European Union

UKIP In The Spotlight

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Cognizant of the UK Independence Party’s likely strong performance in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections, some reputable publications have joined the long-established monitors such as UKIP Watch in paying closer attention to the daily goings-on within the resurgent party. Displaying great originality, The Telegraph calls their version…UKIP Watch too. So no possibility of confusion there, then.

To their credit though, The Telegraph’s UKIP Watch redeems itself with some insightful analysis on Day 1, effectively countering the oft-repeated myth that UKIP’s support is comprised almost exclusively of disaffected “grumpy” Tories:

Why is the myth of Ukip as an army of angry, middle-class suburbanites who are obsessed by Europe and having a referendum so widespread and persistent, when the reality is so different? Most likely because of the difference between Ukip’s activists and their voters.

Committed activists and politicians, the kind of Ukipper the media are most likely to encounter, very often are middle-class, Southern and suburban former Tories (particularly the Ukippers you are likely to stumble across in the Westminster village, where most journalists congregate). Add to this the continual fascination in the media with Conservative splits over Europe and it is easy to see how the “Ukip = angry Tories + Euroscepticism” formula has taken hold.

A very good point. Why would UKIP be immune from the phenomena that affects the main three parties, namely that their most strident activists little represent their average voter? It is good to hear this point addressed in the media, and it would be even more encouraging to see the stories about the kooks and crazies in UKIP’s midst covered in the same way – namely that those on the cutting edge, whether for good or bad reasons, tend not to represent the whole.

Godfrey Bloom will be sitting out the next few rounds. Image from ITV News.
Godfrey Bloom will be sitting out the next few rounds.
Image from ITV News.

The column’s authors, Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, also make clear that the ‘typical’ UKIP voter is nothing like the cartoonish stereotype of a stuffy, old-fashioned Conservative, and that the retired colonel or Women’s Institute stalwart image is misplaced:

If Spitting Image were still around they would most likely portray the average Ukipper as a ruddy faced, middle-class, middle-aged golf club bore, who lived in a suburban semi-detached house in the Home Counties, wore lots of tweed and bored his neighbours to death by droning on about the evil Eurocrats in Brussels. But this stereotype could scarcely be further from the truth.

Ukip’s supporters look more like Old Labour than True Blue Tories. Ukip’s supporters tend to be blue-collar, older, struggling economically, and often live in poorer, urban areas, with big pools of support in the Labour heartlands of the North. Middle-class suburbanites do not dominate Ukip. They shy away from it.

In fact, Ukip are Britain’s most working-class party. Blue-collar workers are heavily over-represented. Middle-class professionals are scarce. Such voters often express as much hostility to the Conservative party as they do to Labour. This news should not be surprising. Earlier research on Goldsmith’s Referendum Party in the mid-1990s found that they too came from across the spectrum. But despite this research the “disaffected Tory thesis” has become entrenched in the Westminster village, and now dominates misguided coverage of the party.

This, if anything, is the area on which UKIP will need to focus the most if they are to make the perilous transition from successful protest party to a real general election player capable of winning seats in the House of Commons – the fact that the spot in their party reserved for middle-class professionals is currently Tumbleweed Central. These higher-information voters are key to credibility, and they are also primarily the movers and shakers who keep the British economy ticking over. Not having these people in your camp in any significant numbers is a cause for concern, and one that will certainly need to be addressed after the upcoming European elections.

So far, however, UKIP seems to be showing no signs of wilting under the increased scrutiny – indeed, their affable leader Nigel Farage MEP seems to have recovered some of the form which deserted him last week, going so far as to record this spoof weather forecast segment for the BBC’s Sunday Politics show:

 

Perhaps this further helps to explain the reason for UKIP’s continued popularity and appeal – which of the other party leaders, emerging from a week of very difficult and in some cases embarrassing press coverage, would be so relaxed and willing to poke fun at themselves in so self-deprecating a manner? There is something inherently appealing about a politician who is willing to speak

Nigel Farage is confident, and as more and more of the media is coming to realise, his confidence may be well placed.

Defending Gibraltar

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

It is irking see the Conservatives so publicly and comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Labour recently on a variety of issues, most recently related to education and welfare. To witness the same thing now happen in the sphere of foreign policy is yet another worrying sign that the Conservative-led coalition government is coasting at this point, perhaps made complacent by the recent uptick in economic indicators, and taking their eye off the ball.

The Telegraph reports that Gareth Thomas, the Labour shadow minister for Europe, has raised concerns that Britain is not doing enough to forcefully push back against recent Spanish misbehaviour with regard to Gibraltar:

Gibraltar is a territory “under siege” and Spain should be made to account for its actions in relation to The Rock, the shadow minister for Europe has said.

Gareth Thomas, the Labour MP for Harrow West, said that residents of Gibraltar were concerned that Britain was not doing enough to defend them from Spanish harassment. The past 12 months have seen the highest ever number of incursions by Spanish ships into Gibraltar’s waters, with the almost double the incidents from 2012.

“I was struck by the sense that the Gibraltarians have of being under siege,” said Mr Thomas, who visited Gibraltar in November. “Spanish ships are coming into their waters on a regular basis.”

We have seen this before. The leaders of countries that are in the doldrums, facing economic malaise and restive populations (hi, Argentina), suddenly dredging up ancient grievances against Britain. Grievances that were once dead and buried during happier economic times. If you are going to make the case that the absence of the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar is like a gaping hole in your respective nation, I would have slightly more sympathy if we didn’t hear your plaintive appeals only during times of economic recession.

I refer you to the Treaty of Utrecht.
I refer you to the Treaty of Utrecht.

This continual harassment of a British overseas territory is unacceptable, and one cannot help but feel that the diplomatic protest by the UK in response has been far too small. Relying on a corrupt body such as the European Commission to mediate the dispute by visiting Gibraltar was clearly never going to be the answer, and why William Hague thought that this option would be sufficient to resolve the situation is mystifying. Diplomatic pressure is clearly failing in this case, and more stringent unilateral action may be required to bring the Spanish back into line. Bullying behaviour tends only to respond to a show of strength, a clear assertion that the bullying will no longer be tolerated.

Of more concern to me, though, is the fact that William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has failed to make it sufficiently clear that Britain will not tolerate these childish antics. I had not expected someone so competent and capable to drop the ball or fail to forcefully defend the interests of the UK to the extent that he clearly has. Showing forebearance to Spain on the issue of Gibraltar, particularly given the childish means by which the Spanish government chooses to pursue its non-cause, is no longer cute or charming or patient. It’s weak.

Michael Gove on education, Iain Duncan Smith on welfare and now William Hague on foreign policy, all caught napping and hit from the right by their Labour counterparts. I don’t know whether a weekend retreat is in order at one end of the spectrum, or a wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle at the other, but David Cameron urgently needs to get his cabinet to come out of cruise control.

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.

Missing The Point On Immigration

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

They're a' comin...

 

James Kirkup, writing in The Telegraph, asks “How much would you pay to reduce immigration?”, in an article praising UKIP’s Nigel Farage for making the supposedly bold proclamation that he would rather be slightly less well-off in return for lower levels of immigration into the United Kingdom – in other words, that he is willing to pay out of his own pocket to reduce immigration.

[Farage] added: “If you said to me, would I like to see over the next ten years a further five million people come in to Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say, I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer, and I’d rather we had communities that were united and where young unemployed British people had a realistic chance of getting a job.

“I think the social side of this matters more than pure market economics.”

Kirkup, who considers this to be a “genuinely interesting” way for Farage to reframe the debate, phrases the quandry this way:

How much economic growth should we give up? How much of your fellow citizens’ prosperity, are you willing to sacrifice in order to cut the number of people entering Britain from abroad?

To be precise, how much — to the nearest £1, please — would you pay to reduce immigration?

Unfortunately, by accepting Farage’s premise that immigration is harmful in all spheres other than the economic – and the idea that immigration must automatically be a negative thing, a cause for concern or something to be ameliorated.

This is yet another argument where the two opposing sides seem to argue back and forth over an irrelevant distraction rather than the main issue. Why is it that immigration has, at times, led to divided communities and fractured society? Why must it be that immigration puts the young British unemployed at even more of a disadvantage? If only we could begin to address and turn around these key issues, surely the matter of net immigration into the UK would cease to be of almost any importance at all.

For example, we should re-examine how Britain can better to integrate and assimilate new immigrants into our society, avoiding the mistakes of countries such as France and learning from those such as the United States. How can we ensure the right balance between providing support and assistance to help new arrivals find their feet and integrate into society, and using “tough love” where necessary to ensure that the state is not enabling immigrant communities to isolate and refuse to become part of British society?

We should take a long, hard look at our education system and parenting culture and ask why it is that a young adult born and raised behind the iron curtain in an economic, political and social environment far less prosperous and nurturing than that of the UK is so often preferable, in the eyes of so many reputable and rational employers, to a British-born young jobseeker who has enjoyed all of these advantages.

And yes, we should look at the topics of welfare and the terms of our relationship with the European Union, and decide whether allowing brand new economic migrants to our shores to benefit from the welfare system that the rest of us have paid into over a longer period is really a cost that we are willing to continue to pay in order to maintain our EU membership in its current form.

None of this debate will happen as long as we accept the premise that economics aside, immigration is an inherently bad thing – to shrug our shoulders and go along with Nigel Farage’s line of reasoning, as James Kirkup and others do so willingly.

How much would people pay to have an informed debate about the real social, educational and economic issues around immigration? More than our politicians and media seem to realise.