if I engage in an argument on Camsurf?

A. Not necessarily. It is important to distinguish the difference between talking to someone about a topic you disagree on and cyberbullying. On Camsurf you can meet thousands of strangers from around the world, all of whom have different opinions and views of the world. On some occasions you might find someone who disagrees with you about a certain topic. If you discuss this topic with them in a civilized manner where both of you can get your points across then it is not bullying. However, if you use insults and hurtful language while discussing issues then you may offend someone or hurt their feelings. This is the line between cyberbullying and talking about a topic you disagree on. The best way to avoid this is to stick to talking about topics you and the person you are chatting with are interested in. Remember, Camsurf is about having fun while meeting new people!

Cue lots of talk about the weather, and not quite so much about a certain American presidential candidate, then.

Note too the defining downwards of the concept of bullying, along the lines described by Jonathan Haidt and Nick Haslam in their recent excellent Guardian OpEd:

When research on bullying began in the 1970s, an act had to meet four criteria to count: it had to be an act of aggression directed by one or more children against another child; the act had to be intentional; it had to be part of a repeated pattern; and it had to occur in the context of a power imbalance. But over the following decades, the concept of bullying has expanded in two directions.

It has crept outward or “horizontally” to encompass new forms of bullying, such as among adults in the workplace or via social media. More problematic, though, is the creeping downward or “vertically”so that the bar has been lowered and more minor events now count as bullying. For example, the criteria of intentionality and repetition are often dropped. What matters most is the subjective perception of the victim. If a person believes that he or she has been made to suffer in any way, by a single action, the victim can call it bullying.

So this is what it has come to. Grown men and women forswearing online forums where they might potentially encounter a boisterous or rude opinion in favour of a “walled garden” where their every interaction is monitored by watchful moderators looking out for their “safety”. Everyday human interaction is now being presented as so fraught with peril that it is best not attempted at all without external supervision.

Fortunately, Safespace doesn’t have the feel of a platform that will be with us for very long, or challenge the major social networks for pre-eminence. But the mere fact of such a site’s launch is sufficiently alarming that we must take note.

Bear in mind that one of the key reasons why heavily moderated, anti free speech platforms are not challenging more aggressively for market share is because the big beasts – particularly Facebook – are choosing to respond to pressure to deal with cyberbullying in almost as draconian a way.

These are the options currently presented to users who want to report something on Facebook which they find to be offensive:

Facebook Report Post - Anti Free Speech

Note the third option – “It goes against my views” – which is now legitimate grounds to report someone else’s post as being offensive and deserving of removal from Facebook.

It can be tempting to make light of sites like Camsurf Safespace, regarding them as a sheltered playground for children, unrepresentative of the mainstream. But when the world’s pre-eminent social network treats its users in the exact same way, it is no laughing matter.

Cyberbullying is a real and concerning phenomenon where it occurs. But the idea of a fully grown, mentally capable adult being “bullied” is absurd, as are these incremental but damaging steps toward regulating and monitoring all of our online interactions to ensure that we are using the internet “safely”.

 

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Love Our NHS? Prove It With Your Vote In The EU Referendum, Continued

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

Brexit - NHS - European Union - EU Referendum - Brexit

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If you are deciding how to vote in the EU referendum based on what the rival campaigns are telling you is best for the NHS, you’re doing it wrong

The stupidity and incompetence of the Vote Leave  campaign reached such desperate lows today that at this point, I can no longer really blame anyone who has not been paying much attention to the EU debate thus far if they end up voting Remain. Heck, if I hadn’t been writing about politics every day and following the debate for years, I might well do the same.

After all, why put your trust in the Leave campaign, the people proposing a departure from the status quo, when the leaders of Vote Leave are conducting their campaign with all the political aptitude of the slow sibling from a well-connected family whose parents were grasping around trying to find something productive for them to do with their lives, and gave them the fate of our country to play with.

And so today we get this much-trumpeted open letter from “more than fifty” healthcare workers, telling us that only by voting Leave can we Save Our NHS.

The letter reads:

Dear Sir,

The NHS is a great British institution that families rely on in times of need. But as it slips into financial crisis the NHS itself needs some urgent attention.

The NHS is being asked to make huge cuts at a time of rising demand. Patients are having to wait longer for treatment, hospital deficits are increasing and doctors are on strike after being told they must take a pay cut. The Government must accept responsibility for this – they have starved the NHS of necessary funding for too long.

If we Vote Leave on 23 June we will be able to spend more on our priorities like the NHS. If we put the billions that currently go to EU bureaucrats into the NHS instead it would hugely improve patient care. For example, the £350 million a week we hand to Brussels is similar to the entire yearly Cancer Drugs Fund budget.

As healthcare professionals who have worked for the NHS for years we believe that the best choice in the EU referendum is to Vote Leave on June 23rd and save the NHS.

List of signatories

Well, I suppose it’s marginally better than the ludicrous suggestion that we use the money we supposedly save to whack up a brand new fully staffed hospital every week until there are ten mega hospitals in every town and ninety percent of us are employed by the NHS.

But still, what a bunch of utter nonsense this letter (and the decision to campaign off the back of it) is. Not only does this fail the “common sense” test, it fails the “does anyone at Vote Leave have any measurable brain activity at all” test.

The NHS is one of the largest organisations in the entire world, and the fifth largest employer with over 1.7 million people on the payroll. Rounding up fifty NHS workers to put their names to a letter supporting either Brexit or the Remain campaign means absolutely nothing – one could just as easily circulate a letter and get fifty signatures from NHS employees who believe they have been abducted by aliens, demanding a massive budget appropriation to build space lasers to keep us safe.

Furthermore, it would be utterly naive to base a geopolitical and constitutional decision like Brexit on the gut feeling of a bunch of people who not only work in an entirely unrelated field, but who toil for an organisation so large and all-powerful that it positively screams “vested interest” and “deeply ingrained bias in favour of the status quo”.

Besides, a bunch of predominantly conservative politicians and activists not known for their doe-eyed devotion to the NHS suddenly going prancing around the country acting like the health service’s greatest defenders is not going to fool anyone. By a huge majority, the most committed devotees of the NHS are the same people who will unthinkingly vote to stay “in Europe” come hell or high water. Worshipping at the altar of Nye Bevan doesn’t do great things for one’s critical reasoning skills, after all.

All of this time spent repeating the risible notion that only by voting Leave can we Save Our Blessed NHS is time that could be spent – oh, I don’t know, maybe promoting a comprehensive plan for a safe Brexit with the minimum of disruption. A plan which would instantly negate 90% of David Cameron’s fear-based Remain campaign and really bring this campaign to life.

But why do that, when Matthew Elliot and Dominic Cummings are more than happy presiding over their children’s finger-painting exercise of a campaign, preaching to the already converted and singularly failing to tackle any of the counterarguments quite rightly thrown in their faces by David Cameron and Britain Stronger in Europe?

Fortunately there is another shadow Leave campaign – an underground resistance, if you will – who are intent on fighting this referendum with facts, and who understand that the public rightly expect those who advocate for Brexit to have put some thought into what Brexit should look like.

I am never more excited and hopeful for the future of this country than I am when I read their work. Please follow The Leave Alliance, share their articles and (if you are able) donate to their all-important fundraising efforts. Every pound raised helps to spread the message further.

Semi-Partisan Politics will be diverting any kind contributions made to this site to The Leave Alliance from now until the conclusion of the campaign.

 

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