What would be the worst consequence of Britain leaving the European Union?
Ask your average, garden variety pro-European this question and they’ll have a number of rote answers to hand – the sudden disappearance of three million British jobs in a puff of smoke, the imposition of punishing new tariffs on British exports, Frankfurt replacing London as the capital of European finance, large multinationals upping sticks and moving to France, the sudden irrelevance of a declared nuclear power and the world’s fifth largest economy, and Vladimir Putin’s imminent invasion of eastern Europe, to name but a few.
Each of these absurd scaremongering warnings, ranging from the wildly pessimistic to the downright laughable, is taken seriously enough to be a mainstay of the threadbare pro-European case for remaining part of the EU. But none of them are the real reason why so many within the political and media class are desperate to avoid Brexit.
These overblown macro-level concerns are, in fact, little more than window dressing, designed to make pro-Europeans feel better about the real reason for their support of the status quo. For in truth, their pro-EU stance has little to do with high-minded ideas about social democracy or statecraft, and everything to do with something far more personal – the protection and advancement of their own narrow, self-serving interests.
Owen Jones is clearly channelling the British Left’s guilty conscience.
As the stories of left-wing hysteria and bad behaviour following the Conservative election victory rack up, at least one left-wing commentator is finally starting to feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at the words being said and misdeeds committed in the name of so-called principled opposition to the Evil Tories.
For Owen Jones, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the way that UKIP’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell, was set upon by foul-mouthed, threatening activists as he waited for a bus outside Parliament. But even now, Jones is unable to simply express regret or disapproval, choosing instead to water down his criticism of the anti-Tory hysteria in a broader (and redundant) argument defending the activists’ right to protest.
So we’re clear, the way [Carswell] was reportedly treated was out of order. Protest is a basic democratic right, won at great cost by our ancestors. It is often passionate and angry, be it about cuts to public services or opposition to the ban on fox hunting. It includes civil disobedience, employed by protest movements ranging from the suffragettes to tax justice campaigners.
If a disabled sufferer of the bedroom tax angrily accosted Iain Duncan Smith, it would not be the place of privileged me to tut at them. But subjecting Douglas Carswell to what was undoubtedly a frightening and upsetting experience was totally wrong, and it is difficult to see what those involved hoped to achieve.
However, his attempt to use the incident to make political gain – and resort to sweeping generalisations about the left – cannot go without a response. “Austerity, according to the left, is the ultimate evil,” writes Carswell. Well, no, actually. I suspect most on the left, if asked for “ultimate evils”, would opt for, say, genocide, war or murder.
Heaven forfend that those of us on the right should point out the moral wrong of physically and verbally intimidating someone simply because they hold right-wing political views. This is the kind of principle that the Old Left (wherever they went) would have been rushing to the barricades to defend – but apparently no longer.
Never mind that Douglas Carswell, their latest victim, is actually UKIP’s member of parliament and no longer a Tory. The protesters may not have done their homework in this case, but the scene would only have been worse had more of them known this fact.
(The general degree of hatred and outright hostility shown by the activist Left increases exponentially as you move further away from the dull, lumpen centre of British politics and towards the right.)
“I’ve just been attacked by a – by a mob, walking home. You can see I’ve just been surrounded by several hundred people, by hard lefties, just… just unbelievable. It got really, really nasty, and I’m an elected MP trying to get home at the end of the day and I run into a mob who, you know, were insane.”
Insane is just about the only word strong enough to describe the hysteria which has gripped much of the Left since David Cameron’s unexpected election victory. From the expressions of disgust in their fellow voters for not embracing Ed Miliband, the alarmist warnings that the NHS would now immediately be sold off to Evil American corporations and the melodramatic apocalypse warnings sounded by those who just like their government big and intrusive, it quickly became apparent that the Left were drinking so much of their own Kool-Aid that they were no longer capable of viewing conservatives as anything more than two-dimensional cartoon villains.
And it is far easier to shout “Tory scum” while chasing UKIP’s sole MP into the back of a police van than it is to ruminate on why his party picked up thirteen per cent of the national vote.
The only comfort for the British Left – not that they are rational enough to notice at present – is the fact that the Tories are so timid in their embrace of real conservatism, and so intellectually stymied from having nodded along to arguments about the inviolability of the post-war consensus for so many decades, that even given a free hand with their slim parliamentary majority they are unlikely to do anything to radically shrink the state where it most needs to be shrunk.
But this won’t be a comfort forever. Eventually, at some point in the next few years, the Left will stop taking so much joy in self-righteous opposition and actually aspire to govern once again. And this will not be possible if the Labour Party becomes indelibly associated with screaming, hate-filled mobs shouting “Tory scum!” at decent public servants as they go about carrying out our democracy.
More Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch here, here and here.
UPDATE:
Appearing on the BBC’s Daily Politics show today, Douglas Carswell had this to say when asked by Andrew Neil if he had not somehow deserved the abuse he received because of UKIP’s political stances:
Andrew Neil: Does it have something to do with UKIP, though, because it is – although the UKIP overall policy attempts not to be racist, there is a widespread feeling that there is racism in your party?
Douglas Carswell: Well, maybe one or two commentators watching this show and watching those clips might want to ask themselves has stuff they’ve said over the past seven or eight months perhaps created the intellectual space that allows a mob to feel it’s justified to attack an MP.
I’m not sure that “intellectual space” is necessarily the best term to describe the cumulative effect of all the anti-UKIP commentary flying around before the election – after all, there was certainly nothing remotely intellectual going on in the minds of the snarling young activists who hounded Carswell yesterday – but his point is a good one, and well made.
When is it okay to make obscene Hitler comparisons and to mock cancer survivors, while still claiming to be an enlightened, privilege-checking, compassionate progressive?
Well apparently if your name is Sandi Toksvig and you are speaking at the Hay Festival – the “Woodstock of the mind“, according to Bill Clinton – then you have a license to do just that while still being taken seriously as a decent, responsible individual.
Toksvig saved her most cutting remarks for Nigel Farage. ‘I watched the count for South Thanet and I found myself cheering for the Tory candidate,’ she told the audience. ‘I hate Farage for that, I really do. He made me cheer a Tory, the b—-rd.’
She then went on to refer to the testicle the Ukip leader lost to cancer, joking about what Farage and Hitler have in common: ‘Farage kept having pictures of him defaced with Hitler moustaches. I mean he’s not really like Hitler. Okay, he has a German wife, he hates foreigners, he only has one testicle and he was defeated.’
Imagine now that Sandi Toksvig had launched a crass verbal tirade against a senior politician of any other party while living it up at the Hay Festival. Suppose that she had made a joke about David Cameron’s late son, Ivan, or chortled to herself as she regaled her audience with a wisecrack about Ed Miliband’s deviated septum. Hell, imagine that Toksvig had just made fun of Ed Balls’ mild stammer.
If Toksvig had done any of these things it would have been a national scandal – guaranteed front page stories in all the national newspapers. Forget any more lucrative gigs on BBC Radio, Toksvig would have counted herself lucky to work as a volunteer on hospital radio after so openly and tastelessly mocking an establishment party leader.
It really is that simple. Chuka Umunna is not necessarily a bad person – in many ways he was one of the few truly competent performers and articulate voices in Ed Miliband’s team of losers – but the mere act of his installation as the successor to Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Kinnock would be enough to permanently alienate many of the voters who spurned Labour this May.
They may still regurgitate the language of standing up for the working man, the poor and the vulnerable – when they are in public. But behind closed doors their love of the EU, heavy handed regulation, bloated public services and open door immigration with no effort to up-skill the domestic workforce to compete made quite clear that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party was very much in it for selfish reasons.
Semi-Partisan Politics 