European Union

When Deciding How To Vote In The EU Referendum, Do Your Own Research – All The Information Is Out There

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

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It is becoming fashionable among the undecideds in the EU referendum campaign to complain about the supposed lack of available facts in the debate. But they don’t want facts – they want to be spoon-fed opinions and simultaneously reassured that these answers are unbiased

There is a rather nauseating new trend among those people who have somehow not yet come to an informed opinion on whether or not Britain should vote to leave the EU, whereby they blame their inability to reach a decision on the supposed lack of available facts handed down to them from on high.

We even see this cropping up in Question Time, as the Independent reports:

With 113 days until the EU referendum – that’s more than 15 weeks away – levels of stamina among the public for the flow of information being directed at them seem to be waning.

And when the opening question of BBC’s Question Time was on how much the referedum’s outcome would depend on “which side could scare us more”, one audience member put the problem laid before the country in very clear terms.

A young man said the decision to continue or terminate the 40-year relationship all rested on wondering who could be trusted to give impartial, accurate information.

“With all this scaremongering that’s going on in the media about this, I don’t see how us as the general public can make an informed decision,” he said, prompting nods from those around him.

[..] In the light of such risks, the audience member seemed to be concerned that he was given little information with which to make a safe and long-term decision.

“It’s just all sides saying different things and you just don’t know who to believe,” he said.

Boo hoo. It’s so difficult for undecided voters today, bombarded with passionate (but often fact-free) arguments from both sides. How can they possibly be expected to vote when the government and the meejah don’t give them a clear and unambiguous signal?

The amusing thing is that the young Question Time audience member asking the question would probably have absolutely no difficulty using the internet to research a complex and technical query relating to his malfunctioning Playstation or home cinema system. He is likely adept at finding YouTube tutorials which show how to disassemble and repair household appliances, and if he has a favourite sports team, band or celebrity he can quite likely find all manner of information about them online with no difficulty at all.

But when it comes to the workings and operation of his own country and the European Union which influences so many aspects of his life, it apparently does not occur to the questioner that he can use exactly the same skills he honed researching his fantasy football team to turn up some relevant, unbiased facts about the EU. The thought simply does not compute. When it is something glitzy and fun, he is more than willing to spend five minutes consulting Google and a few hours reading through the results that his search throws up. But on “boring” matters like the governance of the EU, what the European Union might look like in the future or how Brexit might actually be accomplished, he loses focus before he can finish typing a query into the Google search bar.

Of course he is not getting unbiased information from the media. Playing the role of high-minded, neutral arbiter has not proven to be very successful for most media outlets, nearly all of which instead churn out content which plays to the gallery of their readerships. That’s life. But it does not mean that the primary information needed to reach an informed and independent opinion is unavailable. It just means forsaking Monday Night Football or the Great British Bakeoff for one night and using the internet or local library to make oneself a more informed and engaged citizen.

EU referendum blogger Pete North has by far the best response to these aggrieved undecided voters who flaunt their ignorance of the debate as though it is an injury inflicted upon them by evil external authority figures withholding “the facts”:

I watched Question Time last night. I heard that whining bovine complaint once more “I just want to be given the facts”, expecting that it’s the government’s job to spoonfeed them with information, under the assumption government can and will. Could they be any more bovine?

As it happens, the facts are available insofar as anything is ever truly a fact. On something as comprehensive as the EU there is all the information you could possibly want. And while you can say a lot of bad things about the EU, one thing we can say is that it is transparent. It publishes most of what it does, the schedules, the regulations, the meeting minutes, the agendas and the agreements. It’s all there if you can be bothered to look for it. I didn’t learn what I know by reading John f*cking Redwood.

And when it comes down to it people say they want the facts but they don’t. You can give them the facts but it’s always “tl;dr”. So they want a digest version of the facts. So you provide them with that and it tells them things they don’t want to hear – and so they stick with their ridiculous notions that either we can pull out overnight and comes the dawn of a new utopia – or on the other side the europhiles pretend the European Union IS that new utopia.

What people mostly want is to be told what to think. To have someone else make the decisions. To not let the complexity of life disturb their comforting ignorance. It’s the “I pay politicians to do the politics” attitude. THAT is how we get in these messes to begin with. Politics is too important to be delegated to these bozos and if this referendum has revealed anything it is that most of our elected representatives are intellectually subnormal and know f*ck all about nine tenths of anything.

In the end, to have a proper democracy participation requires more than just turning up to vote. It requires that you educate yourself, keep yourself informed, keep yourself up to date and find the facts for yourself – and especially that you do not rely on the media – after all our media are very much part of that political class with even less clue than the morons we elect. If you can’t be bothered to engage on that level you really do deserve everything you get from your “leaders”.

It is a lazy, naive idea that we can outsource the running of our country to elected politicians and only perk up and pay attention once every five years or so when there is a general election. As Pete North rightly says, that is how we got into this mess in the first place – people failing to hold their leaders to any kind of account, while the politicians did as they pleased.

If you want to be told what to think by the government or those in authority, don’t complain when David Cameron comes back with a one-sided, pro-EU propaganda leaflet costing the taxpayer over £9 million to produce and distribute. That’s what you get for outsourcing your decision-making processes to people with vested interests.

But at least if you do so, you are in plentiful (I won’t say good) company. Neither the official Remain or Leave campaigns are exactly brimming over with deep expertise on the workings of the European Union, in which direction the EU will travel or the logistics of achieving Brexit.

Fortunately, there are those who stopped watching television for long enough to educate themselves on this important subject. A number of them have become experts in the subject, certainly far more so than the Westminster media with its superficial grasp of the facts, all while holding down day jobs. They are the the bloggers of The Leave Alliance, and the plan they promote for leaving the European Union in a safe, orderly and non-disruptive way is called Flexcit, or the market solution.

Start with that. Or start with the European Union’s own websites – as Pete North says, much of this information is “hidden” in plain sight. Begin your search for facts in any number of places, just don’t repeat the whiny, false complaint that there is no factual information available.

 

Postscript: The irony is that facts and figures supporting either side are not the most important thing in this referendum, while economic projections are particularly unreliable to the point of being pure fiction. This blog contends that the EU referendum comes down to more qualitative factors like democracy, sovereignty, governance and constitutional reform, which simply cannot be calculated in an Excel spreadsheet.

 

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The Liberal Case For ‘Leave’

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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The European Union is an obsolete and rusting vessel – a dreadnought in an age of guided missile destroyers – holed beneath the waterline by the forces of globalisation

If you have not already done so, be sure to read Roland Smith’s excellent new article for the Adam Smith Institute, “The Liberal Case for Leave“.

Smith, a newly-minted Fellow of the ASI, begins with an excellent summary of the context in which Britain joined the EU in the first place – which also has the effect of showing what a vastly different country we are now than we were at the nadir of our post-war, pre-Thatcher decline:

Let’s bypass the line that says the UK electorate were sold the then EEC on a false premise. Instead let’s look at the circumstances in Britain around the time we joined the EEC and then agreed to stay as a result of the 1975 referendum.

Back then Britain was a country beset by nagging economic problems that were coming to a head: The constant stop/go policies of the post-war period that seemed to only inch us forward while the likes of Germany and Japan seemed to leap ahead; strikes; power cuts; rations even; union power; consensus politics; corporatism; and the 3-day week. Opinion favouring free markets was out on the political fringes.

On a longer view, Britain was a country in decline. Since World War II and particularly since the Suez crisis of 1956, Britain’s empire and its confidence had declined as it grappled with a new post-imperial future. The USA and the Soviet Union were the two blocs that now mattered in the world, each having their own large economic trading zone (the USA itself and Comecon).

Indeed, large and protected blocs seemed to be the future and the EEC was apparently forging a third bloc and third way between these two giants, albeit aligned to the USA.

Then there were the walls.

The most visible walls were the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain separating the Soviet Union from the West but there were also significant tariff “walls” between blocs, countries and trading areas. These walls not only demarcated different geographic areas, they reinforced the separateness of those areas, limited trade, and ultimately put a limit on economic progress. The tariff walls in particular defined economic blocs but also made the case for them, creating an impulse for relatively like-minded countries to club together to at least forge a level of economic freedom among themselves.

Smith rightly summarises the prevailing attitude of the time:

Being “for Europe” symbolically represented a future, outward-looking, cosmopolitan and internationalist mindset. It confirmed that you were part of the new jetset or had aspirations in that direction. It was about “getting on”.

Smith goes on to note that Britain joined the EEC just at the time when all of the old certainties which underpinned it began to show the first signs of corrosion – the decline and fall of the Soviet Union bringing an end to the necessity of regional super-blocs, and the decade of negotiations which led to the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

With the beginning of significant reductions in global tariffs and even the emergence of many new nations, the European Union – a protectionist customs union with explicit and long held aspirations for statehood – was already falling behind the times, as Smith describes:

Unseen and barely discussed in the 1990s, globalisation was beginning to eat into the logic of a political European Union at the very point it was striding towards statehood with a single euro currency.

Looking back, the EU was (and is) an old ideology in a hurry.

The event that was somewhat more attuned to freer globalised trading was the fanfare around the launch of the single market in 1992, except for the fact that it was and is tied to the EU’s political integrationist ambitions. But now, even the European single market is being rapidly eclipsed by the march of globalisation. A large and growing body of single market law is now made at global level and handed down to the EU which in turn hands it down to the member states.

The automotive industry’s standards are defined by the World Forum for the Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations (known as WP.29) under ‘UNECE’ – a United Nations body. Food standards are defined by the ‘Codex Alimentarius’ established by the UN and the World Health Organisation. Modern labour regulations are defined by the ILO – the International Labour Organisation. Maritime regulations are defined by the International Maritime Organisation. Many energy-related regulations can be traced back to the global Kyoto accord on climate change and other international agreements.

Read the whole article. Roland Smith covers an extraordinary amount of ground in his essay, including more sense on immigration policy than you will ever hear from the official Leave and Remain campaigns.

While the EU’s furtive aspirations for statehood are misguided and abhorrent, many of the ways in which the European Union has developed were born not out of particular malice toward the sovereignty of its member states but merely as the result of being perpetually stuck in an increasingly irrelevant post-war mindset. Unlike many rent-a-copy diatribes against the EU, Smith captures this nuance well.

If we are to succeed against the odds in securing Brexit in this EU referendum, it will not be the alarmist cries about impending dictatorship or the abolition of the NHS which secure victory.

Reasonable, moderately engaged people – those with vague eurosceptic thoughts but who are minded to vote Remain because of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt kicked up by the government that those with vested interests in keeping things as they are – are most likely to be persuaded to Vote Leave if they are told that the EU is not necessarily the Great Satan, but rather a hopelessly outdated mid-century anachronism thrashing around and drowning in the sea of globalisation.

Given the choice, people will quickly vote with their feet when it comes to safely evacuating a foundering ship. Which is why the Remain camp are doing their utmost to portray the EU as a faithful and seaworthy vessel, albeit one in need of a lick of paint here and there.

This important article by Roland Smith – as well as outlining a bright and positive liberal vision for Brexit – also sounds a timely warning that RMS European Union has essentially been holed below the waterline by the iceberg of globalisation and is already steadily taking on water, regardless of the course it now chooses to steer.

And the fact that the lights still burn and the band plays cheerily on as the water laps ever higher around the deck is no reason for Britain to foresake the waiting lifeboat on offer.

 

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Love Our NHS? Prove It With Your Vote In The EU Referendum

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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The EU referendum meets our national religion

The major campaigns on both sides of the EU referendum are currently slugging it out in a tawdry contest for the affections of fearful, NHS-idolosing simpletons.

No British political campaign is complete without eye-rolling attempts by those without ideas or vision to trawl for votes by pretending that Our Blessed NHS (genuflect) is mere moments away from being abolished.

From Vote Leave’s latest mailshot, entitled “Save Our NHS”:

Lord Owen, the former Labour Foreign Secretary and Health Minister, today launches the Vote Leave ‘Save our NHS’ campaign with an important speech: ‘Protecting our NHS from the EU’.

He argues that the our National Health Service should not be under the control of the EU and cites serious flaws in The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is a major new deal being negotiated behind closed doors between the EU and the USA.  This he says, disregards the purpose of social health care and undermines the responsibility each member state has for its own healthcare policy.  This is highly detrimental to our NHS.

And from Britain Stronger in Europe, the charmingly personalised “Love the NHS Samuel? You need to read this”:

When it comes to the NHS, you can’t listen to the people campaigning to leave Europe.

They describe the NHS as a “60-year mistake” (Vote Leave’s Dan Hannan), say there’s “plenty of room for cuts” (Nigel Farage), and think people should have to pay for services so they “value them more” (Boris Johnson).

No – instead, we should listen to the doctors and NHS workers who make our health service so special.

This week, 200 medics wrote a letter stressing that “the NHS, medical innovation and UK public health” are stronger in Europe.

They warned “Brexit should carry a health warning” – because the economic damage caused by leaving Europe would “jeopardise an already cash-strapped NHS.”

Samuel, those who work in the NHS couldn’t be clearer – we need to stay in Europe to protect investment in our health service. Volunteer for our campaign today, and help secure the NHS for future generations:

Well, that’s that then. Your friendly local NHS urologist is clearly such an expert on statecraft, diplomacy and constitutional matters that they are ideally positioned to tell you how to vote on a matter of existential importance to Britain.

The obvious, simple-minded manipulation being attempted by both campaigns would be offensive were it not so amateurish. And to think that political consultants and strategists are actually being paid money to come up with this stuff.

Vote Leave and you’ll get cancer, because Brexit is so dreadfully scary that it should come with a health warning!

Vote Leave and we’ll save so much money that we can build a brand new hospital every week. Just think of it! That’s fifty two massive new hospitals every year. In a decade, we’ll have 520 new hospitals! By the year 2036 we could have 1040 new hospitals! Enormous ones! Your descendants could live in a Britain with a humongous, fully staffed new hospital for every single person living on this island! Oh, what a paradise it will be.

What pathetic, manipulative nonsense.

Whether we vote to leave the European Union or remain in the burning building, the NHS will continue to exist. We can’t seem to shake it. And it will continue to churn out moderately priced but increasingly substandard levels of care while nearly the entire population gathers round to uncritically praise the holy creation of St. Aneurin Bevan of Tredegar from dawn to dusk. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.

Do you really believe Britain Stronger in Europe when they suggest that “medical innovation” will cease or be harmed if Britain leaves the political construct known as the European Union? Exactly what is it about forsaking a foreign flag, anthem and parliament which will slow down the cure for Alzheimer’s?

Or do you seriously buy this idea that Brexit means that we can throw up a brand new hospital in every major British city within a year, and keep on doing that until the NHS is not only our largest employer but our only employer?

Don’t be taken in by this execrable, manipulative, transparently idiotic nonsense from the major Leave and Remain campaigns, all of which seem to be managed by B-student politicos and all of which are operating on the hopeful assumption that you are a frightened, credulous simpleton.

Recognise that this referendum is about sovereignty, sovereignty and sovereignty. Do your own research, and then make the right decision. And whatever you decide, don’t waste your vote virtue-signalling your love for Our Blessed NHS.

 

Save Our NHS

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Yanis Varoufakis: The Remain Campaign’s Best Spokesman For Brexit

Samuel Hooper12 Comments

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Think that the EU is a hopelessly outdated, cumbersome, anti-democratic tyranny of the technocrats and unaccountable elites? So does Yanis Varoufakis. But he would very much like for you to vote Remain.

If you were searching for a passionate, eloquent case against the EU and the increasingly discredited idea of European political union from a non-Briton, you could do little better than the first 80% of Yanis Varoufakis’ latest Op-Ed in the Guardian.

In his article, Varoufakis uses anecdotes from his brief and tumultuous period as Greek finance minister to give the reader an illuminating and deeply unpleasant close-up view of exactly what it is like for a national government minister to face off against the EU’s leaders and technocrats in defence of their sovereign national interest (spoiler alert: advocating for national interest, like sovereignty, is verboten).

If you stop reading the Op-Ed before the final six paragraphs, you would come away thinking that this is a man who has stared into the cold, dead eyes of supranational European governance, seen its soul and come away understanding just how misguided and dangerous is the anachronistic, mid-century experiment known as the EU.

But then Varoufakis executes one of the sharpest journalistic handbrake turns you will ever see, wilfully ignoring his own bitter experience at the hands of supranational governance for the “common good”, and somehow arriving at the conclusion that everything will be better if we simply double down on our commitment to European political union.

His response upon being burned by the flame of unaccountable, supranationalist technocracy is apparently not to recoil his hand, but rather to go marching briskly on into the inferno.

Thus Varoufakis goes from this, when describing the nature of his negotiations with the Eurogroup (and German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble in particular) at the height of the Greek Euro crisis in 2015:

An alliance of states, which is what the EU is, can of course come to mutually beneficial arrangements, such as a defensive military alliance against a common aggressor, coordination between police forces, open borders, an agreement to common industry standards, or the creation of a free-trade zone. But it can never legitimately strike down or overrule the sovereignty of one of its member states on the basis of the limited power it has been granted by the sovereign states that have agreed to participate in the alliance. There is no collective European sovereignty from which Brussels could draw the legitimate political authority to do so.

One may retort that the European Union’s democratic credentials are beyond reproach. The European Council comprises heads of governments, while Ecofin and the Eurogroup are the councils of finance ministers (of the whole EU and of the eurozone respectively). All these representatives are, of course, democratically elected. Moreover, there is the European parliament, elected by the citizens of the member states, which has the power to send proposed legislation back to the Brussels bureaucracy. But these arguments demonstrate how badly European appreciation of the founding principles of liberal democracy has been degraded. The critical error of such a defence is once more to confuse political authority with power.

A parliament is sovereign, even if its country is not particularly powerful, when it can dismiss the executive for having failed to fulfil the tasks assigned to it within the constraints of whatever power the executive and the parliament possess. Nothing like this exists in the EU today.

For while the members of the European Council and the Eurogroup of finance ministers are elected politicians, answerable, theoretically, to their respective national parliaments, the Council and the Eurogroup are themselves not answerable to any parliament, nor indeed to any voting citizens whatsoever.

Moreover, the Eurogroup, where most of Europe’s important economic decisions are taken, is a body that does not even exist in European law, that keeps no minutes of its procedures and insists its deliberations are confidential – that is, not to be shared with the citizens of Europe. It operates on the basis – in the words of Thucydides – that “strong do as they please while the weak suffer what they must”. It is a set-up designed to preclude any sovereignty derived from the people of Europe.

While opposing Schäuble’s logic on Greece in the Eurogroup and elsewhere, at the back of my mind there were two thoughts. First, as the finance minister of a bankrupt state, whose citizens demanded an end to a great depression that had been caused by a denial of our bankruptcy – the imposition of new unpayable loans, so payments could be made on old unpayable loans – I had a political and moral duty to say no to more “extend-and-pretend” loan agreements. My second thought was the lesson of Sophocles’s Antigone, who taught us that good women and men have a duty to contradict rules lacking political and moral legitimacy.

Political authority is the cement that keeps legislation together, and the sovereignty of the body politic that engenders the legislation is its foundation. Saying no to Schäuble and the troika was an essential defence of our right to sovereignty. Not just as Greeks but as Europeans.

To this, in his pivot towards advocating a Remain vote:

Our European Union is disintegrating. Should we accelerate the disintegration of a failed confederacy? If one insists that even small countries can retain their sovereignty, as I have done, does this mean Brexit is the obvious course? My answer is an emphatic “No!”

Here is why: if Britain and Greece were not already in the EU, they should most certainly stay out. But, once inside, it is crucial to consider the consequences of a decision to leave. Whether we like it or not, the European Union is our environment – and it has become a terribly unstable environment, which will disintegrate even if a small, depressed country like Greece leaves, let alone a major economy like Britain. Should the Greeks or the Brits care about the disintegration of an infuriating EU? Yes, of course we should care. And we should care very much because the disintegration of this frustrating alliance will create a vortex that will consume us all – a postmodern replay of the 1930s.

It is a major error to assume, whether you are a remain or a leave supporter, that the EU is something constant “out there” that you may or may not want to be part of. The EU’s very existence depends on Britain staying in. Greece and Britain are facing the same three options. The first two are represented aptly by the two warring factions within the Tory party: deference to Brussels and exit. They are equally calamitous options. Both lead to the same dystopian future: a Europe fit only for those who flourish in times of a great Depression – the xenophobes, the ultra-nationalists, the enemies of democratic sovereignty. The third option is the only one worth going for: staying in the EU to form a cross-border alliance of democrats, which Europeans failed to manage in the 1930s, but which our generation must now attempt to prevent history repeating itself.

This is precisely what some of us are working towards in creating DiEM25 – the Democracy in Europe Movement, with a view to conjuring up a democratic surge across Europe, a common European identity, an authentic European sovereignty, an internationalist bulwark against both submission to Brussels and hyper-nationalist reaction.

Is this not utopian? Of course it is! But not more so than the notion that the current EU can survive its anti-democratic hubris, and the gross incompetence fuelled by its unaccountability. Or the idea that British or Greek democracy can be revived in the bosom of a nation-state whose sovereignty will never be restored within a single market controlled by Brussels.

Just like in the early 1930s, Britain and Greece cannot escape Europe by building a mental or legislative wall behind which to hide. Either we band together to democratise – or we suffer the consequences of a pan-European nightmare that no border can keep out.

In other words, the European Union as it is presently constituted and governed is a colossal, anti-democratic behemoth, but trying to leave this decaying mid-century relic to embrace the kind of inter-governmental and multilateral cooperation which befits a modern, confident Britain in a globalised world would “create a vortex that will consume us all”. Britain is stuck with the decision it made in 1975.

This is the Sajid Javid school of thought – the heart feels eurosceptic and yearns for Brexit, but the head worries that the world is too dangerous and uncertain right now for us to risk a small outbreak of democratic sovereignty by voting Leave. Incidentally, it is also the same mental cowardice that would have seen the thirteen American colonies never declare their independence from an overbearing, undemocratic British Crown with which they increasingly felt little affinity.

Or is it?

Much like the battered spouse convinces themselves that they are the ones at fault, or that their abusive partner can change, Yanis Varoufakis seems to have convinced himself that with enough “grassroots support” a pan-European democratic movement (his own DiEM25) can spring up and accomplish the following lofty goals at the drop of a hat:

  1. Willing a true European demos and sense of European identity into being, and
  2. Wresting the true levers of power within the EU away from political and economic elites, and vesting them in the newly-invigorated common European institutions created in Step 1

But it is pure wishful thinking. The EU’s architects (those who bought into the original vision of a process leading to a single European state) and current beneficiaries (political elites who enjoy the lack of full accountability to their own electorates) will not take such a brazen power grab lying down. Varoufakis, if he recalls, was finance minister of Greece until the powers that be froze him out, forcing his resignation.

And were they to succeed, DiEM25 would only be yet another entirely elitist group seeking to impose their own top-down vision of supranational governance on the peoples of Europe. Two of its founder members (Noam Chomsky and JK Galbraith) are Americans who have no damn right to decide how we choose to govern ourselves in the first place.

(Look beyond the flashy website and the picture of a smiling Caroline Lucas and read the manifesto, and you’ll see that the talk of democracy is just a window dressing for the same integrationist dogma, only bolted on to a bunch of miserablist, left-wing nonsense)

Apparently Varoufakis’ idea of an alternative to the current hegemony of the Brussels elite is to replace them with a new academic elite instead – to cram the European Union’s institutions with tweed-jacketed professors in place of sharp-suited lobbyists and bureaucrats.

One can understand why Yanis Varoufakis might want to agitate for a mini-revolution within the European Union to displace his many recently-acquired enemies and install more people like him (cerebral, academic types) in their place.

One can even admire his chutzpah for trying to engineer such a coup in broad daylight, and his shamelessness at exploiting the very real suffering of his Greek compatriots in an attempt to bring about another elitist vision of European political union (which will fail ordinary citizens just as the current model fails Europe’s citizens).

But what Varoufakis utterly fails to do – having devoted the majority of his Guardian Op-Ed to correctly explaining why the EU is a democratic black hole – is advance the slightest argument as to why Britain should aid and abet him in his grubby scheming by voting to remain in the European Union this June.

 

Yanis Varoufakis

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Black And Pro-Brexit

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Could the Remain campaign’s arrogant assumption that they have the support of ethnic minority voters be their downfall?

While the Remain campaign may arrogantly assume that it has the support of all ethnic minority Britons in the coming EU referendum, this is absolutely not the case.

Author Dreda Say Mitchell “comes out” as a Brexiteer in the Guardian:

I share the view of leftwing politicians like my former MP, the late Peter Shore. The EU debate isn’t about bent bananas or migrants on the take; it’s about democracy. There doesn’t seem much point in electing MPs if their votes can be overridden by supranational institutions like the EU or tax-dodging corporations. Much of the apathy and cynicism towards politics is a result of people feeling that real power is somewhere else and not in the ballot box. I’ve seen the EU described as “post-democratic”. Some of us would prefer the real thing back.

Meanwhile, if it’s true that there are growing numbers of BAME voters down the golf club worrying about all these Polish plumbers, I’m taking the positives from that. It proves integration works – we’re becoming just like our white counterparts.

Mitchell makes exactly the same case for Brexit as many other principled eurosceptics – because whatever the cynical Remain camp may say, this referendum has absolutely nothing to do with race or identity politics, and everything to do with democracy.

Something to remember next time the rootless Remain campaign attempts to smear eurosceptics by latching on to the pitiful rantings of Brexit’s worst ambassadors.

Belatedly, some on the Remain side (particularly those on the Left) are starting to wake up to the fact that they take ethnic minority voters for granted at their peril in this referendum, and are scrambling to prepare exactly the kind of divisive, identity politics-based overtures to such voters that one has come to expect from the Left.

In February, Left Foot Forward noted:

The ‘in’ camp cannot stick its head in the sand while [UKIP immigration spokesman Steven] Woolfe and Nigel Farage talk about the Commonwealth at every available opportunity, in a direct appeal to BAME voters.

EU supporters need to engage directly instead of sticking rigidly to arguments about the benefits of the EU more generally.

[..] Aligning issues which resonate more with ethnically-diverse communities alongside the standard pro-Europe arguments makes common sense and will help remain campaigns to feature more in places like The Voice.

The fact that a whole side of the EU debate is being outfoxed by a single UKIP member with no track record of working in BAME communities is embarrassing to watch. It’s not like the ‘remain’ campaign weren’t alerted to the ethnic gap in their strategy before.

While Labour continue to digest the need to raise their game on racial diversity, having marginally slipped further back against the Tories on BAME votes at the last election, it is disappointing that a pro-EU campaign driven largely by progressives has not absorbed these lessons. There is still time.

Meanwhile, the Independent squeals indignantly about UKIP having the nerve to appeal to black voters (who of course should blindly and gratefully do whatever they are told by sanctimonious lefties who have “their best interests” at heart):

Putting the Brexit debate aside, Woolfe’s comments are problematic for a number of reasons. Ukip is not a party known for its concern for the wellbeing of Black people living in Britain, but rather its concern about Black people living in Britain. Indeed, to consider Ukip and racial progress in the same breath often feels like something of an oxymoron.

So to suddenly feign concern for the lives of Black Britons in an attempt to gain Black British support for the EU Out campaign seems both disingenuous and offensive.

[..] Absurdly, Ukip now expect Black Britain to be complicit in the stirring of such a climate of hate through simplistic scaremongering. However, while Woolfe continues to refer to ‘evidence’ that supposedly suggests Black Britons are opposed to EU membership, substantive research from the Runnymede trust finds that Black Britons are divided and largely ambivalent on the issue.

[..] Shifting xenophobic arguments from one oppressed group to another, however, isn’t exactly the inspiring narrative that Black communities are looking for when deciding which way to vote on a possible Brexit.

How dreadfully problematic.

 

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Top Image: BBC

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