Europe

Cameron’s Fear That EU Partners Will Reveal Truth About His “New Deal”

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

British People - EU Renegotiation - Referendum - Brexit

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David Cameron is negotiating with the British people on behalf of the European Union, not the other way around

David Cameron’s entire “renegotiation” (in fact in has been no such thing, for there were never any demands made) has all been completely backwards, with the prime minister far more interested in huddling with fellow European ministers to work out what kind of a deal might be successfully snuck past the British people than conducting any kind of listening exercise with the British public to determine what key concerns and demands need to be taken to Brussels.

And we see yet more evidence of this in the Times’ Red Box briefing today, which reports on the understandable concern from the government that the meaningless superficiality of David Cameron’s “reform” will be inadvertently exposed by a fellow European leader or minister who makes the mistake of telling the truth:

British ministers are urging their European counterparts to talk up David Cameron’s renegotiation deal to persuade British voters that it is significant.

There are fears in the UK government that some foreign leaders, who have been irritated by Cameron’s demands, will be publicly dismissive of any deal agreed at next month’s European Council summit.

Senior British figures point to polling that shows that opinion on the EU is evenly split, but if voters think the prime minister has secured “major change” they will vote overwhelmingly to stay.

[..] The nightmare scenario is if a minister from Germany, France or Poland goes on the record to say Cameron’s changes are meaningless window dressing.

The piece goes on to quote polling which suggests that successfully presenting the output from the renegotiation as “major change” dramatically increases the probability of a “Remain” vote:

Asked to “imagine David Cameron has secured a small change in Britain’s relationship with the European Union, securing guarantees over some key issues that he said protected British interests, but without any major change in which policy areas the European Union has powers in”, 38 per cent wanted to leave and 37 would want to stay.

If Cameron “could not secure any change” and the referendum was held with the EU “as it is now”, 46 per cent would leave and only 32 per cent remain.

But if Cameron gets “major change” including “substantial changes to the rules Britain has to follow and British opt-outs from European Union rules in several different policy areas” the result is dramatically shifted

Some 50 per cent of people would then vote to remain, with only 23 per cent determined to leave.

None of this is in any way surprising, and as such it is not really “news” at all. Anybody with their head properly screwed on knows that the government is not conducting a serious renegotiation with the EU in good faith with their mandate from the British people, and that everything we are now witnessing is part of a co-ordinated public perceptions and expectations management effort from a prime minister and a government who made their minds up long ago.

But while this is hardly breaking news, it is still worth taking the time to pause, step back from the daily commotion of the Brexit debate, and marvel at the bigger picture.

The first duties of any elected government – of any prime minister – are to advance the national interest of the United Kingdom, and to fulfil the mandate on which they were elected in the first place. Feeling the pressure from UKIP midway through the last parliament, David Cameron chose to offer a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU – against his better judgement, his personal pro-Europeanism and his (wrong but sincerely held) belief that Brexit would be against our national interest.

But since having been returned to power in May, the prime minister has not acted in good faith based on that mandate. In fact, he has been deliberately deceptive and manipulative, seeking to create and propagate the illusion that he is pounding tables in Brussels and fighting for our priorities in Europe, when he never even bothered to check what those priorities are, let alone insist on any specific concessions.

David Cameron and his loyalist cheerleaders prance around as though they have bravely confronted the EU with a specific list of demands designed to win back sovereignty and secure it forever, when all they did was write a wheedling, begging letter to Donald Tusk hesitantly suggesting a few topics of discussion – half of which were slapped down the same day.

This is how you end up with the risible scenario of George Osborne appearing on Newsnight yesterday to give an update on “renegotiations” which are not taking place, and declaring himself a eurosceptic despite the fact that he is currently engaged in nothing more than a joint marketing effort with our EU partners to hoodwink British voters into thinking that we have won some meaningful concessions:

If David Cameron, George Osborne and the more vacuous half of the Conservative Party can all describe themselves as “eurosceptic” and do so with a straight face, then we are all eurosceptics now. Everyone, from Martin Schulz, Jean-Claude Juncker, Kenneth Clarke and the entire sorry cast of Britain Stronger in Europe would qualify as a eurosceptic by this metric, because everybody concedes that the EU needs reform of one kind or another (even if that reform involves “more Europe”).

In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that when it comes to this non-renegotiation, the British public are effectively sitting at one end of the long conference table while the British government schemes and confers with the rest of the European Union at the other end.

I know it is hopelessly idealistic of me, but I expect more from my elected government. And it is getting tremendously tiring waking up every day wondering what new schemes,devices and cunning plans the prime minister of this country intends on using to hoodwink and misdirect the people he supposedly serves into believing that he is in any way working on their behalf.

A greater man than David Cameron – if his devotion to the EU and fear of Brexit were similarly genuine – might have stood up and declared that because he believes EU membership to be strongly in our national interest, he couldn’t in good conscience put it to a popular vote or negotiate in an unbiased way on behalf of the United Kingdom. Yes, such a stance would have further fuelled the rise of UKIP, but at least I could respect the intellectual honesty and consistency.

But David Cameron did not do this. Rather than behaving with honour or principle, Cameron swanned around, pretending to share the public’s concerns about the European Union, and then – as soon as his re-election was secure and the UKIP threat neutralised – zipped across to Brussels to begin plotting with fellow EU heads of government and state as to how Britain’s pesky electorate could best be mollified, placated and distracted while the Brussels juggernaut rolls on unopposed.

And they wonder why there is a strong public perception of a self-serving European political elite who doggedly pursue their own interests in direct opposition to the will and interests of their national electorates!

There is only so much that one can take of duplicitous politicians who pretend to be eurosceptic and favour Brexit when stumping for votes or positive headlines, but whose every action contradicts this stance once in power. And I may have finally reached my limit.

If the EU’s form of parochial pseudo-internationalism really does represent the best future of human governance – and it really, really, really doesn’t – then politicians should come out and say so. They should own their love and admiration of the EU and their lack of faith in Britain, instead of hiding from these things and pretending to be eurosceptics.

I respect any politician of any stripe who has the courage of their convictions – who is able to articulate a sincerely held viewpoint without first running it by a focus group, and whose commitment to their causes runs deeper than exploiting them for electoral gain. That’s why I maintain a degree of respect for Jeremy Corbyn, despite sharing none of his socialist beliefs.

Jeremy Corbyn’s sincere-but-loopy socialism I can respect. The unabashed European federalists in Brussels I can respect, too. Though hardly any of them are democratically elected officials, at least they have the courage to hail their creation for what it is – an embryonic state in gestation.

But David Cameron and George Osborne – europhiles in stolen eurosceptic clothing, actively engaged in perpetrating a moral fraud on the British public – people like that I cannot respect, do not respect and will never respect.

Brexit - Flexcit - European Union

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Top image: cartoon by Ben Jennings

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An Open Letter To UKIP Voters

Samuel Hooper43 Comments

Open Letter to UKIP Supporters - Brexit - Immigration

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Dear UKIP Supporter,

There’s no easy way to put this, so I’ll just come right out and say it. If you truly want Britain to vote for Brexit and independence from the European Union in the coming referendum – if that is your top priority right now, as it is mine – then we need to drop our demand to scrap the free movement of people between Britain and Europe and stop calling for stricter immigration controls on people wanting to live and work here.

Before you dismiss me as some pro-European mole from the Remain campaign sent to deceive you, hear me out. I voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election after much soul-searching, because I share your disillusionment and disgust with the political establishment and three main legacy parties – all of which are pro-EU to their core, and all of which have lied to us for decades about the European project and ever-closer political union. I also have admiration and respect for Nigel Farage, without whom we would not be having this referendum at all.

But this is our last chance to save Britain from being absorbed into a European state, and I am terrified of waking up on the morning after the referendum only to find that by insisting on every single one of our demands – particularly on immigration, which is a controversial topic with strong feelings on both sides – we scare the public, lose the vote and squander our only chance of escaping from ever-closer political union.

By asking people to vote to leave the EU, we are already asking them to place a lot of trust in our shared vision for a stronger, more prosperous independent Britain. Unfortunately, many people are swayed by the Remain campaign’s pro-EU propaganda, which relentlessly tells them that Britain is too small and weak a country to succeed on its own. You and I know that to be nonsense, but we already have an uphill battle on our hands to overcome the establishment’s formidable misinformation machine. And demanding an end to the free movement of people within the European Economic Area on top of everything else is just a step too far. People are naturally risk-averse, and keeping this issue on our list of demands is one thing too many.

I know that having secured the referendum from a reluctant David Cameron, it seems like total victory is within your grasp – that you are on the verge of getting everything that you have wanted for so long. And I know that despite the difficult general election result, there are enough indicators to convince you that the tide is turning in your direction, that the entirety of UKIP’s agenda can one day be achieved.

But I implore you to remember what happened to overconfident Labour supporters at the general election. They imprisoned themselves in an ideological bubble of their own making, used social media to talk to each other rather than convincing undecided voters, were hypnotised by their partisan Twitter feeds and drew the false conclusion that the country was about to make Ed Miliband the next prime minister. Their hearts were broken on May 8. Don’t make the same mistake.

I’ve seen some of the UKIP discussion groups on Facebook and the online newspaper comments sections, and I know you have, too. Yes, there are good points made here and there, and some very honest and decent people. But there is also an obsession with immigration that borders on the fanatical. To win the Brexit referendum, we need 51% of the country to vote with us, and like it or not, too many people simply don’t consider immigration a burning issue. They do, however, think that harping on the subject too much strays very close to xenophobia, and if our movement is portrayed as racist or xenophobic in any way, then it’s game over.

Besides, is immigration itself really the problem, or is it the negative side effects of immigration which need to be tackled – the impact on schools, housing, public services and community cohesion? Because there are ways that we can address these issues other than campaigning on a platform of ending free movement and enforcing strict limits on immigration, thus scuppering any chance we have of winning the referendum.

We can look at making our welfare system work on a much more contributory basis, and we can do more to ensure that local areas feeling the greatest strain of inward migration are given significantly more money and resources to help them cope. We can invest properly in adult education, reskilling our workforce for the jobs of the future so that hardworking British people are never left behind at the mercy of cheap overseas labour. And yes, we can also have that important conversation about British values, so that everyone who lives on these islands respects the unique culture and heritage which make Britain so special. Many of the levers to help mitigate the impact of immigration are not possible under EU law, but they would be if Britain were an independent country again.

But by insisting on ending the free movement of people within the European Economic Area as part of our demands for Brexit, we are letting perfection be the enemy of the good. At the risk of using too many clichés, ending free movement is the straw which will break the camel’s back and end our dream of leaving the European Union. Why? Because there are not enough votes in an anti-immigration stance to win, and because opposing free movement loses us nearly as many votes as it gains.

By insisting on ending the free movement of people as part of Brexit, 25% of the electorate will shun us because no matter how misguided they are, they hear “immigration controls” and think “racism”. And another 25% will be very wary of us because they are young, pro-European professionals or students who like the idea of easily being able to live and work in Rome or Paris if they want to, and understandably don’t want to jeopardise their own life chances. That leaves us with no margin for error – we would have to win every single other vote out there, which is just impossible.

But if we campaign for Brexit while promising to respect the free movement of people for the time being, we take away our opponent’s greatest weapon – the false and ludicrous accusation that we are Little Englanders who want to pull up the drawbridge because we are somehow scared of Johnny Foreigner.

Truth be told, you didn’t begin supporting UKIP just so that you could talk about immigration all the time, important though it is. Like me, you recognised that something fundamental is at stake when it comes to our relationship with the EU. Are we to continue sliding down the greasy slope toward European political union, where so many key decisions are taken in Brussels that the idea of Britain as a sovereign state with unique national interests becomes a laughable absurdity? Or are we finally ready to do what every major non-European country does, and face the world as a fully engaged, globally connected and influential world power? Will we continue to be governed by laws and policies set in Brussels where we have just 1/28th of a voice, or are we mature enough to govern ourselves?

At the end of the day, it comes down to one small word – democracy.

Like me, you supported UKIP because you saw Nigel Farage standing up for democracy when it seemed like nobody else cared. And the country owes you a debt of gratitude for what you did. I know many of you have received insults, abuse and worse for daring to vote differently than your friends and family, but your courage has brought us to a place where the dream of independence from the European Union and the return of democracy to Britain are within our reach.

Having got this far, it is all too tempting to assume that the same strategy which forced David Cameron to offer the referendum in the first place will also help us win it. But this is just not so. Nigel Farage did an amazing job turning UKIP’s 3% at the 2010 general election into 13% in 2015, but that still leaves us a massive 38 percent away from winning the referendum. And you just can’t make up that kind of gap by shouting the same message with a louder voice.

Bearing this in mind, I ask you to consider that no great endeavour is won without great sacrifice, and that something major has to change if we are to win the referendum and secure freedom and democracy for our country. And at this critical juncture, like it or not, the sticking point for the electorate is immigration and the free movement of people. Accept the status quo on the free movement of people for the time being and we have a fighting chance of extricating ourselves from the tentacles of Brussels. But stubbornly insist on getting everything we want, and we will be left with absolutely nothing.

This is a difficult and unwelcome message to hear, I know. But making this one sacrifice, and taking this one leap of faith – on the understanding that as an independent country we will seek to deal robustly with the negative consequences of immigration – will put victory within our grasp.

And just think of what we gain by being more flexible on immigration:

The young first-time voter who has only ever been taught good things about the EU and immigration will no longer be scared away by our campaign, and can then be engaged with our arguments about democracy and persuaded to vote for Brexit.

The young professional couple living in Manchester or London will be forced to pick between one side which wants remote and unaccountable government in Brussels and another side which wants laws made by the people they affect. And when they no longer have to worry that their freedom to live and work in Europe is in jeopardy, they will be much more likely to side with us.

Small and large business owners who are naturally eurosceptic but fear the potential uncertainty of labour supply or harm to the economy will be free to follow their hearts and vote for Brexit, knowing that there is no risk to their livelihoods.

Meanwhile, the sneering europhiles of the Remain camp will be dumbfounded, and their campaign left in utter chaos. Their whole argument is built on lying to voters and insisting that people like us only oppose the European Union because deep down we hate foreigners and want to see a complete halt to immigration. This is a golden opportunity to show them – and the country – that they are wrong, that while we have legitimate concerns about unrestricted immigration, we support Brexit because we are on the side of democracy first and foremost.

And ultimately, it is our faith in democracy – not our policies on immigration or anything else – which is our greatest strength, and the greatest weakness of our opponents. Unlike the europhiles, we can look voters in the eye and tell them that Brexit is about trusting them to make the right decisions for themselves and for our country. The Remain campaign has nothing to say about democracy, because they distrust the British people so much that they simply don’t believe we can run our own affairs.

So there it is.

We can win this referendum and secure Britain’s future for our children and grandchildren. But nobody said that it would be easy, or that this victory would be possible without sacrifice. Therefore we must be adaptable and willing to look at plans which have a chance of winning over undecided voters while simultaneously de-risking Brexit, even if it means that we don’t get everything that we might want.

And remember: democracy is key. If we win the referendum and keep Britain from being irreversibly absorbed into a political union, we preserve our freedom to revisit any and all other agreements with the EU in future, and to stand up for our national interest. But if we allow our greed to lose us the referendum, then Britain will soon be unable leave or change the terms of our membership, even if we want to. Dropping our demands on immigration is the safest thing to do, and it is also the right thing to do.

I hope that you will consider what I have to say, and bear it in mind as we respond to demands to show our plan for Brexit. Thank you for hearing me out.

With best wishes,

Sam Hooper

British citizen, former UKIP voter, Brexit campaigner

Open Letter

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Don’t Believe The Europhiles: There Is No Status Quo If We Vote To Remain

Samuel Hooper9 Comments

European Parliament

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Anyone thinking of voting to Remain in the European Union through fear of the unknown must remember that the EU is on a journey of its own, and will look very different in ten, twenty and thirty years’ time

 

… The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.

– Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

 

In a must-read piece, UK Unleashed invites us to imagine a near future in which Britain has made the mistake of voting to remain in the European Union in the coming referendum:

It’s 2030. Thirteen years previously, after a torrent of negative campaigning by the Remain side and having been mind-crippled by unparalleled EU funded FUD, the UK population voted to remain in a ‘reformed EU’. The fight was down to the wire and, yet again, pollsters were shown to be wide of the mark, yet surprisingly on message. But when the count came in, Remain won by a mere 2%.

This ‘significant majority’ was accepted as a mandate by the then Prime Minister David Cameron to take the the UK in to a new relationship with the EU. ‘The British Option’ as it was called, brought us to the outer ring in 2022 after it was ratified by the people of the UK in a second referendum. Although originally seen as a triumph against ‘ever closer union’, in 2030 there are now well established concerns. Whilst the likes of Norway (which continues to top the world ranking for prosperity) sit at the top tables of global bodies where the rules are hammered out, the UK are now further retracted and marginalised, neither taking a global position or one of prominence within the EU.

To compound matters, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey have now all joined the ever growing federation, with Boznia Herzegovina and Kosovo also on the cusp of membership. Our margin of vote in the European Parliament and European Council are lower than ever and about to shrink yet again. In spite of complaints about the inability of any one member to stand up to the EU in any meaningful way, the committed europhiles, in thrall to their pay masters, repeat the mantra that we should be grateful to have the opportunity to ‘collaborate’. Our hands bound behind our backs, we’re unable to harness the power of the now maturing international markets, instead we remain chained to an ageing customs and political union in spite of the fact that EU exports have continued to decline year on year.

Unrealistic scaremongering? Hardly. Think of the organisation we joined back in 1973, and what a different beast it is today, both in size and competence. Then think of the current geopolitical crises and changes, and how they are already being used by the integrationists as a catalyst and excuse for further “essential reform”.

Only a fool could believe that the driving forces behind the EU think that their creation has reached a benign state of perfection, and that no further change is desirable. And only a fool could believe that the European Union’s response to the latest global challenges – from terrorism to climate change – will be anything other than “more Europe”.

This is a key point, because the chief argument of those who would keep Britain in the EU is the hysterical claim that leaving would be some terrible and unprecedented leap into the dark. Unable to wax lyrical about their beloved EU for fear of alienating vital swing voters – and because there is nothing remotely inspirational about the European Union – instead the europhiles hammer on relentlessly with the scaremongering notion that Brexit is scary while Britain’s future in the EU will be predictable, prosperous and permanently sunny.

Or as UK Unleashed memorably puts it:

I guess when you’re ensconced in the arms of the EU octopus and you’ve divested yourself of any sense of national identity, you’ll say what ever it takes to avoid being prised away. In their heads, these people probably don’t see themselves primarily as British, instead they’re EU nationals just waiting for the country to be hatched in the next treaty.

The europhiles are in absolutely no position to make such promises of security within the EU and destitution without. What little they know of the EU’s immediate future they cannot campaign on, because it would be repugnant to many British voters, and the rest is just as much a mystery to them as it is to everyone else. We simply do not know what future geopolitical challenges we will face, or precisely how they will be used by the arch-integrationists to continue the journey they began back in 1950.

All we can say with any degree of confidence is that the EU will look very different in 2050 than it looks today, and that the self-declared aspirations of many European national leaders and EU officials to pool even more sovereignty and undermine the nation state yet further will be in full fruition.

Dr. Richard North gives us a glimpse of what lies ahead:

Hidden in plain sight, as in various documents published in Europe including last September’s “State of the Union Address” by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, is the plan for a radical restructuring of the EU into two classes of member.

The 19 eurozone countries will move on to much closer political and economic union; while Britain and the rest become mere “associate members” (possibly also including countries outside the EU, such as Norway and Switzerland).

As Juncker explained, none of this is to be formally revealed until 2017, when the Commission issues a White Paper to trigger the laborious procedures now required for any new treaty. And these might not be concluded until 2025.

All of which completely transforms the game play. Mr Cameron can keep his original promise to hold a referendum in 2017, but only to ask the British people for permission to remain in the EU until the terms of the new treaty are clear. We will then have to hold a second referendum on whether we accept these terms.

Britain will then have the choice of belonging to the new inner core, the vanguard for the dissolution of the nation state, or membership of the outer rim of states, burdened with many of the same costs but with even less influence and fewer dubious benefits. That is what we can reasonably expect by voting to Remain – and if any EU supporter would care to argue otherwise, let them step forward and do so, presenting their own less dystopian vision of the future.

In reality, once the deceptive posturing of the Remain camp is stripped away, it is only the Leave campaign which gives the impression that they have given any thought at all to what life outside or inside the European Union might realistically look like for Britain beyond the next decade, or how such an exit from unwanted political union can be managed under a variety of scenarios.

And on this note it is extremely encouraging to see that Dr. Richard North, pre-eminent authority on the European Union and author of Flexcit (the best adaptive Brexit plan in existence), is partnering with Arron Banks and Leave.EU in a consultancy role to make Flexcit that group’s official exit plan.

This is great news, and means that one of the two largest Leave campaign groups (really the only one, since Vote Leave is teeming with people who don’t actually want to leave the European Union) actually has a robust, solid plan for Brexit. If Brexiteers learn about and support this excellent plan, we will be able to go into the referendum battle with the Remain camp’s best weapon – the false claim that Leave supporters have “no plan” for Brexit – broken in their hands.

The Remain camp’s whole fearmongering argument to persuade us to vote to stay in the European Union is that we are safer and more prosperous under our current arrangements, while Brexit would throw everything into flux, potentially create chaos and leave us worse off. Basically, their uninspiring campaign message is “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

But that is not the choice before us in this referendum. The EU is changing, moving down a swift and pre-determined path to further integration for most member states with powerless irrelevance awaiting those other countries not wishing to join the core. There will be no “devil we know” to side with, but only devils we don’t. And of those, staying part of an ever-tightening political union for which most of us have no love or affinity is far more threatening a devil than having the faith and confidence that Britain can succeed as an independent country playing a full and unfiltered role on the world stage once again.

That’s the choice before us now. And since the Leave camp now has Flexcit on their side while the Remain camp has nothing but smears, scaremongering and a vision of the future they are too ashamed to articulate, the only devil to be avoided is the one which pledges fealty to Brussels.

Brexit - Flexcit - European Union

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Rotherham & Cologne: A Tale Of Two Cities Betrayed By Political Correctness

Samuel Hooper11 Comments

Cologne - Sexual Harrassment Abuse - Virtue Signalling

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High-handed elites with their fear and contempt for ordinary people are the greatest internal threat now facing our society

If Western civilisation does ever collapse in upon itself, it will not be the fault of radical Islam, UKIP, Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump or Kim Jong-Un’s home-made H-bomb.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the fastest route to national or civilisational decline is for our elites to persist in their policy of signalling their virtue by furiously ignoring inconvenient realities, and having infinitely more fear and contempt for their fellow citizens than any real, external threat to our freedom and security.

Consider the scandal now unfolding in Germany, where city officials and the media stand accused of covering up important news about a spate of sexual attacks in the city of Cologne, for reasons of political correctness and a painful reluctance to highlight a potential link between these attacks on women and the immigrant population.

From the New York Times:

The tensions simmering beneath Germany’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance.

[..] The assaults initially were not highlighted by the police and were largely ignored by the German news media in the days afterward.

[..] The descriptions of the assailants — by the police and victims quoted in the news media — as young foreign men who spoke neither German nor English immediately stoked the debate over how to integrate such large numbers of migrants and focused new attention on how to deal with the influx of young, mostly Muslim men from more socially conservative cultures where women do not share the same freedoms and protections as men.

Shockingly, this story has only received significant traction over the past couple of days, despite the events taking place a week ago.

One can almost imagine the terrified police officials and news editors in Germany, sitting on this story of unquestionable public interest, yet paralysed into inaction by the all-consuming fear of appearing in any way racist – as though it were not perfectly possible to report the news in a sober and measured way, giving the facts without casting aspersions on an entire ethnic group or community.

But to the minds of many people in authority – not only in Germany, but across Europe – reporting a story which amounted to a question of public safety for the women of Cologne was remarkably not an open-and-shut case, but rather a morally ambiguous grey area fraught with hazard and difficulty.

The reason for this moral and professional failure is twofold. Firstly, there was the ever-present impulse to be seen as virtuous, progressive and in no way racist (as though noting the ethnicity of a criminal suspect is somehow smoking gun evidence of prejudicial thought). One cannot underestimate the corrosive effect that this pressure to be seen not just as tolerant but blindly uncritical of other cultures has on people who hold positions of trust in our society.

But secondly – and even more insidiously – there is the fear of “we the people”, and the nervous contempt with which elements of our political class view their fellow citizens. It is the mindset which whispers in the ear of police chiefs and news editors that they cannot possibly report a story about mass sexual harrasment in a major European city, because the particulars of the case might drive the ordinary “sheeple” into committing a murderous, anti-immigrant pogrom. It holds the people in such low regard that they are seen as mindless automatons liable to do anything suggested by Evil Mass Media.

Both of these noxious ideas are complete nonsense, of course. It is perfectly possible to report a pertinent social or ethnic dimension to an important news story without giving in to base racism or crude stereotyping, and most people are perfectly capable of watching or reading such a story without themselves being motivated to commit criminal acts against people who share the same appearance or ethnicity as the alleged suspects. Yet these are the poisonous ideas influencing people in positions of civic leadership throughout Europe.

In some ways, the scandal emerging out of Cologne resembles the Rotherham sexual abuse scandal in the UK, which finally made news headlines in Britain in 2013. Obviously there is no comparison in terms of the scale of the atrocity committed – in Rotherham, hundreds of girls were systematically abused and raped by gangs of men while the authorities turned a blind eye – but the first response of those in positions of civic authority has been startlingly similar. As in Rotherham, officials in Cologne first chose to bury their heads in the sand and wish the problem away rather than risk the reputational harm (or imagined public disorder) that would have arisen had they sounded the alarm.

As Mick Hume notes in his powerful and timely book “Trigger Warning: Is The Fear Of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?“:

Why did the local authorities try to close down media reporting and public debate of the child sex scandal? Not because the council and police in Rotherham had some sort of soft spot for sex criminals. It was because they were afraid of being accused of racism, and exacerbating community tensions, by allowing it to be said that Asian men were abusing white girls. They did not want to suppress the story because it was false. They wanted to suppress it because it was true.

[..] In other words they feared the reaction of local people if the media were permitted to report the truth and people were allowed free discussion of the facts. Or to put it more bluntly, they suspected that the Rotherham public were a malleable lynch-mob-in-waiting, a collection of puppets that could be inflamed into race riots by a spark from a Home Office report or a newspaper investigation.

[..] The authorities feared that there might be race riots in Rotherham if locals heard a bad word about child sexual exploitation from the press or right-wing politicians. So interfering in the right of the public to know the facts and judge for themselves became the first instinct of liberal-minded officials and politicians. Rather than have uncomfortable truths in the public domain, they tried to keep the free-speech genie in the bottle.

Inevitably, this “liberal” interference only serves to make matters infinitely worse by allowing problems to fester unresolved.

And yet the consequences of allowing the people to hear or know the uncomfortable truth are never as calamitous as the elites always fear, as Mick Hume points out with respect to Rotherham:

This was not done in the name of restricting free speech of course, but of protecting the innocent and maintaining community cohesion. Whatever they called it, the result of interfering with free speech and limiting debate was, as always, to make matters worse. When the long-suppressed truth finally came out there were no race riots in Rotherham – people are not the mindless automatons that some appear to believe. But the scandal left deep divisions and scars that threatened to sink, never mind rock, the multicultural boat.

If this problem manifested itself only in cases of sexual abuse going unreported and unaddressed it would of course remain a horrendous sickness in our society and a grave failure of the state to protect half of its population. But it would not be an immediate, existential threat to large, modern countries like Britain and Germany.

However, this worrying trend is by no means limited to the sexual abuse of women, or the dereliction of duty by civic leaders in provincial cities. All around Britain – and indeed Europe – we see the same failure to tackle non-integration and non-assimilation with Western norms by recent migrants or their children. Even when the lack of commonly held British values and a shared common identity leads to whole families upping and departing for Syria to fight for ISIS against the country which gave them life and liberty, many of us refuse to face the problem square on.

It’s not just Rotherham. There is a festering crisis of British and Western values, and a determined unwillingness from some quarters – for reasons of political correctness and fear of the masses – to challenge cultures and behaviours which fall short of our hard fought, painstakingly-built commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of (or from) religion, respect for the role of law and equality for women.

But it is not the child rapists or locally-grown terrorists who are even the greatest problem. Evil as those deplorable crimes are, the people who currently present the bigger threat to our society are those in the political elite or positions of civic leadership who seek to make a public virtue out of their tolerance-at-all-costs approach to multiculturalism. Some of these people may mean well. But their misguided dogma threatens our country and our liberties with a slow death by a thousand cuts.

And it is this corrosive attitude – whether expressed in Cologne or Rotherham, London or Brussels – which we must fight against first and foremost.

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The Daily Toast: The Christian Case For Brexit, And Against The EU

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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There’s nothing Christian – or in any way moral – about throwing away our hard-won democracy in the drooling pursuit of European political union

Adrian Hilton of the excellent Archbishop Cranmer blog has a very noteworthy piece in Reimagining Europe, making the rare (but very welcome) argument against the European Union from a Christian perspective.

Hilton writes:

Unlike many politicians and most bishops and other circulating elites, I don’t equate historic Europe with the political civic empire called the EU, and it seems that my desire for UK secession from this artificial construct makes me ‘un-Christian’.

How welcome these words are. The lazy but insidious notion that the continent of Europe and the political construct known as the European Union are one and the same thing is hugely damaging yet near-universally held. People worry about “leaving Europe” as if by leaving one particular (very expensive) geopolitical club, Britain would literally be levering herself away from the continent of Europe, walling ourselves off in Fortress Britain, when this is clearly not the case.

But the lazy belief that British membership of the European Union is somehow as logical and essential as our geographical location within the continent of Europe is widespread, and so it is unsurprising to see it mindlessly repeated by the Church of England.

The same goes for the risible idea that leaving the EU would be to cease any kind of friendship or cooperation with the other countries of Europe, another argument commonly deployed by europhiles, as Hilton recounts:

“So we stop working with our neighbours; finding common ground; influencing for good – not my idea of Christian,” [Lord Deben] tweeted to me a few weeks ago. Like Jeremy Corbyn, it seems, I’m locked into an otiose 1970s view of the world. Everything has changed, and I just haven’t realised that sovereign nations can no longer work effectively with their neighbours on matters such as trade, taxation and regulation: “Most big international decisions (are) made between EU and US,” Lord Deben asserted, before needling: “Why do you want Britain excluded?”

You see how the caricature goes? The EU is ‘top table’ (though it really isn’t, but that’s another blog post), and Christians who favour UK-EU secession become isolationist, xenophobic, un-(anti?)-Christian ‘little Englanders’. He didn’t say ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’, but he might as well have done. My ‘idea of Christian’ is self-evidently blinded by nationalistic bigotry and naively fomenting apocalypse. No matter how much you try to reason back with gracious statistics, humble facts and philosophical insights, the inference is clear and crushing: there is no place in the Church of the Enlightenment for those who identify with the narrow, sectarian parochialism of a national democratic polity. No informed, intelligent or discerning Christian could possibly be so spiritually witless or theologically illiterate as to advocate withdrawal from the EU.

But of course there is nothing Christian about allowing the United Kingdom – our flawed but essentially decent democracy – to be subsumed into an explicitly political supranational union which is the peculiar, flawed vision of founding fathers who – unlike their American predecessors – are largely unknown and unloved, because their elitist vision for technocratic governance so utterly fails to resonate in the hearts of Europe’s citizens.

Neither is there anything “moral” or Christian about divesting ourselves of judicial, legislative and executive sovereignty, only to slowly and stealthily transfer and pool those powers into an entity with which most of us feel absolutely no heartfelt love, affiliation or loyalty.

Or as Hilton so eloquently puts it:

I support the Leave campaign not because I desire economic isolation or social exclusion from the Continent, but to extricate the UK from the unaccountable elitist pursuit of unending politico-economic integration at the expense of democracy, accountability and liberty, which, to me, are perfectly sound biblical principles.

Ask a europhile how these principles are to be preserved in a European Union of relentless, unapologetic political integration and you will be met with a very long silence.

Ask a europhile how they plan to preserve democracy when they undermine the nation state at every turn, and give its powers to a supranational organisation which commands no feeling of affinity, and you will get tumbleweeds. Because they have no answer. Either they have not thought the issue through, or – far more frightening – they have thought about the ramifications for our democracy, but simply don’t care.

Hilton concludes:

We, the governed, ask ‘Who governs?’, and the answer is lost in a pathology of bureaucracy and unfathomable institutional structures which seem purposely designed to convey a façade of democracy while shielding the executive elite government from the inconvenience of elections. We are governed by a wealthy, supranational, technocratic oligarchy, and no popular vote can remove them or change the direction of policy. This might fulfil Lord Deben’s apprehension of righteous government, and I am sensible to the fellow-feelings of European humanity in its unanimous yearning to eradicate civil strife and internecine war. But all I see are disparate peoples desperate for the restoration of national identity against the failures of forced continental integration.

UKIP. Front National. The Danish People’s Party. Jobbik. The Freedom Party. Finns. All across Europe, eurosceptic parties – some mainstream, some more extreme and less pleasant – are flourishing because of a growing number of citizens who have had enough of enforced European political unity and remote government-by-technocrat, and who would much rather that meaningful power returned from Brussels to the level where they feel a sense of belonging – be that their region, province or country.

Too often – at least in Britain, with the media’s patronising and dismissive coverage of UKIP leading up to the European and general elections – we explain away these populist movements, or belittle their support base by suggesting that they are all economically left-behind losers or curtain-twitching village racists.

And it’s partly true, only not as an insult. If you are a well paid professional in rude financial health you can better afford to be a consumer rather than a thinking citizen. You can use your vote to signal your virtue (anyone but UKIP!) or advance your lazily thought out utopian daydreams, with little fear of the consequences. But those of our fellow citizens on the sharp edge of globalisation – those whose livelihoods are impacted by deindustrialisation, new technology, outsourcing and the information economy – tend to see things differently.

This doesn’t mean that we should adopt every nativist, protectionist policy that comes along – because barriers to trade are never the right answer. But it does mean that we should acknowledge that the eurosceptic parties of the Right and the Left are at least asking some important questions that the mainstream parties, trapped in their centrist consensus groupthink, have consistently failed to do.

And too often the Church has sided with the establishment, reflecting the voice of the political class and the prosperous middle class rather than the informed citizenry or the imperilled working class. Worse still, it has done so while shamelessly dressing itself in the robes of enlightened internationalism, progressivism and virtue.

If nothing else, it is encouraging to see that thanks to the likes of Adrian Hilton, they will no longer be allowed to do so unchallenged.

More semi-partisan commentary on Re-imagining Europe here and here.

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