EU

Who Should Be Able To Vote In The EU Referendum?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

UK British EU Flags - Brexit - European Union - Secession Referendum

 

It goes without saying that the loudest voices on the pro-European side are desperate for the coming EU referendum to be open to EU nationals currently living in Britain, as well as British citizens. From their selfish perspective, subverting our democracy in this way is a price well worth paying in order to inflict their desired outcome on the rest of us.

But now the europhiles are reaching for another rhetorical weapon in the fight: the fact that Britain, through a number of bizarre constitutional quirks and the pernicious rules of the EU, already allows select groups of favoured non-citizens the right to participate in our democracy.

Mihir Bose, writing in the Guardian, is already taking a gleeful victory lap on the subject, suggesting that eurosceptics are somehow being craven or ideologically inconsistent for objecting to the idea of EU citizens voting to keep Britain chained to Europe while not speaking out against these other cases of non-citizens receiving the franchise:

What [eurosceptics] neglect to mention is that even now you do not necessarily need to be a UK passport holder to vote in a general election. Indeed, for decades the UK has allowed citizens from other countries the right to select members of parliament, a right that even extends to citizens of three EU countries. They are part of a much larger group of 72 countries that includes all Commonwealth territories, British overseas territories and British crown dependencies. Fiji and Zimbabwe may be suspended from the Commonwealth but their citizens resident here have not lost their right to vote in UK elections. The three special EU countries are Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. They enjoy this privilege because while they may now be part of the EU, they once had an older allegiance to a much greater union: the British empire. The sun set on the empire long ago, but its legacy lives on.

What makes all this fascinating is that while Eurosceptics are happy to raise all sorts of scare stories about the EU, these other voters are an issue they are reluctant to discuss. Indeed, as far as the UK electoral franchise is concerned, this is now the great elephant in the room, as I was made well aware during the recent election. At one husting, I had the chance to raise this issue with three panellists from the main parties: Michael Gove for the Tories, Ivan Lewis for Labour and Baroness Kramer for the Lib Dems. Lewis disapproved of my even raising the issue. Baroness Kramer, who did not seem to know that non-citizens could vote, justified it on the grounds that this was a wonderful example of British eccentricity. Gove just said that he did not want to see any change in the franchise.

More fascinating was how Ukip reacted. Some weeks before the election, at a British Future event, Douglas Carswell, now the only Ukip member of parliament, made a very reasoned speech to show that Ukip was not an anti-immigrant party. But when I raised this issue, he made it clear that this was not a question Ukip would touch, remarking that the British system was so complex that to lift the carpet would mean all sorts of things would crawl out. How strange to hear this from a party whose leader, Nigel Farage, makes so much of the fact that he is prepared to go where no other politician dares.

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Defying The People On Europe

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.
Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

Labour peers in the House of Lords have filed more than fifty amendments to the EU Referendum Bill as it makes its way through the committee stage in a transparent and bold-faced attempt to filibuster the bill, defy the clear wishes of the British people and to save their hapless leader, Ed Miliband, from having to take a firm and unambiguous stance on the issue.

The Telegraph reports:

David Cameron’s plan to give the public a vote on membership of the European Union could be defeated within weeks after Labour peers tabled dozens of outlandish amendments that could halt its progress in Parliament.

More than 50 amendments were tabled for the committee stage of the EU Referendum Bill, including holding a petition of a million voters, posing the questions in Cornish and giving prisoners the vote, the Telegraph has learnt.

As a private member’s Bill, it has a limited time to pass through Parliament. It can only be debated on Fridays and must be approved by both houses by February 28.

Dirty parliamentary tricks such as this have been used by all sides at one time or another, but it is dispiriting to see them deployed against a bill that merely seeks to return power to the people on an important issue of sovereignty such as this. There is no need to wait for a petition of a million votes before proceeding, we know that a vast number of people support a referendum. Neither do we need to pose the referendum question in Cornish, Klingon or any other obscure language. And topics such as the re-enfranchisement of prisoners currently serving custodial sentences deserve their own hearing and debate, not just to be used as ammunition in childish political games.

I remain genuinely torn on the issue of Europe. Whilst I see the EU in its present form as nothing but a scandalously wasteful talking shop in pursuit of a closer union never formally sanctioned by the citizens of any of its member states, the issue of a potential British withdrawal would be very thorny. Though none of the worst-case scenarios peddled by the pro-European scaremongers are anything near accurate (all of our trade with the EU vanishing overnight, sudden diminution on the world stage among others), there are real questions that need resolving around the realistically achievable options for future relations between a seceded Britain and the remainder of the EU. At its most basic, we need to know the terms on which Britain can continue to remain a part of the common market and free trade area whilst subscribing to as little as possible of everything else that the EU has taken it upon itself to do.

When they are not busy accusing eurosceptics of being little Englanders or xenophobes, those on the pro-European side of the fence are forever issuing mea culpas, saying that of course the European Union has flaws and needs reform, but that the only way to tackle this is from the inside as a fully engaged player. But the day to press for such reform never seems to come, or when it does come Britain finds that her interests on a key point do not align with other key players in the union, resulting either in gridlock and inaction or another painful debit from the “give” column in the give and take of our membership, the price, we are told, of being part of the club.

I am exceedingly unwilling to spend another year, yet alone another 5-year stretch between general elections, being fobbed off in this entirely predictable manner. Yes, what happens if Britain crosses the Rubicon and votes to leave the EU is of tremendous importance for our country, and those on the “leave the EU” side need to flesh out this part of their argument more fully in order to be more convincing to those such as myself who are genuinely torn. But the fact that these questions have not yet been fully addressed is no reason to delay the referendum, in the same way that contempt and distrust of the British people is also not a legitimate reason.

I often get the sense from the words and actions of the Labour Party that they are convinced that they know what is best for me far better than I do myself. But nowhere is this self-righteous superiority combined with ruthless determination to promote their vision of Britain over all others more evident than in the current manoeuverings of the Labour peers in the House of Lords.

The people deserve their say, and if Ed Miliband cannot muster the courage to take a public stance one way or another, he should at least call off his ennobled lackeys and prevent them from impeding the wheels of British democracy any further.

Britannia Contra Mundum

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Not necessarily the end of the world.

 

Britain, according to Mary Riddell writing in The Telegraph, is the friendless pariah of Europe.

Riddell informs us that our economy is in the doldrums, our foreign policy is a shambles and we are actively alienating the very people who we need to come riding to our rescue:

…the issue of Britain’s global influence should preoccupy every parliamentarian.

Our current position is not hard to plot. Hiding under a duvet of doubt and debt, Britain – so recently the buccaneer of the world – has become insular to the point of agoraphobia. Recession and hardship at home have made the UK a nation of political navel-gazers. The cost-of-dying debate, over whether we could possibly justify the cost of our wars, has been superseded by a cost-of-living crisis: gas bills have supplanted gas masks.

According to this defeatist and self-flagellating line of argument, it is Britain, the weak country, which needs to curry favour with her European neighbours, and not the other way around. Apparently it has gotten so bad that as a nation we are now suffering from some kind of identity crisis:

But inward-looking politics are bolstering, rather than reducing, Britain’s identity crisis. With power ebbing away abroad and the spectre of Scottish independence at home, Britons are wondering: who are we?

This comes as news to me, and probably to many other people who feel comfortable in our national identity and don’t feel the need to vex themselves with recurring thoughts of national inferiority or separatism.

I seem to remember urging against this type of declinist, pessimistic, self-defeating talk only very recently in “Why Britannia Rules”, but my small backwater blog has clearly made no impact on the mood of feeling in the British commentariat. As I said then, when everyone was tearing their hair out and prophesying the end of Britain after Parliament voted against military action in Syria:

We are British. We are a great country. Our economy may still be in the toilet, and we may be governed at present by dilettantish non-entities in the mode of David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg, but these things shall pass. And when they do, Britain will still be a great country.

What I wrote was true then, and it is true now. But this is where Mary Riddell really loses the plot:

With dangers abroad and our economic destiny far from assured, it is imperative that Britain should re-establish its identity and global niche. The irony is that our best hope is the one that politicians hesitate to flaunt, and that many citizens revile. The EU remains the largest single economy in the world, has the second biggest defence budget after the US and boasts the diplomatic muscle recently used by its (previously maligned) foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton, in helping to secure the recent Iranian nuclear pact.

In what precise way has Britain lost her identity? Did this happen while I was sleeping?

The EU may indeed remain the largest economy in the world, but it is not the “largest single economy”, as Riddell and anyone with the slightest knowledge of current divergent conditions in Greece and Germany knows all too well. Whether we swoon with delight over our membership of the European Union and ever-closer union with our continental neighbours or chafe at the smothering bureaucracy of the whole project and yearn to leave, we still trade with the EU. And contrary to the shrieks of some scaremongers, even if Britain were to leave the EU, this trade would cheerfully continue by necessity and mutual benefit. Some unscrupulous commentators phrase their warnings in such a way as to leave the impression that all of Britain’s trade with Europe would cease and disappear in a puff of smoke if we were to leave the EU, a ludicrous and obviously nonsensical notion.

And are we really going to start talking national defence as a reason to lash ourselves ever tighter to the mast of the European Union? The EU may have the second biggest defence budget after the US, but this is a meaningless fact when you consider the obvious fact that the member states of the EU do not act with one common military purpose. Indeed, of the EU member states it is really only Britain and France that possess any capability to project significant force without airlift or blue water navy support from the United States. Furthermore, Britain’s military actions in recent years have primarily taken place either through NATO or in concert with our chief ally, the United States. It is hardly as though we would be putting any much-loved and time-tested military partnership with the Europeans at risk by disengaging from the EU, as no such partnership exists.

We are then supposed to believe that Britain is in danger of severing  herself from some great source of “diplomatic muscle” as a result of our ambivalence about Europe. But I could well point out that weighing against Riddell’s one example of EU foreign policy success (Baroness Ashton’s help in securing the recent Iranian nuclear pact) are the many times when other powers have looked at the incoherence or tense nature of European joint foreign policy and either laughed at it, rudely dismissed it or used it as an opportunity to divide and conquer.

Then comes the obligatory “but of course there are a few small issues that need ironing out” remark in reference to the EU’s many flaws, together with the standard plea to refrain from throwing the baby out with the bath water:

While no one doubts that reforms are needed, EU membership makes us an influential part of the largest global trading bloc. As Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, and Ian Kearns write in their new book, Influencing Tomorrow, the EU is “not just an instrument for amplifying our power, but also for promoting peace and security and defending democracy and human rights”.

I can only despairingly repeat (as though to a brick wall) the fact that Britain, as one of the world’s few truly indispensable nations, would remain strong and secure whether or not we are an “influential part of the largest global trading bloc”. Indeed, I would further argue that we are not, have not been and are unlikely to become as influential as we should be within an EU structure which gives veto power to countries which are relative minnows or which have strongly divergent interests to Britain’s, and that by freeing ourselves from the yoke of so much European regulation and counterproductive harmonisation attempts we would have the potential to soar higher and achieve even more. But Mary Riddell seems too afraid of the world and too doubtful of Britain’s enormous advantages and assets to ever acknowledge this possibility.

None of this is to say that the right answer is for Britain to leave the European Union under any and all circumstances. It is just to point out that there needn’t be such a bone-chilling fear of secession and the idea of Britain standing on her own two feet like so many other sovereign nations manage to do. It is partly this fear that colours and undermines our relationship with the EU, and makes the current raw deal that we get from our membership a self-fulfilling prophecy. If our European partners believe that we are desperate to remain a part of the club at any price, the price that they are certain to demand and extract from us in each and every nation will be that much higher.

So rather than running into the arms of the EU in a scrabble to find identity and protection, as Riddell advocates in her less-than-stirring peroration, we should actually embrace some of the insularity (if we must call it that) that so many of the commentariat class seem to scorn, at least in terms of our approach to the European Union.

In order to prosper, Britain must look inwards at ways to release our own inherent national dynamism and competitiveness, rather than outwards for reassurance and protection in a world which will surely offer neither.

On EU Secession And Straw Man Arguments

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Another day, another newspaper column from a political has-been lecturing us on why leaving the European Union or renegotiating our terms of membership would be terrible, just terrible, and consign us to the lowly status of a third world country, adrift in the sea of globalisation with no friends and no influence.

The newspaper columns tend to follow the exact same template, and this time it was the turn of Kenneth Clarke, writing in The Telegraph, to gently explain to us stupid “swivel-eyed” nationalist loons exactly why our views are undermining Britain and putting our future at risk. He writes, with reference to the potential EU-US free trade agreement currently being discussed at the fringes of the G8 meeting in Lough Erne:

For, irony of ironies, it is of course the EU that is making deals with America and Canada possible. It should come as no surprise that President Obama’s officials have commented that they would have “very little appetite” for a deal with the British alone. Quite simply, the political commitment and dedication that the creation of a free market encompassing over 800 million people, 47 per cent of world GDP, and boosting the combined economies of the EU and the US by nearly £180 billion, could only ever be made by the leaders of evenly matched economic blocs.

What nonsense. While this statement may be true for some of the smaller EU member states, until you reach about Spain size, it certainly does not apply to the United Kingdom. Why would any country not wish to negotiate bilaterally with the sixth largest economy in the world, and miss out on the many benefits of tariff-free access to such a large hub of industry, innovation, technology, arts and sciences? Ken Clarke would have us tremble in fear that the mighty President Obama might overlook pathetic, little old Britain if we dared to stand on our own, but he certainly pays attention to the likes of India, Russia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and countless other countries with much lower nominal GDP than the United Kingdom, so that argument hardly stands up.

But of course, Ken Clarke doesn’t need his arguments to bear scrutiny, because they are straw men. He assumes that a Britain outside of the European Union would automatically be isolated, introverted and inward-looking, seeking to shut itself off from the world, but he is putting words into the mouths of the Eurosceptics. He disingenuously proclaims:

There always has been something of the romantic in the British soul. We can’t fail to be stirred by Charge of the Light Brigade visions of Britain standing alone against the odds. It is the same sentiment behind the idea of exchanging the EU for Nafta.

But, in the end, we are a practical race. We know that the empire on which the sun never set was created by intrepid, relentlessly outward-facing adventurers and administrators, not isolationist John Bulls. That “Brexit” would mean curtains for our ability to have any leadership role in world-defining plays like these free-trade agreements would greatly disturb us. Accepting a diminished situation in which the UK is forced to trade by EU rules which it has had no say in setting is simply not in our nature.

I don’t know of any anti-EU people who want to create a Fortress Britain and isolate ourselves from the world – in fact, quite the opposite is true. We feel that the ever more onerous conditions and regulations that must be observed as part of our EU membership damage our national competitiveness and make it harder for us to do the business that we want to do with the rest of the world. If the EU were simply a free trade area then remaining an EU member to negotiate an agreement with NAFTA or the US would make the utmost sense. But the ever-closer union has become so much more than that, spawning parliaments, commissions, foreign policy chiefs, “human rights” courts, and generally extending its tentacles into every aspect of national life. How does Ken Clarke imagine being beholden to all of these anti-democratic institutions improves our leverage or bargaining position when it comes to discussing matters of free trade?

Of course, Clarke is deeply invested in the success and longevity of the European project. He himself is a current member of the secretive Bilderberg group which in the post-war years was instrumental in formulating many of the policies and initiatives that have helped to bring us to our ever-closer union with our European neighbours and allies. Indeed, at the most recent Bilderberg Group meeting in Watford, England, one of the agenda items specifically focused on “the politics of the EU”, which you can read as “how to make the masses support our floundering European project”. The last thing that he would want is to undo his organisation’s stated objectives of weakening the institution of the nation state in favour of larger, pan-national, anti-democratic organisations. The European Union serves the needs of his political and corporatist friends very well indeed; the average voter, less so.

Personally, I don’t appreciate being talked down to by the likes of Ken Clarke, so in retaliation I am going to post this video of him, taken at a campaign event while he still held fairly high political office, being too fat to get out of a racing car that he was inspecting (skip to the 7 minute mark):

 

I’ll change my views on Britain’s need to leave the European Union, or at least drastically renegotiate our terms of membership the day that Ken goes on a diet.

The Spirituality of the European Union

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

EU church religion

 

St George’s Day brings yet another wildly misguided and inappropriate intervention from a Church of England bishop, this time the Rt Rev Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter.

While back-handedly praising Prime Minister David Cameron for the zeal of some of his reforming efforts, he goes on to expound at length on the question of whether Cameron might be – wittingly or unwittingly – undermining the “deep spiritual roots” of the European Union.

From The Telegraph:

The Rt Rev Michael Langrish, who sits in the House of Lords, told Peers that he was concerned that Mr Cameron’s policies could contribute to the “loss of the European soul”.

He told how the European project has “deep spiritual roots” and said the Church of England “engages with the EU itself through its own representation and structures”.

The Bishop of Exeter is, of course, a Lord Spiritual, one of those Church of England bishops given the right and authority – unique among leaders of all other religions and denominations in this country – to sit in the upper house of the British parliament and meddle in our lawmaking. The Telegraph continues:

Speaking in the House of Lords this week the Rt Rev Langrish insisted that the Church of England has a “European perspective”.

“It may be thought that the Church of England does not have a particularly European perspective, but that is far from being the case,” he said. “Through its diocese in Europe it is present in all the member states of the EU. It has effective links with other churches throughout Europe and is active in the Conference of European Churches. Together with our partner churches, we are also deeply aware of some of the roots of the EU and the vision of its founders in Catholic social teaching.”

First of all – deep spiritual roots? Really? I am not wholly ignorant of Catholic social teaching, and I am probably better informed than most about the history and development of the European project from its humble beginnings as the European Coal & Steel Community. In my misguided undergraduate days I curated a half-hearted, rightly neglected website called the Pro-European Alliance which aimed to explain some of this history and spin it in a way that case favourable light on the modern-day European Union.

Bishop Langrish’s attempt to describe the institutions, mechanisms and workings of the EU as having any spiritual dimension to them whatsoever seem to be a rhetorical step too far. That is not to say that there was or is nothing noble in the idea and reality of the EU. Binding the fractious nations of Europe together through increased trade, some common institutions and a mechanism to resolve local disputes was undoubtedly a good thing. So potentially a tenuous argument could be made that the existence of an organisation such as the EU served or serves some spiritual goal.

But the European Parliament? The Council of Ministers? The Commission, which hasn’t produced an audit-worthy budget and financial statements for years beyond counting? The European Courts? How do any of these inefficient, undemocratic, self-serving institutions, created by bureaucrats to serve the interests of bureaucrats, nourish the roots of spirituality? In any way?

The only way that one can see any spiritual element to any of this is if one subscribes to the view that the nation state and international institutions are the most suitable – or only acceptable – forums for key aspects of the modern welfare state such as regulation, income redistribution and the like to be administered. That people are inherently selfish, thoroughly unaltruistic, and that only through government coercion (either at a national or European level) can we make ourselves administer fair justice and look after the weak and vulnerable in our societies.

And of course this is exactly what large swathes (though not all) of the Church of England does believe today – see “Christ would not privatise our NHS” as just another recent, damning example. Build and maintain a big state sector to do all of the things that humans are too selfish or wicked to do of their own volition for the good of their fellow men, and criticise anyone who holds opposing views from the pulpit every Sunday.

The Bishop concludes:

“I hope that the failure of successive British Governments to articulate a coherent and constructive policy towards our European partners and to manage to take public opinion along with this will not contribute to that loss of the European soul.”

When the Bishop of Exeter defends the spiritual roots of the European Union and attacks David Cameron for seeking to repatriate powers from the EU and return them to the nation state or to the individual, not only is he wrong, but in so doing he is no less than abdicating his own Church’s spiritual roots and its responsibility to empower and enlighten the individual.