General Election 2015

Labour’s Happy Fundraising Emails Turn Paranoid And Authoritarian

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Labour Party - Fundraising Email - Ben Nolan - General Election 2015

 

Ben Nolan, the Labour Party’s Head of Membership, is having a nervous 2015 general election campaign.

Whereas other Labour figures (or their MailChimp newsletter administrators) have been relentlessly upbeat in their messages – “GUESS where our JAWS are this morning, Samuel, after we saw our latest fundraising totals!” – Nolan seems to be paid to be pessimistic. And creepy.

As a political blogger, I make a point of staying on the mailing lists for all the main political parties. Normally they are completely unrevealing missives, simple straightforward requests for cash. Sometimes they direct you to a website where you are invited to enter your postcode to reveal a bespoke list of that party’s achievements in office or future spending bribes, customised for your local area.

But sometimes they look like the one that Ben Nolan sent today, fired out to “supporters” who he has decided are not trying hard enough to propel Ed Miliband into 10 Downing Street:

Samuel,

I know we’ve asked you — more than a few times — in the last couple of weeks for a donation to support the crucial work of our local organisers and volunteers.

It seems from our records that you aren’t yet among our generous group of online donors.*

I’m sure it’s for a good reason, Samuel, and I’d love to know what it is. Do you have one minute to tell me what’s stopped you donating?

Your feedback will help us to build a stronger and more inclusive campaign in these final days.

Thanks so much for taking the time.

Ben

Ben Nolan
Head of Membership, Labour Party

Note the undertone of menace in the words “I’m sure it’s for a good reason”.

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Labour Now Best Friends With HSBC, Thanks To Bank’s Stance On Brexit

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

HSBC Canary Wharf London - Brexit - European Union

 

Much is being made of HSBC’s statement that the UK-based bank is considering moving their headquarters away from London, with senior Labour politicians quick to take this corporate bellyaching as vindication of their plan to deny the British people any say in their democratic future.

From the report in the Guardian:

HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, has issued a stark warning about the economic risks of the UK pulling out of the European Union as it revealed it was considering moving its headquarters out of London.

The surprise announcement of a full-blown review into where the bank should base its operations will stun politicians on the general election campaign trail.

HSBC listed the economic uncertainty created by the risk of the UK going alone – a blow to the Conservatives which have pledged to hold an “in-out” referendum on the EU.

Its shares jumped almost 4% after the statement, which was released before the bank’s annual shareholder meeting in London. The rise added more than £4bn to the value of HSBC – already one of the most valuable companies on the London stock market.

Among the Labour politicians to jump on the announcement was the shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna, who wasted no time in fashioning HSBC’s announcement into a weapon with which to bash the Tories.

In a series of tweets, Umunna claimed that it is “irresponsible” for the British people to have a debate about whether we wish to become a sovereign country again, and that it would be a “disaster” for the economy if Brexit (British secession from the EU) were to happen:

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General Election 2015: There Will Be No Passion Until We Rediscover Our National Ambition

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

David Cameron - Nick Clegg - Passion - General Election 2015

 

As the 2015 general election campaign grinds past the halfway point with none of the main party leaders doing or saying anything remotely interesting or inspiring – choosing only to shriek about the chaos and carnage that their opponents would do in government – people are starting to ask: where is the passion?

The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth pick up on this supposed lack of “passion” in politics in their recent interview with David Cameron, conducted as the Prime Minister hurtles around Britain failing to electrify voters with talk of his Long Term Economic Plan and doomsday scenarios about a Labour-SNP government.

Interestingly, Cameron appears totally bemused that his coalition government’s technocratic, risk-averse management of the country from 2010-2015 has failed to win him legions of adoring fans:

The Prime Minister is aware of the criticism and finds it ‘frustrating’. ‘I feel I have worked my socks off for the last ten years to get to this point,’ he says. ‘I feel we are on the brink of something amazing in our country. If I don’t succeed on 7 May I will be furious more for my country — but furious for myself.’ He says this quietly, not crossly, as if he has been confronting his own political mortality. ‘We have done so much to get so far — I do not want to pull back now.’ And then, a promise to do better: ‘If I need to do more to communicate that I will.’

What he is trying to communicate in the final fortnight of the campaign is that Britain’s recovery has been extraordinary, but that it didn’t happen by accident. And that if people want the recovery to continue, they’ll have to vote Conservative. He is writing the speech he’ll give that day, with ‘jobs’ scribbled as the first bullet point. He has created them at a faster rate than any prime minister in history, which he puts down to tax cuts and welfare reform. So he is travelling to Yorkshire to sell ‘an extremely positive plan to transform the education of young people in our country, to keep going with this welfare revolution’.

He accepts that the revolutionary character of his government is not widely appreciated. ‘I think it is very undersold in many ways,’ he says. He doesn’t say by whom. He later refers to the government’s ‘quiet revolution: pro-work, pro-saving, pro-enterprise’.

Revolutionary character? The coalition government came into power promising an economic recovery and the elimination of Britain’s vast budget deficit. It achieved the former but failed spectacularly to eliminate the deficit, reducing it only by a third (now changed to a “half”, thanks to the disingenuous use of different metrics). The Labour Party would have likely done far worse, but this is beside the point – a stable economy should be a hygiene factor, the absolute base in terms of expectations of a “revolutionary” government.

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Election 2015: Why Won’t David Cameron Talk More About Europe?

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

David Cameron - Conservative Party- Brexit - Britain and Europe - General Election 2015

 

We need to talk about Europe.

With Labour and the Tories deadlocked in the polls and Britain on course for a hung parliament, The Spectator asks an interesting question: in an effort to break the deadlock, why won’t David Cameron and the Conservative Party start “banging on about Europe”?

From The Speccie’s leading article:

It is hardly as if the issue of an in-out referendum has been neutralised. David Cameron, in committing himself to such a poll, seemed to be in a strong position over Ed Miliband, who has declined all pressure to follow suit. Cameron can justifiably say to anti-Europeans that a vote for him is the only way to ensure that the country has a chance to reject EU membership. For EU supporters, he is offering the chance to settle the matter of Britain’s membership for a generation to come. And for sceptics in the middle who want to be part of the EU, but a reformed one, he is promising renegotiation of Britain’s terms.

Ed Miliband’s position, by contrast, is simply one of denying the people a say on an issue which divides the country — on the basis that voters cannot be trusted with such questions. It is entirely believable, should Labour come to some sort of pact with the SNP after the election, that we will end up having two referendums on the subject of Scottish independence, with the EU question remaining unresolved. Even the pro-EU Greens want an in-out referendum on the — for them, unusually solid — grounds that the issue of Britain’s membership will be an issue until it is seen to have renewed democratic legitimacy.

The Spectator concludes:

David Cameron ought to be turning European turmoil to his electoral advantage. With Ukip at around 13 per cent, he would win a strong Conservative majority if only he could persuade a quarter of Ukip’s potential voters over to his side. Contrary to talk about the left being in advance, the conservative parties (the Tories plus Ukip) between them are registering a substantially bigger slice of the vote than in 2010.

But this is where the Spectator’s analysis falls down – the misplaced assumption that if only David Cameron talks more naturally about his personal beliefs and the Conservative Party’s official policy on the European Union, hordes of recently defected UKIP voters would return to the Tory fold.

People don’t generally support UKIP just because they want Britain to go through the democratic exercise of holding a referendum on our membership of the EU, letting the chips fall where they may. They support UKIP because of all Britain’s non-extremist political parties, Nigel Farage’s gang is the only one that unequivocally disagrees with remaining in the European Union under more or less any circumstances. Gaining popular consent may be great, but the goal is Brexit – and UKIP are the only party who are committed to that end.

From this perspective, David Cameron’s pitch to the electorate is little better than Ed Miliband’s – both say that they want to get the “best deal” for Britain in Europe (whatever that may be), but when push comes to shove, neither of them believe the EU to be a fundamentally flawed, undemocratic or threatening to British interests. If they did, we wouldn’t be talking about a referendum, Britain would secede tomorrow.

Why would UKIP’s growing ranks of supporters vote Conservative when they know that they will get a Prime Minister and government that may honour their promise to hold a referendum, but then in all likelihood campaign for Britain to remain part of the EU after the largely cosmetic “renegotiations” are complete? More to the point, why would a rational voter vote for wishy-washy feigned euroscepticism when there is another party (UKIP) and another leader (Nigel Farage) who still trusts the British people to have their say, but is actively committed to campaigning for Brexit?

UKIP supporters have generally made up their minds that the EU – with its growth-sapping regulation, control-freakish infringement on national sovereignty and persistent undermining of the nation state through common security and borders policies – is a bad thing. They may understand that the rest of the country needs a little more time to educate itself and arrive at the same conclusion, but they do not expect the party they vote for on 7 May to have to go through the same tortuous process. Ukippers want out, as soon as possible, because they believe that this would be best for the country – the clue comes in large letters on the front page of their manifesto, titled “Believe in Britain”.

So to answer the Spectator’s original question, there is a very good reason why David Cameron has not spent – and will not spend – more time in this election campaign “banging on about Europe”. True eurosceptics, especially the ones who have made the leap to UKIP, know that David Cameron’s offering of a referendum is a move intended only to placate his party’s right wing, not a promise borne of a personal desire to free Britain from the EU. Therefore, every day that David Cameron spends talking about Europe is another day he alienates the Europhiles and the politically indifferent, while winning back only a small fraction of the UKIP vote.

You can observe the deafening silence from the Conservative Party on Europe and admire David Cameron’s political radar and message discipline, or you can despair that the Prime Minister simply doesn’t see Britain’s emancipation from the European Union machine as a cause worth fighting and risking political office for. But either way, it’s no accident that the EU is the non-issue of the 2015 general election campaign.

EU Referendum: Don’t Trust The Party That Doesn’t Trust The People

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

 

What to do when the political party you support and spend every waking moment campaigning for adopts a stance which is not only breathtakingly arrogant, but which runs completely contrary to the fundamental principles of democracy and respecting the will of the people?

Well, if you’re the socialist website Left Foot Forward and the case in question is whether or not Britain should hold a referendum on leaving the European Union, you simply convince yourself that the public are dangerous idiots who can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves, thus justifying your benevolent left wing dictatorship.

The editors of Left Foot Forward, clearly feeling a little uneasy that their man Ed Miliband is actively campaigning on a platform of denying the British people a say on their future governance, decided to do some unofficial polling to make themselves feel better. And sure enough, it transpires that 63% of their readers are also opposed to letting the British people decide.

But the left need some reasons, however flimsy, to shore up their indefensible position, and Left Foot Forward staff writer Ruby Stockham comes armed with plenty of them:

EU-sceptic Conservatives say that the knife-edge balance of public opinion means it is undemocratic to block a referendum. There are several problems with this argument. The first is that it’s cherry picking: we do not hold referendums on most public issues. There has not been one, for example, on TTIP; there was not one on military intervention in Syria or Libya.

The reason for this is that most of the electorate do not have a deep understanding of the intricacies of these issues; to build up a full picture of the economic, social, or security benefits and disadvantages of both sides would be a full-time job. What the electorate are exposed to is the simplified bias of parties like UKIP or the Eurosceptic press, who present an easily digested one-sided argument. The government cannot decide whether or not something is democratic based on whether or not it suits their aims.

Actually, the reason that EU-sceptic conservatives want a referendum is nothing to do with the fact that the public opinion is on a “knife-edge”. It’s more to do with the fact that power has been continually given away from Westminster to Brussels, from democratic British institutions to their opaque and largely undemocratic EU counterparts, without the British people ever having granted their permission for this to happen.

The 1975 referendum doesn’t count – the British people voted to join what was then known as the European Economic Community because as its name suggested, it was presented as a matter of free trade. Since that time, “common” European policies have sprung up in all manner of areas which impact British life, and which are traditionally fall to the nation state to control. Therefore, to present the question of Britain’s continued membership of the EU as being the same as any run-of-the-mill government decision – like raising taxes or deploying the military – is an entirely misleading comparison.

Stockham then tries to suggest that the British people are too ill-informed to make an educated decision. But this would be the whole point of a referendum campaign – to educate the British people on the pros, cons and detailed implications before letting the people render their judgement. Of course it does not suit Stockham’s purpose for the British people to become more educated on the subject of Europe, because then they would realise the extent to which the common market is just a façade for the far more wide-reaching European political union which was always the end goal.

And it is certainly not the case that the public would be overtly swayed by the “simplified bias of parties like UKIP”, as Ruby Stockham so haughtily suggests. If anything, the simplified bias is all on the pro-EU side. The majority of big businesses (who are naturally risk averse) are for the status quo – funny how the opinion of big business matters to the left on the topic of Europe, but nowhere else – as are all of Britain’s political parties, besides UKIP. In terms of funding and finding suitable mouthpieces for their talking points, the pro-Europeans would have no problems whatsoever – but of course it suits Left Foot Forward’s aims to portray themselves as the underdog.

But Ruby Stockham saves her best argument against holding an EU referendum for last:

Fourthly, the European Union has over 500 million citizens. A UK exit would affect all of them. It is truly undemocratic to allow the UK minority to dictate the future for all EU citizens.

That’s right. According to Left Foot Forward, the British people are not entitled to determine their own future because to hold a referendum would infringe on the rights of people in Lisbon and Warsaw – nearly all of whom would be supremely indifferent in any case – to keep Britain tied up in an unwanted political union.

Truly, no argument is too desperate when it comes to the British political left trying to find excuses to override the will of the people.

To quote a much younger Tony Blair: Weak, weak, weak.

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