Culture

Thirty Years After Challenger, Who Now Inspires Us To Dare Mighty Things?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Whether we meet triumph or disaster in our national endeavours, our politicians – and their words – are no longer up to the job of inspiring us to move forward

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat”

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

Thirty years ago today, the NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded in flight shortly after takeoff, killing the crew of seven.

Responding to the tragedy, which was witnessed by millions of people on live television – including many schoolchildren, for one of the astronauts was to be the first teacher in space – US president Ronald Reagan addressed the nation. He said:

We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s take-off. I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.

[..] There’s a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

Two decades earlier, and another tragedy. On April 4 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was been shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee.

On hearing the news, Robert Kennedy, then junior senator from New York, addressed a crowd of people in the open air in Indianapolis, saying:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

My favorite poem, my – my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

[..] And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Now think about the last great British political speech you remember.

And don’t mention Hillary Benn huffing about Britain doing “our bit” to defeat ISIS in Syria, because competent and well delivered though it was, if that now passes for a great political speech for the ages then we are all ruined.

Need some more time to think?

Challenger Shuttle Memorial

There is no poetry in our politics any more. There is barely even decent prose, judging by the inauthentic passion of Ed Miliband or the randomised utterances of someone like Sarah Palin in America. In place of poetry – the kind of language which is only possible when we focus on ideas, goals or aspirations bigger than ourselves – we have dull, technocratic language about the performance of our precious public services, and overwrought emotional language either detailing how something makes us feel, or demonising the other side (the Evil Tories).

Imagine if David Cameron responded to some future aviation or exploration disaster by talking about slipping the surly bonds of Earth and touching the face of God. Just picture it. He would be laughed out of office – or at least mercilessly pilloried in the press – for speaking in what we would now consider to be such a pompous way. At best you might tease from him a few careless, cookie-cutter lines about the families of the victims being in our “thoughtsnprayers” (or just thoughts now, more commonly). But nothing big picture. Nothing that encourages us to look beyond ourselves for one second.

That’s because in our society today, there is nothing bigger than the Self. We are the gods of our own lives – or at least we often think so. And politicians, painfully aware of this fact, talk down to us as though we were children, always seeking to catch our eye with flashy pledges of “what’s in it for us” rather than what is necessarily good for the country, or for human liberty and progress.

Vote Labour and your NHS waiting times will go down. But don’t worry, we’ll get them to pay for it through higher taxes. Vote Conservative and your taxes will go down, and if that means fewer public services for them, so be it.

Now I’m certainly not suggesting that taxes and public spending are not important issues. But when even the Conservative Party can fight the 2015 general election on an offensively paternalistic manifesto promising “a plan for every stage of your life“, can we really deny that we have become a nation of consumers rather than citizens, more interested in who will deliver the most goodies for ourselves and the people we like than who will best steer the ship of state through challenging times?

That’s what we now expect from our prime ministers today – not a world leader, but a lowly Comptroller of Public Services. No call to arms in service of a great national goal. Nothing remotely inspirational at all. Just a checklist of things promised to us in return for our vote. I’m not assigning blame for this depressing chicken-or-egg state of affairs. But this is how our politics now works, more than ever. Less asking “what you can do for your country”, and much more emphasis on “what your country can do for you”.

Even the coming EU referendum – when the British people have a vanishingly rare opportunity to reconsider the very way that we are governed, the way we face the world and deal with the challenges and opportunities of globalisation – is being treated by the main campaign groups on either side as a parsimonious matter of saving or incurring relatively trivial sums of money, with rival (and equally ludicrous) numbers being batted back and forth by the rival camps.

Vote Leave asks us to imagine freedom from the EU in dismal terms of saving enough money to build a new NHS hospital every week, as though that trumps the democratic right of the British people to live in a sovereign country, while Britain Stronger in Europe attempt to bribe us with a gimmicky calculator purporting to show how much our shopping bill will go up unless we remain part of a European political union.

It’s all so tediously depressing and uninspiring. Is it any wonder then that political apathy is on the rise, and that those of us who remain engaged increasingly opt for virulently anti-establishment parties like UKIP or the SNP? Or that with the decline of moderate religion and our failure to confidently express and transmit British values through our culture, some disaffected young Muslims, rootless and yearning to feel part of something bigger, are stealing away to Syria to fight for ISIS?

I’m a political blogger, and for my sins I sit and listen to far too many political speeches by cabinet ministers, shadow ministers and other establishment types. And to begin with, I thought that I would judge a speech according to whether it felt in any way inspirational, transcendent or like a genuine attempt to rally people toward a goal beyond their own personal enrichment and the state-sanctioned smiting of the hated “other”. A speech which, regardless of its political leaning, might set the pulse racing a little with possibility.

Well, four years later and my pulse continues to flatline. I haven’t heard a genuinely good speech yet – as in one that you might actually remember six months later or recite a key passage from – at least not one hailing from the three main parties. If anybody believes that they have heard one, please send me a link or transcript and I will be forever in your debt.

Maybe I’m just romanticising the past. Maybe in thirty years’ time when Ed Miliband’s kid is running for the leadership of the Labour Party, we will all look back on Ed’s fifteenth personal relaunch speech or David Cameron’s 2015 general election stump speech and hail them as bold, visionary masterpieces. Maybe.

But I strongly suspect that in the year 2046, anybody wanting to listen to listen to a great British political speech – with the exception of those made by firebrands like Margaret Thatcher – will have to look back in time almost a century, and certainly past the haunted late years of the 2010s.

 

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BBC Daily Politics: Shining A Spotlight On Student Illiberalism

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

 

Few politicians will dare to criticise today’s breed of authoritarian student activists – because odious and illiberal as their worldview undoubtedly is, both main political parties have something to gain from regulating our behaviour and speech

Yesterday, I went on the BBC Daily Politics to talk about the creeping tide of campus illiberalism and the tyranny of modern student activists who seek to turn their universities into fuzzy, unthreatening places where intellectual debate and reason are secondary to making people feel accepted and validated at all times.

The debate was framed around the question of whether Britain should consider raising the voting age, given the fact that so many student activists recoil from free speech and the boisterous exchange of ideas, preferring to cloister themselves in ideologically homogeneous “safe spaces” while viciously lashing out at anybody who dares to hold different ideas.

I had written a blog post back in November, following up on Glenn Reynolds’ (of Instapundit) column suggesting in the wake of the Yale and Mizzou controversies that if students could not tolerate hearing contradictory ideas, they had no business voting and participating in democracy. I think a lot of the points that Reynolds made were very strong, though I also agree with what he said when he walked back his statement the next week.

I was surprised to get the call from the BBC, but I thought it was worth accepting the invitation to push the broader message – not that we should go around banning groups of people from voting just because they wind us up, but that this insidious culture of identity, grievance and therapy, incubated in our universities and ignored for too long by the media, is going to have profound consequences for our society and our democracy as these people grow up and join the electorate.

The Daily Politics’ Soapbox feature is good for what it is, but when it comes to laying out a new and complex argument full of nuance and detail, there are obvious shortcomings. You get a two-minute video (which I filmed in Oxford, with particular thanks to the Oxford Union and its president) to make a brief pitch, but that pitch can only be around 200 words, the rest of the time being given to music and establishing shots. And then there is the live segment, broadcast after Prime Minister’s Questions, where you get to debate with Jo Coburn, Andrew Neil and the panel.

The video is shown at the top of this piece, and you can judge the results for yourself. I’m reasonably pleased with how it went, but also frustrated that we could only skim the surface of what is an important and fascinating issue – one with potentially profound consequences for education, free speech and democracy.

Notably, the two MPs on the panel that day – Ed Vaizey and Kate Green – didn’t want to delve into the real issue at all, choosing to get hung up on the specifics of the voting age element. Green in particular was in denial about there being any kind of problem, saying that she didn’t think it was a “new thing” and that “there have always been controversies in our universities”.

But Green then goes on to say “I think it is part of exploring boundaries and debating ideas and issues”.

No. This is precisely the problem. By high-handedly declaring that they speak for all students and elevating their personal feelings over any question of objectivity, truth or legitimate debate, these student activists – the New Age Censors – are specifically crushing the debate of ideas and issues, not just for themselves but for everyone so unfortunate as to be studying with them.

Kate Green tries to make the new academic dystopia of safe space rooms, trigger warnings on texts and campus speech codes something that is natural and commendable, part of exploring boundaries. But it is no such thing. At the time of the Yale controversy, the student (Jerelyn Luther) who had a full-on toddler’s meltdown over a harmless email about Halloween costumes raged:

“It is NOT about creating an intellectual space, it is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are NOT doing that! You are going against that!”

So universities are not to be places of learning and intellectual debate any longer. Or if they are, this mission is very much secondary to the far more important task of making students feel comfortable and validated in whatever “identity” they happen to have assumed on that particular day.

This is what we are dealing with, and this is what neither Ed Vaizey or Kate Green wanted to grapple with. Of course, both have their reasons.

I was essentially describing a group of wobbly-lipped, permanently “vulnerable” perpetual victims who are in constant need of a strong authority presence to smite their enemies and protect them from emotional harm – in other words, I just described the current Labour Party’s ideal (if not yet typical) voter. No wonder Kate Green couldn’t bring herself to engage with the substance of my argument – to do so would be to alienate the very people whom Labour has been reaching out to since the Gordon Brown era.

And what could Ed Vaizey say in support of free speech and against its rapid erosion on university campuses across the country? His leader, David Cameron, flew to Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and walked arm-in-arm with some of the world’s most brutal and repressive leaders in defence of “free speech”, while people continue to languish in British prisons, locked up simply for saying, singing or tweeting something that another person found “offensive”. The present Coke Zero Conservative government doesn’t look on these petty authoritarian students as a problem – it admires their attempts to ban speech and regulate freedom of expression.

I should be clear that not all students – not even most students – are like the petty little tyrants in the headlines today. Spiked’s Tom Slater makes this point forcefully:

If there’s one thing that really gets on my nerves, it’s the idea that students today are uniquely intolerant. The explosion of campus censorship in recent years has made bashing campus politicos a kind of commentariat pastime, with fortysomething columnists wheeling the little blue-haired pillocks out each week to give them a good kicking. But while the students’ union censors deserve everything they get, all too often campus censorship has been painted as a generational phenomenon – as if undergraduates appeared from the womb with a Safe Space policy in hand.

I quite agree. And my one regret is that there was no time in my fleeting moment on the Daily Politics to explore the context in which these little campus tyrants are growing up, and what has made them the way they are. As Tom Slater, Brendan O’Neill, myself and a few others have pointed out, many of those “fortysomething” columnists and academics now criticising the student activists are themselves guilty of supporting the hate speech laws and therapy culture which have taught the New Age Censors that “sticks and stones may break their bones, but words will kill them stone dead”.

That being said, I think it was still a useful opportunity to raise an important issue and maybe raise awareness among a wider group of people, many of whom haven’t set foot on a university campus in years and would be horrified to discover the kind of illiberal dystopia that they have become in the name of “tolerance” and “inclusivity”.

But as Spiked is now doing, we all should give particular praise and encouragement to those few students – like George Lawlor from the University of Warwick – who have been brave enough to stand against against these illiberal trends on campus.

This fight will not be won in the television studios of Westminster or the columns of national newspapers. It is the brave students withstanding huge social pressures and even physical intimidation to take a stand for liberty and free speech on their own university campuses who must do the real fighting, as well as those professors and administrators with sufficient backbone to stand up to the shrill demands of the Safe Space Lobby.

But the rest of us should provide what air cover we can, as this blog has consistently done – and will continue to do going forward.

Safe Space Nook

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BBC Daily Politics: If Students Need Safe Spaces, They Have No Business Voting

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Today I will be a guest on the BBC’s flagship Daily Politics show, discussing the worrying and accelerating infantilisation of today’s university students and asking whether young people who need the protection of trigger warnings and safe spaces can possibly be trusted to responsibly exercise their democratic right to vote.

Last year, in response to a brilliantly provocative column by American law professor and political blogger Glenn Reynolds – in which he argued that today’s generation of coddled, micro-aggression fearing students have utterly failed to earn the right to vote – I went along for the ride, agreeing:

It is ironic that at the same time there is a push to lower the voting age in the UK – the Lords recently voted to allow sixteen and seventeen-year-olds to vote in the coming Brexit referendum – people only slightly older and now at university, who already have the vote, are busy regressing back into emotional childhood.

[..]  Given the increasing number of campus incidents of precious snowflake students demanding that the authorities curtail their liberties for their own “safety” – and the fact that increasing age is the last, best hope of gaining wisdom – the idea of raising the voting age does start to feel awfully tempting.

Response written, I then didn’t think much more of it. That is, until the other week when I was contacted by the BBC and asked whether I wanted to state the same case on their flagship political programme, the Daily Politics.

The context of the issue is known well enough, and I have blogged extensively about the worrying and absurd rise of calls to outlaw clapping and booing, tearful temper tantrums about dress codes, stifling ideas by labelling them ‘problematic’, the tedious insistence on “safe spaces” and mandatory sexual consent workshops, all of which are flourishing on British and American university campuses.

Now, do I really want to stomp around like a little authoritarian, summarily revoking the franchise from every group of people who happen to rile me up? Well, as readers of this blog already know, I would generally rather leave the screeching, sanctimonious authoritarianism to those who do it best – the student activists busy cocooning their young minds in an ideologically homogeneous bubble, and purging any dissenting viewpoints which threaten their “mental safety”.

But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make the urgent case that if things continue on their current course – with children being raised to believe that “sticks and stones may break their bones, but words will kill them stone dead”, and growing up to become intolerant students intent on purging anybody who fails to fawn deferentially over their delicate sensibilities – then before long, none of us will possess the intellectual and social robustness required of an engaged citizenry. And none of us will make good voters.

I want to stop the rot before it gets that far. But doing so will require confronting some difficult truths. And among these truths are the fact that the world of academia (particularly in the US – but where America goes, Britain already follows) has become infected with a virus which produces legions of what can only be described as adult babies – people who are physically mature, but with the emotional and psychological resiliency of a toddler.

The extent of the rot was laid bare in Spiked’s 2016 university free speech rankings, which forensically detail the extent to which free speech is curtailed at every university campus and students union in the country.

To give just a few examples, at present there are 30 students union which have banned newspapers (no prizes for guessing which publications), 25 which have banned mainstream hit songs for being “offensive” and 20 which have banned clubs or societies. But they only take their cue from the universities themselves, nearly half of which enforce “No Platform” policies against controversial speakers and a fifth of which have already moved to import American-style “safe space” policy onto their campuses.

I’m due to debate with Conservative MP and Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, as well as Labour MP Kate Green. It will be very interesting to see whether I am able even to extract any acknowledgement that there is a problem which needs to be tackled. However, with the Conservative government leaning hard on universities to protect the fragile minds of their students by banning extremist speakers and Labour poised to benefit disproportionately from the authoritarian student vote, I’m not expecting a tremendously sympathetic hearing.

Watch this space!

Watch me debate on Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Politics, broadcast on BBC Two at 11:30 for the start of the programme (and PMQs), and at 12:20 onwards for my segment.

Alternatively, watch live or catch-up on BBC iPlayer.

Safe Space Cartoon - 1

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This Is The NHS

Samuel Hooper12 Comments

Save Our NHS

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British healthcare reform should be the subject of forensic journalistic analysis and urgent debate, but all we have are saccharine, uncritical devotionals to the NHS

If you were the CEO of a company whose costs were relentlessly increasing and competitors gaining ground with every passing quarter, what would you do?

Would you waste valuable time looking back wistfully on the glory days, when every product launch was an unparalleled success and new customers were queueing around the block? Or would you take a hard-headed, dispassionate look at what was necessary – redundancies, divestments, acquisitions, innovations – to reshape and refocus the firm to prosper in the new, harsher environment?

Any executive worth their salt would do the latter. Corporate graveyards are littered with the bones of executives and companies who chose to dwell on a romanticised, sentimental vision of the past rather than face the difficult future.

Sadly, when it comes to the NHS we adopt the former, toxic mindset. Rather than thinking dispassionately about how best to deliver healthcare to an advanced nation of 65 million ageing, fattening citizens, we prefer to think of the glory days of socialised healthcare while utterly neglecting the future. We prefer to smugly bask in what we consider the wisdom and compassion of the post-war generation who created the NHS rather than ask ourselves whether what worked in 1948 will still work seventy years later in 2018, let alone by its centenary in 2048.

There is more than enough blame to go around for this depressing state of affairs. The NHS-Industrial Complex, that vast and interconnected web of (sometimes but not always well-meaning) special interests is certainly at fault. So too are glib and cowardly politicians, who would rather fire up a crowd (and win re-election) by making empty promises to Save Our NHS rather than grapple with the difficult (and politically toxic) detail. And we ourselves are to blame, for continually rewarding this short-termist and opportunistic behaviour in others.

But today’s entry in the Healthcare Hall of Shame is the Guardian newspaper, whose natural left-wing political leanings have prompted one of the worst cases of journalistic NHS hagiography in recent years. This time the Guardian have outdone themselves with their new ongoing series, This Is The NHS.

Visit the This Is The NHS mini-site and you will be confronted with three main types of story:

  1. Personal “the NHS saved my life” accounts from grateful patients
  2. Sympathetic “behind-the-scenes” profiles of staff, hospitals and departments
  3. Hectoring nanny-state demands from the public health lobby

Some of these stories are very moving, dealing as they do with illness, loss or periods of great hardship and vulnerability in the lives of their subjects. But none of them come close to explaining why taxpayer-funded, government-provided healthcare is the best possible solution for Britain. Both of these maxims – taxpayer funded, government provided – may still be optimal. Maybe. But is it not worth doing any kind of comparative analysis to be sure?

And when the physical expression of our healthcare policy is one of the five largest human bureaucracies in the history of the world, is it really not worth checking that we are on the right track, that a government-run National Health Service still makes sense?

Apparently not. Emotion and stubborn attachment triumph over reason, and we are supposed to suspend our critical faculties and clap along to each positive story about the NHS without questioning what treatment (if any) in each scenario is unique to the NHS and would not have been given to an equivalent patient in, say, Canada or France.

I take this extremely personally. Like most people, I have had occasion to use various NHS services throughout my life, sometimes – such as when I came down with appendicitis – at times of physical pain and imminent danger to my wellbeing. Naturally I was very grateful for the excellent, professional service that I received.

But I deeply resent my natural feelings of gratitude – and those of countless other people, many of them featured in the Guardian’s This Is the NHS series – being taken and deliberately twisted into a cynical piece of emotionally manipulative propaganda by journalists and special interests with a strong (and shamefully undeclared) desire to maintain one very specific model of healthcare funding and provision. That is simply not right.

The Guardian would hate this analogy, but with their navel-gazing, introspective examination of the status quo when it comes to British healthcare, they are exhibiting the same lazy superiority complex shown by US conservatives when ObamaCare was being debated. Like American conservatives, the Guardian (and nearly the entire British Left) stubbornly believe that their respective systems are the envy of the world, and insist on saying so loudly and repeatedly while failing to provide any proof whatsoever to back up their assertions.

As the ObamaCare debate raged in America, countless Republican politicians and Tea Party activists could be found ranting about President Obama’s evil socialist plan to destroy the “greatest healthcare system in the world”. And today, as David Cameron’s Conservative government rearranges the deckchairs in an attempt to look purposeful when it comes to healthcare, foaming-at-the-mouth left-wing activists shriek to anyone who will listen about the Evil Tories and their dastardly plan to sell off the NHS to their rich friends while leaving the sick and elderly to die on the streets.

Of course, both claims are ridiculous hyperbole. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) was a relatively timid, incremental and (thus far) underwhelming attempt to expand the existing system of private healthcare coverage to more Americans. And whatever privatisation schemes the Tories may have cooked up to date are a drop in the ocean in terms of the total volume of services delivered by the NHS, and do nothing to change the twin fundamentals of taxpayer-funded care, free at the point of use.

So given the fact that nothing remotely shocking or remarkable is currently happening in terms of British healthcare policy, why publish the This Is The NHS series in the first place? The Guardian portentously explains:

Our aspiration is to examine a broad range of issues, from the strains on A&E to standards of care for the elderly, the multi-layered issues surrounding mental health, chronic disease, the high cost of drugs and the impact of alcohol. And exciting treatments using new sciences and cutting-edge technology. We want to understand the dilemmas over prioritisation, over-prescribing and the cost of drugs. And the fiendishly complicated way the service is managed and run. We want to address the question: do we have the NHS we need? The aim is to do this through diaries, fly-on-the-wall reporting, interviews, films and explanation.

We have asked a large sample of our readers what they want from this project. The most engaging focus, ahead of anything else was … hope. “I’d like to see both sides of the story, as all we hear about is the failings or pay issues,” one reader said. “What about those patients who have been cared for amazingly, staff who are brilliant at their job and enjoy it?” Another urged that amid all the perceived problems: “The successes of the NHS need to be celebrated.”

In other words, the Guardian is seeking to satisfy the desire of its left-wing readership to hear stories confirming how wonderful the NHS is. Sure, there will be a few token negative experiences thrown in to give the appearance of objectivity (though anecdotally, I have noticed far more positive than negative stories thus far). But there will under no circumstances be any challenge to the fundamental assumption that the NHS model is Good and Virtuous, and not to be questioned under any circumstances.

Imagine if the Guardian set out to create a similar month-long deep-dive series examining the workings of the Ministry of Defence and Britain’s armed forces. The Guardian’s journalists and commentators would have a field day forensically examining and questioning every element of spending, every organisational aspect and every core function. They would see it as their journalistic duty to take a root-and-branch view of the whole organisation, to muse about the very meaning of defence and national security in the modern age, and question whether the existing deeply historical structures are equal to our current and future challenges. And they would actually be right to do so, even though they and this blog would come to very different conclusions.

But when it comes to the NHS, nothing and nobody is allowed to challenge the dusty 1940s dogmas upon which the British healthcare system is built. Everything is up for debate – so long as the answer involves pumping more money into the same, fundamentally unreformed system.

This is stubborn childishness in the extreme. An infantilised British public (particularly the metropolitan left-wing segment who comprise the Guardian’s readership) demand stories which make us feel better about Our Beloved NHS, and which reassure us that the NHS is doing lots of great things despite the endless succession of negative headlines. And the Guardian responds with a spectacularly uncritical, depressingly uncurious series of devotionals to the decaying status quo.

I’ve said it many times before, but it still bears repeating: our blind, unquestioning devotion to the NHS is quite literally killing us. And thus far, the Guardian’s “This Is the NHS” series – which could have been the catalyst for a serious discussion – is just another smug monument to our national sickness/religion.

NHS Worship - London Olympic Games 1

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Small Minds Discuss People: The Media’s Coverage Of The EU Referendum

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

Boris Johnson - Theresa May - EU Referendum - Brexit - Conservative Party

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The EU referendum is about the British people, not the Westminster game of thrones

Another day brings another tiresome round of court gossip about which Conservative ministers might potentially campaign for Britain to leave the European Union in the coming referendum.

This time the breathless gossip is reported in Guido Fawkes:

A co-conspirator tucking into his ravioli in Westminster’s Quirinale restaurant looked up to see Theresa May and Liam Fox settling down to lunch. An hour earlier Fox had asked the Home Secretary for assurances over the government’s line on Russia, so you can bet that was on the menu. Though the main topic for discussion will almost certainly have been Europe.

There has been speculation that May has been meeting with leading Eurosceptics as she keeps her options open ahead of the referendum. Where better for Dr Fox to lobby her to lead the Out campaign than one of the pricier Italian restaurants in SW1? 

While the Evening Standard gushes about Boris Johnson:

What vexes the fledgling campaign to stay in the EU is the prospective behaviour of Boris Johnson and Theresa May: in the words of one Westminster insider, “they are the only players who could change the weather”.

True enough. Boris has the popular appeal to make the Out campaign blossom with optimism and good cheer, ridding it at a stroke of its negative, wintry disposition. May, on the other hand, would bring the authority of a great office of state to the Brexit campaign. Both politicians are taken seriously within the Tory tribe as prospective successors to Cameron. Small wonder that their every move is being scrutinised so closely.

Seasoned Boris-watchers (or Bozzologists) admit that his behaviour is presently inscrutable. Those I have spoken to incline — just — to the view that he will decide eventually to stick with the In camp, though without much conviction.

Before going on to say of Theresa May:

In 2010 May was startled to be given such a senior brief. Since then she has become incrementally persuaded that she has what it takes to succeed Cameron. Like Boris, she knows her leadership prospects are intimately entangled with her conduct in the EU referendum. But if she is serious about taking on the boys for the top job, she should give the Out camp a wide berth.

As Michael Heseltine used to say as he prepared his challenge to Margaret Thatcher, most contenders only have one bullet in the chamber. If May aligns herself with the Out movement, she will be handing the gun to others and inviting them to do as they please with her accrued political capital. So if her head has indeed been turned by the flattery of the Brexit crew, it should be turned back — and fast.

Because we all know that the really important thing in this referendum is not the profound and historic choice that the British people will make about how we wish to be governed in the twenty-first century, but rather the salacious court gossip over which cabinet ministers and wannabe future Tory leaders will risk their bright young (or not-so-young) careers by allying themselves with the Brexit cause.

Never mind that awkward S-word, sovereignty. That’s boring. Never mind a detailed and difficult discussion about the realities of global governance. That would require research. Proving the adage that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people, most of the British media is happy to talk about people and the petty personalities involved in the public debate, to the near total exclusion of everything else.

If you want serious, granular analysis and argument on either side of the referendum debate, there is no point looking in the pages of the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Spectator or any other publication claiming prestige. All you will find there are thinly veiled press releases from one or other of the groups squabbling for lead designation, or worryingly naive editorials from household name commentators who sound suspiciously like they have done no independent research of their own. Very unimpressive.

No, for serious analysis you have to turn to the blogosphere, and sites like eureferendum.com and Leave HQ on the Brexit side, or Hugo Dixon on the Remain side. And the difference is like walking from a junior school classroom to a tutorial room at Oxford or Cambridge. Absent are the mindless platitudes and stale (often long-ago disproven) talking points that are so often repeated on television and in the broadsheets, and in their place are references to the real, murky world of global regulation – a world which, once discovered, proves that the EU is not the “top table” as europhiles blithely claim, but also that an orderly Brexit would not lead to an instant “bonfire of the regulations” as some on the Leave side stubbornly insist.

Some eurosceptics and Brexiteers would say I am wasting my time by even bothering to mention low-grade newspaper gossip such as the Boris Johnson vs Theresa May game of thrones. And they have a good point, to a degree. This referendum is about the British people and what they think is best, not what government ministers, opposition politicians or establishment media figures may want. Fair enough.

But you can’t just look at these shenanigans in isolation. Is the coming Brexit referendum the most important thing to happen politically in a generation? Yes, absolutely. But that does not mean that we should focus on the referendum outcome to the extent that we ignore the failings and misdeeds of the political class who were here before the referendum became a reality and will (sadly) be here long after it is but a footnote in history.

There is the future stewardship of the country to think about. And I want Britain’s future political leaders to be (so far as possible) principled people with the courage of their convictions. If they claimed to hold a certain view on an important issue like Britain’s membership of the European Union to get elected, they should then follow that through once in office.

Consequently, this blog will be taking a very dim view indeed of any Conservative politician who wrapped themselves in the cloak of euroscepticism to win selection, only to run loyally to David Cameron’s heels like an obedient dog and campaign for a “Remain” vote when it really counts.

This debate should be about ideas first and foremost. That is where this blog will focus. However – and maybe this a sign that I lack a great mind – I for one will certainly remember those people who put their personal careers ahead of their commitment to democracy when it comes to this existential referendum.

EU Democracy - Brexit

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