Elitism

The Narrowing Path To Victory For Brexit Supporters

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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A big external shock or a rising tide of anti-establishment rage are now the only remaining paths to victory for the poorly-led Brexit campaign

Getting a majority of Britons to vote to leave the European Union – particularly in so compressed a time frame, with the entire establishment chorus raised in unison against us – was always going to be very much a long shot. That much is obvious; asking people to vote against the established status quo is always very difficult, and despite having spent years flaunting their euroscepticism in public, it quickly became clear that many of the “big hitters” had given almost no thought as to what Britain’s future outside the EU should look like.

How different things could be if only the official Leave campaign had…oh, I don’t know, some kind of Brexit plan – not just familiar recitations of everything that is wrong with the EU, but an actual positive alternative vision for Britain, rooted in fact and probability rather than idle conjecture. But the shining ones in charge of Vote Leave and Leave.EU saw no need for a stinkin’ plan, preferring to paint with childishly broad brushstrokes their half-baked vision of buccaneering Britain negotiating and signing tens of trade deals a year, while the EU falls over itself to give us all the benefits of single market access at no cost (because the Germans like selling us their cars, don’t you know?)

Or as Pete North puts it:

From the outset you need to stress test your message. It has to be the words of winners. Eurosceptics bleat on about going global but it’s empty when you contrast it with the rest of their message which is outright hostile to global engagement. Again, it fails the credibility test.

I’ve said it time and again, but simply whingeing about the EU doesn’t work. Very few people like the EU, but they need a seriously good reason to take a risk – and that means you have to have a safe and desirable alternative. Oh, and a plan to get there. Vote Leave’s approach is to pretend there are magic wands to instant prosperity. Rather than seeking experts they sought people who will tell them what they like to hear. The Westminster bubble all over. They are going to lose and they will deserve it.

And so, with an uphill battle on their hands, the official Leave campaign has done almost nothing to improve their chances of victory, preferring to fire up the base and exalt in their lack of a Brexit plan rather than make a concerted effort to win over the undecided. And we are now rapidly approaching the point where all straightforward paths to victory are closed to the eurosceptics. Privately, David Cameron’s team expect to win with as much as 58% of the vote, and it increasingly appears that the only thing which might decisively change the Leave campaign’s fortunes is a big external shock – a flareup of the migrant crisis, a badly timed EU power play or a domestic political scandal, for example.

But why, besides the obvious ineptitude of the official Leave campaign, is it proving so hard to win over the undecided? It certainly doesn’t help that the arguments for remaining in the EU tend to be simplistic and fear-based*, while those in favour of Brexit (at least the thinking person’s version of Brexit) are more nuanced and complex. Among those who are not already die-hard eurosceptics, the push factor away from the EU can only take root when one has a basic grasp of the EU’s history and workings, while the pull factor toward an outward-looking, globally engaged Britain requires an understanding of the changing global trade and regulatory environment which the mainstream media utterly fails to provide (because they themselves do not understand it either).

(* Here I discount the genuine euro-federalist argument, which is perfectly legitimate but almost never heard in Britain because it is so distasteful to the majority.)

When Remainers crow that most major organisations from the IMF to large corporations want Britain to remain in the EU it superficially sounds like a slam-dunk case for staying, until one realises that most of the organisations held up by the Remain campaign are duty bound to minimise the risk (however small) of economic disruption, but have absolutely no mandate whatsoever when it comes to protecting and preserving democracy.

The CEO of a large corporation is accountable to the board and shareholders for the financial performance of their firm – often, it should be pointed out, with an unhealthy emphasis on the short term. CEOs have no legal responsibility to make public pronouncements about what is best for Britain’s democracy – the ability of British citizens to exercise meaningful control over the decisions and policies affecting their lives. And they certainly do not forfeit their bonuses when political engagement and voter turnout falls as people increasingly realise that it doesn’t much matter which party holds the majority in Westminster.

Were it not so depressing, it would be amusing watching Remain campaigners, particularly those on the Left, eagerly lap up every word uttered by the voices of big business – people whom they otherwise utterly distrust and openly despise, but whose statements that Britain should remain in the EU are accepted gratefully and unquestioningly because they confirm all of the existing biases of the EU apologists. Enjoy it while it lasts, because you are never again likely to hear Ryanair and the Labour Party press office singing so lustily from the same hymn sheet.

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But if, as expected, we go on to lose the referendum by a sizeable margin, our only remaining hope will be that the victorious David Cameron acts in as smug and condescending a way as he did in the aftermath of the Scottish independence referendum. Counterintuitively, this is when we need the prime minister to be at his arrogant best – to claim that the issue is settled for a lifetime and then swan around taking his gruesome victory lap and talking overexcitedly about how Britain will play a leading role in his mythically reformed European Union.

In other words, we need the prime minister to do everything in his considerable power to mock and belittle us if Remain carry the day, because this will add much needed fuel to the eurosceptic movement, light a fire under the the referendum post-mortem (Pete North is already talking about Nuremberg trials for those Brexit big beasts who did the most to let the side down) and hopefully result in a post-defeat surge in support like the one enjoyed by the SNP last year.

And there is every chance that this will happen – David Cameron has a big ego and a thin skin, and his political radar often deserts him when he gets emotional. Sadly, this may now be our best hope – to keep the margin of defeat as small as possible, and then hope for (or indeed provoke) as many gaffes and missteps as possible from the victorious Remainers.

It bring no joy to report this state of affairs – clearly it would be far better if Leave were consistently ahead by 10 points in all the polls and on course for victory, even if it means winning on the back of a “Brexit plan” drawn in children’s crayon. The only consolation is that this blog increasingly believes that the EU is doomed one way or another, that within ten years or twenty it will disintegrate under the weight of its own paralysing indecision, internal contradictions and interminable one-way ratchet towards closer integration.

We would all like to spend the remainder of 2016 preparing for secession negotiations and pressing the government to adopt sensible stances – and we should continue to fight to win, right up to the end. This is the last negative word this blog will write about the Leave campaign until the referendum is over – at which point you will find me, gavel in hand, on the bench at Brexiteer Nuremberg.

But increasingly it seems that our immediate job on 24 June will be to keep the flame of liberty alive, ready for the next opportunity – if and when it comes. And if we are truly dedicated to the cause, we must now begin preparing for that eventuality, too.

 

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The Labour Party’s Soul Searching Exercise Is Off To An Unpromising Start

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Finally, a glimmer of self-awareness from within the perennially self-satisfied Labour Party. But there is a long, difficult road ahead if Labour are serious about reaching out to their legions of disaffected former voters, and it is far from certain that senior party figures have either the stamina or the humility to make the journey

 

“What makes us great as a country is not our culture, it’s not our wealth, and it’s definitely not currently our footballing abilities.” – Suzy Stride, Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Harlow, 2014

 

Apparently Tristram Hunt has been filling the time freed up through refusing to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet by having a good, long think about why the Labour Party imploded quite so badly under the hapless leadership of Ed Miliband.

Hunt’s principle contribution to this process of soul-searching has been to assemble and edit a book of essays by various people within the party, each one ruminating on the cause of their defeat. The common thread which emerges, unsurprisingly, is the profound extent to which the increasingly metropolitan, middle-class core of the modern Labour Party has diverged from the “white working class”, to the extent that the Labour leadership (and many activists) had almost nothing to say to Britain’s strivers going in to the 2015 general election.

Hunt previews this new book – “Labour’s Identity Crisis” – in an article for the Guardian, and it makes fascinating reading, though probably not for the reasons that its author would like. For it reveals the absolute mountain which Labour has to climb just in order to appear relevant to those voters who have deserted the party for UKIP or the Tories.

Hunt begins:

“I’m a white working-class Englishman who isn’t on benefits, Labour isn’t for people like me.” That was the brutal message that confronted the Labour party candidate Suzy Stride on a doorstep in Harlow, Essex, during last year’s general election.

It was a sentiment repeated across the country: Labour didn’t speak for England. Worse, in that remarkable tweet from the Islington MP Emily Thornberry  – picturing St George’s crosses adorning a semi in Rochester – we seemed to mock it.

It’s very interesting that Tristram Hunt should kick off his article with a quote from failed 2015 Labour parliamentary candidate for Harlow (my hometown), Suzy Stride. Because this is what Stride had to say about the country which gives her life and liberty back during the 2014 Labour Party Conference:

“What makes us great as a country is not our culture, is not our wealth, and it’s definitely not currently our footballing abilities. What makes us great is that we have the dignity to care for those who are most vulnerable. So when did it become acceptable to make parents queue for food at foodbanks?”

This is someone who stood before the electorate asking for their vote only months after boasting on television that she believes there is nothing special about her country, its culture, history or achievements, and that the only thing which we on this rainy island have to be proud of is the fact that we confiscate ever more money from the most productive people in society and blast it indiscriminately at anybody declared by the Labour Party to be “vulnerable” (currently hovering at around 50% of the population, in terms of net welfare recipients).

And yet up pops Suzy Stride in Tristram Hunt’s book, acting as though the seeds of her defeat were sown not by her own contemptuous attitude toward her country, but rather by the mistaken priorities and poor leadership of the national party. The man who went on to beat Stride by 8,350 votes, incumbent Conservative MP Robert Halfon, understands that in fact our culture is great, as is our history, our wealth and global power. And while he is far from being a Thatcherite right-winger, Halfon at least appreciates that the greatness of our country is more than the sum of our public services. Faced with a choice between the two candidates, it was no contest for the voters of the bellwether constituency of Harlow.

Tristram Hunt quotes Stride again, at the end of a long passage on immigration:

For too many voters, we were still the party that had once dismissed Gillian Duffy as “bigoted” for raising the question of mass migration and cultural change. Labour still has a long way to go to acknowledge the post-2004 influx as one of the most dramatic demographic surges in the history of England. As a result, England has changed in cultural and ethnic composition with an intensity many voters understandably find deeply unsettling.

For at the same time as new migrants found work, manufacturing was laying off workers in the face of increased global competition. There was no direct link between the jobs gained and those lost, but the conjunction of immigration, globalisation and job losses left a toxic political legacy: industrial communities in England saw their way of life change under a Labour policy for which democratic consent was never sought, let alone given. Even worse was an unwillingness by Labour activists to acknowledge the problem. According to Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, eight out of 10 Labour party members think that immigration is good for the country. This is not the case on most doorsteps in Labour areas. And when, in 2015, English voters raised cultural concerns about changes in language, dress and social norms, we answered with crass, material responses. “Many middle-class Labourites scoffed at such views,” according to Suzy Stride in Harlow. “Where would the NHS be without immigrants?” was a common response from canvassers, she said.

This is actually a very good passage, and is the closest we have yet come to anything approaching contrition for the way that the New Labour government of Tony Blair waved through an unprecedented influx of immigrants without so much as mentioning it to the British electorate, let alone seeking their permission. Whether one is generally pro or anti-immigration (and this blog is very much pro), we should all be able to agree as democrats that such a significant national change, brought about by stealth, was an unconscionable act of arrogance by the Blair government. The fact that many Labour activists still have to be coaxed ever so gently toward this realisation is itself a sign of how much atoning the party still has to do.

Tristram Hunt then gets to the core of it:

A failure to appreciate the value of Englishness played an important role in our 2015 defeat and nothing Corbyn has done as leader has changed this. Indeed, his cosmopolitan views on immigration, benefits, the monarchy and armed forces are likely to have exacerbated the disconnect.

As George Orwell put it: “In leftwing circles it is always felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” He was right: in no other progressive European tradition – from the French Socialist party to Spain’s Podemos – do you find a similar reluctance to fly the flag.

So there are obvious reforms for Labour to pursue: an English Labour party; a referendum on an English parliament; radical devolution to cities and counties. Alongside that, we have to be careful during the EU referendum campaign not to alienate those millions of Labour voters opting for Brexit. But more than that, what these tales from the 2015 campaign expose is Labour’s need to shed its metropolitan squeamishness about England. It needs to express its admiration and love for the people and culture of this great country.

An admirable sentiment, but at present a futile hope. As Hunt himself admits, the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party has done nothing to change the core of the party’s disdain for that bulk of people lumped together under the umbrella term “white working class”. While this blog hailed Corbyn’s leadership bid not because of his odious foreign policy opinions but because of the opportunity he represents to inject some real partisan choice back into our domestic political debate, there is sadly little evidence that the army of new members Corbyn helped attract to the party hail from outside the urban, middle class clerisy first identified by Brendan O’Neill as the Labour Party’s new de facto rulers.

You see the effect in Jeremy Corbyn’s immediate U-turn on the European Union the moment he became Labour leader. Corbyn had always held a principled eurosceptic stance and had voted to leave back in the 1975 referendum, and yet here he is in 2016, chanting the praises of Brussels. Why? Because while the Labour party membership will forgive many things (including supporting the IRA, as Alex Massie reminds us), the one thing they cannot abide is a failure to support the mindless, anti-democratic pseudo-internationalism of the EU, or the failure to take a firm, unapologetic stance in favour of unlimited immigration. Those things are simply non-negotiable for Labour activists, most of whom can scarcely conceal their disdain for anybody who fails to hold the “correct” view on immigration in particular.

And that’s the problem. Too many Labour activists actually hate the people of this country – or at best they view those not already convinced of Labour’s righteousness as dangerously ignorant, as Tristram Hunt goes on to explain:

Jamie Reed, MP for Copeland, in Cumbria, takes the analogy further by suggesting that, if Labour fails to embrace Englishness, it will face in northern towns and villages the same fate as the Democrats in the US south: a failure to connect “culturally” with a socially conservative working-class electorate, increasingly willing to vote against their own material interests.

Jamie Reed presumptuously declares that it is the cultural issues surrounding English identity which make natural Labour supporters spurn the party and vote against their own material self interest. But this lazy “what’s the matter with Kansas?” attitude is itself part of the problem – the arrogant assumption that people are voting Tory or UKIP despite rather than because of their right wing economic policies, and that of course they would see that good old fashioned socialist policies would be much better for them, if only they were a little more educated.

The headline of Hunt’s piece in the Guardian is “There’ll always be an England – and Labour must learn to love it”. But from all the evidence currently on display, aspiring for love is setting the goal far too high. First, Labour must learn simply to tolerate the country again – to look upon the white working class and others of their former supporters not as godless infidels who spurned the One True Faith and threw their lot in with the genocidal Tories and racist Ukippers, but as decent and rational human beings who simply don’t like what the Labour Party is currently selling.

Meanwhile, Labour shadow ministers and the army of activists who knock on doors and deliver leaflets need to dial down the moral sanctimony from 100 to about 50, and accept that maybe they, rather than the electorate, made the mistake on May 7 (and the days leading up to it) last year.

If these extracts from “Labour’s Identity Crisis” – and the behaviour of Labour supporters in the year since that fateful general election – are anything to go by, the party has a lot of unresolved anger toward the British electorate. If this were a marriage, couples therapy would most definitely be in order. All of which is quite ridiculous, because it is Britain which has every right to be angry at the Labour Party, and not vice versa.

The white working class and many others spurned the Labour Party in 2015 not because they are morally defective, but because the centre-left, urban, woolly Fabianism of the Miliband era had absolutely nothing to offer them.

And what remains uncertain, despite a radical change in leadership and a plucky first attempt at introspection from Tristram Hunt, is just how the Labour Party ever expects to win a future majority when they continue to hold such a large segment of the population in open contempt?

 

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Why The Real Elites Consistently Support Britain’s EU Membership

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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Professional and social elites are more likely to oppose Brexit for narrow personal reasons – which makes them bad citizens

James Delingpole writes in the Spectator that the real dividing line when predicting someone’s position on Brexit is where they fall on the posh / oik spectrum:

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit?

[..] So there I was at dinner the other evening with a delightful, erudite Old Etonian friend of mine. Let us call him ‘Kevin’ (not his real name). Kevin has an accent so deliciously plummy that if you could somehow tin it and sell it to the Chinese you’d become a billionaire. He is immensely cultured, civilised, wise and sensitive. I agree with him on everything, so naturally, when I asked him his views on Brexit and he launched into his eloquent diatribe on why he believed — and long had done — that the EU was the Abomination of Desolation, I listened in a state of near-ecstasy.

Kevin’s beautifully modulated speech went on for at least ten minutes. (There was hardly a shortage of material.) Then, suddenly, something weird happened. About 30 seconds before the end, Kevin shifted tack, and explained (or actually, hardly explained at all) that for all these reasons the only logical position was for Britain to remain in EU. Something to do with Europe being a lovely place and our having a moral duty to help it set the tone, I think.

And goes on to draw a interesting parallel with the Thatcher era:

What does all this tell us about snobbery and Tory politics? Quite a depressing bit, I’ve begun to realise. You can see much the same sort of thing going on in the Thatcher era. Who were her greatest loyalists, the ones most in tune with her radical programme? Why, they were grammar-school types with slightly suspect accents, such as Robin Harris and Norman Tebbit — not the plummy-voiced grandees such as Heseltine et al, who were the ones who eventually did for her.

This is also true, I think, of the upper social echelons’ attitude towards Nigel Farage. It’s not that they disagree with much of what he says: how could they, when he’s so refreshingly candid and reactionary and un-PC? But they’ve persuaded themselves that, like Ukip, he’s just a bit too spivvy and downmarket to deserve their open affiliation. This enables them to have their cake and eat it: privately enjoying his every home truth but never being tainted by that awkward, embarrassed feeling which tends to accompany frankly expressed views on matters like immigration.

Delingpole sees this as an elitism thing: the closer you are to the establishment or to the top of your field or profession, the more likely to are to have vested in the current  order of things and the more likely you are to sense Brexit (sometimes justifiably) as a threat to your current position.

I think that this probably holds true in all manner of fields, from education (How many university Vice Chancellors are brave enough to bite the hand that feeds them recycled British taxpayer money?) to the arts (for the same reason) to the world of business, which understandably cares a lot about economic stability and not so much about democracy.

But this blog maintains that one’s stance on the EU referendum is also determined by whether you consider yourself a citizen or a consumer first and foremost. As Delingpole’s anecdote makes clear, many of the European Union’s biggest advocates within the British establishment freely concede and attack its antidemocratic nature, but still refuse to countenance leaving the club. They are unable take this logical step because they are thinking with their wallets and their social reputation in mind, rather than the good of the country.

By contrast, someone at the sharp end of globalisation – who has experienced the negative aspects of free trade and free movement of people on their employment, living standards and public services far more than the person living in Mayfair – is more likely to vote on the kind of issues that a thinking citizen should vote on, because they are much more likely to be directly touched by those issues.

As this blog recently noted:

If you have grown up and prospered under the status quo, with Britain as a vassal state of a larger and ever-more tightly integrating political union, then it takes an extraordinary amount of curiosity, empathy or insight to come to any conclusion other than that the EU has been a resounding success on all counts. By contrast, if you are self-employed or work in a semi-skilled or unskilled job at the sharp end of globalisation, you are more likely to be negatively impacted not just by immigration, but by the inability of your vote to effect any kind of meaningful political change in Britain thanks to the cross-party pro-EU consensus.

[..] It is those who think primarily with their wallets, as consumers first and foremost, who are most likely to be susceptible to the Remain campaign’s Project Fear and scaremongering tactics about the hysterically hyped “costs” of leaving the European Union, while those who think as engaged citizens and global stakeholders who are most likely to question the European project.

That doesn’t mean that the Oik (in Delingpole’s parlance) is not also often voting for his or her self interest. They may well want to see Brexit as part of a broader package of counterproductice protectionist measures, which would inevitably do Britain more harm than good. But regardless of their personal motivation, they are more likely to discuss the issue of Brexit in terms of policy and of democracy. The oiks thus often act like a better, more engaged citizens than the elitists who lazily support the Remain camp to virtue-signal their distaste at UKIP while overlooking the democratic question.

As for myself, I enjoyed the delights of a state education, worked to get myself into Oxbridge, but then left Cambridge University and went to Warwick. I suppose all of that places me firmly in the “Oik” category, a position I shall hold with even more pride now that it is also a marker for principled euroscepticism.

 

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In Defence Of Tristram Hunt, In Praise Of The One Percent

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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In qualified defence of Tristram Hunt

Was Labour MP Tristram Hunt wrong to call for the top one per cent to assert their leadership in the Labour Party?

Lots of people seem to think so, at least judging by the online hysteria now picking up steam following Hunt’s address to the Cambridge University Labour Club last week.

From the Independent:

Labour-supporting students at one of Britain’s two elite universities have been told by a Blairite MP to lead a campaign of “dissent” in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victory.

Tristram Hunt, the former shadow education secretary, told students at Cambridge University Labour Club that they were the “top one per cent” and needed to show leadership within the party.  

“The way you serve the Corbyn leadership is to be as dissenting and creative as possible,” he told the students, according to the Cambridge University newspaper Varsity.

“You are the top one per cent. The Labour Party is in the shit. It is your job and your responsibility to take leadership going forward.”

But the truth is a little more complex than an outraged headline in the Independent or an angry Facebook post. And ultimately, it depends on what 1 per cent Tristram Hunt was talking about.

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