2015: A Good Time To Be Eurosceptic

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

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First published at Conservatives for Liberty

It’s hard to remember the last time it felt this good to be a Eurosceptic, to love Europe but abhor the mid-century anachronism that is the European Union.

Since the dying days of the Major government we eurosceptics have been on the back foot, forced to watch Britain sign the agreements and ratify the treaties which lashed us ever more tightly to the post-war dream of ever-closer union, totally incapable of mounting an effective defence. And when we did speak up, we have consistently been portrayed as cranks, obsessives (and far worse) by left-wing politicians, Conservative sympathisers and the media.

Aside from the recent morale boost courtesy of Nigel Farage and UKIP, it has often felt as though we eurosceptics were waging a lonely and futile battle against progress itself – that the inevitable world of 2115 would be organised into huge, supranational, protectionist trading blocs, with nation states stripped of power and relevance, and representative democracy having long since slipped down the crack between the two.

But not now, not in 2015. Not after Greece.

It should not have taken the immolation of a small, southern European country – sacrificed for the “greater good” of monetary union – for so many people to finally wake up and realise that the European Union does not mean them well, that the Eurogroup’s treatment of one recalcitrant member is the rule, not the exception.

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Mhairi Black’s Overrated Maiden Speech

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

 

By most accounts, the SNP’s Mhairi Black – Britain’s youngest MP in several hundred years – gave a great and powerful maiden speech when she finally spoke during the Budget debate this week. And so it was, if you lower the bar for greatness so far that it encompasses earnest, occasionally witty, wide-eyed socialist babble.

Certainly many Labour MPs were enthusiastic, as the Guardian reported approvingly when the speech went viral:

In the anti-austerity speech where Black called herself “the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK who the chancellor is prepared to help with housing” after the age limit imposed on housing benefit, she also called for a healing of relations with the Labour party.

“I have never been quiet in my assertion that it is the Labour party that left me, not the other way round,” she said in the speech where she also praised the lateLabour grandee Tony Benn. “I reach out a genuine hand of friendship that I can only hope will be taken. Ultimately people are needing a voice, people are needing help. Let’s give them it.”

Several Labour politicians seemed receptive to her call for cooperation. Praise for Black’s speech was tweeted and retweeted by Labour MPs including Tulip Siddiq, Diane Abbott and Sarah Champion, as well as Labour’s Madeleine Jennings, the parliamentary researcher for MP Stephen Kinnock.

This blog disagrees with almost everything that Mhairi Black believes in, but has no personal animosity toward the twenty-year-old parliamentarian. In many ways it is refreshing and long overdue for someone so young to be included in the makeup of parliament, especially at a time when government policy (and state largesse) so overwhelmingly favours older people, with their selfish attitudes and non-means tested benefits. It is only a pity that Mhairi Black doesn’t represent a serious political party but rather a group of zealous, moralising fantasists who would tear up a three hundred year old union in a fit of pique over ten years of Tory Lite rule. But so be it.

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No, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Leadership Candidacy Is Not A Disaster

Samuel Hooper9 Comments

 

It’s encouraging to see the Telegraph’s Rupert Myers echo this blog’s view that the presence of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership contest is a good thing, and not the unmitigated disaster that conventional wisdom and repetitious Labourite talking heads continue to say it is.

From Myers’ column today:

A Corbyn victory would allow the free democratic choice not between two shades of middle, but between what could properly be definied as the left and the right. Angry voices calling for true, radical alternatives to capitalism would (we can pray) be silenced for a generation (or at least a few months) if Jeremy had the chance to present a bold, socialist agenda for Britain. Floating voters would have the opportunity not to pick between politicians with similar manifestos, but to decide a political battle waged in technicolour. The Corbyn ultimatum would bring the far left from out of the shadows of a Labour HQ intent on fussing about how to win elections, and test the rhetoric of a legion of angry young socialists against the wisdom of the electorate.

Voters like a real, solid, discernable choice. If Labour pick Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson to head their efforts between now and 2020, I predict a renaissance of political engagement. Rather than spend the next five years arguing about the threshold of tax allowances, we could argue the merits of state ownership of the railways, banks, fast food industry, and the Premier League.

Instead of bureaucratic tinkering with foreign aid, we’d be debating whether to drop our borders to allow the unrestricted movement of people. PMQs could be a discussion on how to cap pay to the level of tube drivers, to be set at £200,000 a year. New Labour might not like the image which emerges, but at least Corbyn would turn the contrast button up to full and then rip it off the set.

Absolutely. It’s long past time we had a proper political debate in this country again, instead of these interminable, finickity squabbles about negligible ideological differences.

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The Curiously Brittle Bonds Of Left Wing Patriotism In Britain

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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People of all political stripes sometimes say things they don’t mean, or come to regret, in the heat of passionate argument, either out of anger or just for dramatic effect.

The Sun newspaper once famously warned the last person fleeing Britain in the event of a Labour election victory to “turn out the lights”. Every Labour Party campaign in living memory has warned voters that they had only “24 hours to save the NHS”, though somehow it never seems to disappear in the Tory years. Paddy Ashdown said he would eat his hat if the Liberal Democrats did as badly in the 2015 general election as the exit poll predicted (they did worse).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, angry liberals threatened to move to Canada when George W. Bush was re-elected, while social conservatives – high on passion but lacking in international awareness – responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling legalising gay marriage by themselves threatening to move to Canada, that well-known bastion of homophobia and social conservatism.

So rhetorical hyperbole is not restricted to any one political party or any one type of outlook or worldview. But there is a certain type of political argument to which those on the political Left seem to resort far more often than their opponents on the Right.

When faced with electoral defeat and years in political opposition, those of a conservative mindset tend to lick their wounds for awhile and then set about the business of trying to re-acquire power and influence, however angrily or unsuccessfully. However, when those of a left-wing mindset are faced with rule by the other side, they are far more likely to view the situation as intolerable to the extent that even remaining part of the same country or political structure becomes undesirable.

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The Opportunity Labour Is Failing To Grasp

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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As their uninspiring leadership contest rumbles on, the Labour Party is in the process of missing a massive opportunity, an existential moment which could very well determine whether the party of Keir Hardie exists at all in fifty years time.

Tristram Hunt – one of the real intellectual and political heavyweights who realised that Labour’s renewal could not be completed in time for the 2020 election, and decided to keep their powder dry for the next leadership contest – admits as much in a revealing interview with the Guardian today.

From the piece, entitled “Labour needs a summer of hard truths“:

Rather than developing detailed policy on childcare, housing, or education, Labour’s debate should be about how government can help people to tackle massive economic, technological and social change.

“The party should be arguing for a progressive and interventionist state to support citizens and communities in confronting the challenges of globalisation. What are we for? We are for giving people the capacity to deal with a period of incredible socio-economic change and the advent of digital technology, migration flows, global capital flows.”

As the Tories trim back the state, they fail to address such questions. “Representing Stoke-on-Trent, you see the seismic change of the last 30 years. It is almost anthropological in terms of the taking away of traditional systems. The role of a Labour party and social democratic parties is to help communities get through that and thrive on the back of it.”

Here, in a nutshell, is the leadership contest which the Labour Party should be having, but is not. Watch any of the hustings or listen to the bickering between the candidates and their badly behaved proxies and you will soon see that (with the partial exceptions of Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn respectively), and you will be struck by two facts about the conversation taking place in the party:

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