Media

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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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 21 – Monetising Identity Politics With A Safe Space Coffee Shop

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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If safe space dwelling students don’t want to enter the grown-up job market and workplace when they graduate, they may simply create their own parallel Identity Politics economy

Until now, the one source of comfort to those of us alarmed by the rise in student illiberalism and authoritarianism on university campuses in Britain and America has been the fact that those tyrannical student activists will soon face a day of reckoning when they graduate and find themselves in a job market which has no interest in nurturing their fragile egos.

Sadly, that source of comfort is now being taken away from us. Because a former academic from Winchester, Virginia has found a way to successfully monetise the safe space concept with a coffee shop designed for “marginalized populations”.

Your4State reports:

A new coffee shop in the city of Winchester is one of many, but its owners say the open and safe environment it provides is the only one of its kind in the city.

According to Victoria Kidd, part-owner of the Hideaway Cafe, coffee is not an “accessory beverage,” and grabbing your cup of joe requires a journey to reach your ideal destination.

“You’re looking for a coffee house that offers you a great atmosphere and offers you a great product served by people who care about your opinion of the coffee and care about your experience here,” Kidd said.

For Kidd and her wife, Christy, the journey to open the perfect coffee house started in July when they thought of the safe-space concept for the Hideaway Cafe.

Because why leave safe spaces and infantilised life behind at graduation when you can continue behaving in the same sheltered, censorious way right through adult life?

(No press reports as yet give any detail as to precisely what policies or behaviour codes will make the Hideaway Cafe a safe space, or how the safe space will be enforced).

Of course, the cafe’s proprietor fits the exact profile that one would expect:

“Well I never thought I’d be in coffee,” [Dr. Jess] Clawson admitted.  “I have a Ph.D. in education. I’m an education historian, so I thought I would be teaching college right now and on the tenure track.”

According to Clawson, graduate school prepared her to co-own a coffee house.

She said the level of intensity in her master’s work translated well to creating drinks quickly and accurately.

She also mentioned that her dissertation was on the emergence of LGBT student visibility on Florida college campuses in the 70s and 80s.

Given her background, Clawson said she couldn’t refuse to be a part of the “safe space” business, which she said has been a long time coming.

Finding surprisingly little demand for her peerless knowledge of the LGBT university scene in 1970s Florida, Jess Clawson was forced to improvise and tenuously reapply her academic skills to the field of handcrafting caffeinated beverages. And so the Hideaway Cafe now exists to do for supposedly mature adults what campus safe spaces do for decidedly immature students – provide an intellectual cave where occupants can literally hide from scary ideas and the big bad world.

The Hideaway Cafe is not the first such institution to transform itself into a safe space venue. A coffee house at Claremont McKenna College did the same thing, though only on an ad hoc basis, and within an academic campus setting:

Safe spaces for minority students have appeared on the campuses of other Claremont Colleges as well. Last week, the Motley Coffeehouse at Scripps College issued a statement on its official Facebook page, “The Motley sitting room will be open tonight from 6-10 only for people of color and allies that they invite. Please feel free to come and use the space for whatever you need – decompress, discuss, grieve, plan, support each other, etc. In solidarity.”

But neither is Hideaway Cafe the first to bring the safe space concept to the outside world. Last year, Starbucks in Seattle announced that its stores would be working with the city police to turn their locations into safe places where victims of homophobic “hate crime” could wait until the police arrive.

Pink News reports:

The coffee chain has provided special training to its more than 2,000 Starbucks employees across 97 shops, training them to offer help to those who have been victims of hate crimes.

The initiative came about via a partnership with the Seattle Police Department, with special rainbow-coloured ‘SPD Safe Space’ stickers indicating each shop’s status. Staff will contact the authorities, ensuring victims are safe and allowing them to remain on the premises until police arrive.

The bold initiative is the first such take-up of a scheme by the chain, but Starbucks indicated that it would work with police departments elsewhere to set up ‘safe spaces’ in more cities.

This is somewhat less offensive – although the definition of “hate crime” is very vague and encapsulates many things which should probably be classified as protected free speech, at least the Starbucks safe spaces are reactive rather than anticipatory. They exist to help people who have been the victims of unpleasant homphobic experiences rather than seeking to restrict speech within the store lest somebody be offended.

But whether it is the Hideaway Cafe, the coffee shop at Claremont McKenna or your friendly local Starbucks, what is clear is that the idea of providing infantilising places of refuge for grown adults has escaped the college campus and is starting to be taken up in wider society – more ammunition for those of us who are constantly asked why we spend time fixating on something often portrayed as a niche student issue which poses no risk to wider society.

However, it cannot be said often enough that these censorious young generation now at university did not materialise out of thin air. Their self-centred outlook and inability to process contradictory or offensive ideas is very much a product of their environment and upbringing, and older people – including the liberal university administrators now being hounded and forced out of their jobs by emboldened student activists – bear much of the blame for having created a therapeutic culture and a climate which does not value free speech and is happy to place restrictions on freedom of expression for the comfort of others.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi goes further and suggests that older Americans are actually guilty of creating the first safe spaces and intellectual bubbles, long before they started appearing on college campuses.

Money quote:

But conservatives who get hysterical about the “delicate snowflakes” on campus should take a look at their own media-consumption habits. It’s hard to imagine anything funnier than a 70-year-old who watches 90 hours of Fox News a week and then rails against college kids who are afraid of new ideas.

But it’s not just Fox viewers. Most of the cable TV news industry is just a series of safe spaces. There are conservative channels and liberal channels, all of them huge seas of more or less unanimous opinion. Viewers tune in, suckle their thumbs, and wait to have their own opinions vomited back at them.

The commercial formula at the all-liberals-suck channel is the same as the one at the all-Republicans-are-boneheads channel. People in this country tend to follow politics in the same way they follow sports teams. They don’t think, they root.

The campus safe space movement is often derided as evidence of a rise of a newly censorious political left, a movement that’s ideological in character. And who knows, maybe that’s true. I don’t spend enough time on campuses to know.

But the safe space movement among the somewhat older members of the commercial media has virtually nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with money.

The political punditry business is all about riling up an ad-consuming, subscription-buying demographic. We’re paid by the eyeball, and you don’t attract eyes by sticking fingers in them. So opinion-makers on both sides quickly learn to stay in their lanes.

If your job is throwing meat to wingers, you’re not going to suddenly start admitting Mexicans are people or criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

And Taibbi’s conclusion:

The modern American media consumer has a genuine mania for orthodoxy. We’ve habituated readers and viewers not just to expect content that caters to all their opinions down the line, but also to expect and demand a completely binary representation of the political landscape: blue and red, Us and Them.

Consumers on both sides don’t like pundits whose views are all over the place. They want white hats and black hats, allies and enemies, even though in real life most people are not wholly one thing or another. And when one of the performers steps off-script, it’s a “problem.”

To me this is consumerism, not political correctness. Capitalism in this country has become so awesomely efficient at target-scratching every conceivable consumer itch that it’s raised a generation of people with no tolerance for discomfort, particularly the intellectual kind.

There are so many products available now that customers have learned to demand that every single purchase choice they make be perfectly satisfying. People want nacho chips that taste awesome every time, and they want pundits who agree with them every time. They don’t want to fork over time or money to be told they’re wrong or uninformed any more than they want to eat a salad.

This is a very valid point. For what are Fox News and MSNBC if not media-based safe spaces for adults who live in their own ideological bubbles, rarely socialising or venturing otuside their own circle, and whose news consumption is driven less by a desire to hear the facts and reach their own conclusion than the lazy desire to have existing suspicions and prejudices constantly reinforced?

One can certainly criticise the illiberalism of today’s college students for seeking out safe spaces and pressuring their university administrations to enforce harsh new speech and behavioural codes on campus, but one cannot blame the students alone.

Growing up in an MSNBC or Fox News household where the other side are routinely demonised as being evil, traitorous, un-American or oppressive means that many students may arrive at university without ever having been in close quarters with somebody with a different political philosophy. And just as they experience the first twinges of surprise and discomfort at the discovery of non like-minded people, the campus Identity Politics brigade rides to the rescue, telling them that they are right to be upset, that they are uniquely oppressed and that they require ideologically policed safe spaces just to get through the traumatic years which await them at university. It is a toxic message, but a very powerful and compelling one for many young adults.

So by all means let’s criticise instances of campus authoritarianism when they occur. It is important that we continue shining a spotlight on these incidents and helping liberty-minded students push back and wrest control of their campuses away from the priests and priestesses of the cult of Identity Politics.

But we should not be so smug as to think that we who have left university (or who never went) are in any way superior. For it turns out that older generations have been monetising the idea of safe spaces for years before the Hideaway Cafe even opened for business, and many of us have been unwittingly helping them to do so.

 

More Tales from the Safe Space here.

 

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The Leave Alliance Campaign For Brexit: Citizen Democracy In Action

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Leave Alliance Launch - TLA - 2

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This EU referendum is about the people, not the Westminster elite. Fortunately, there now exists a truly independent Brexit group – the only genuinely grassroots campaign fighting the referendum, and the only one with a credible plan for safely leaving the European Union

Last week – on Budget day, in fact – the Leave Alliance of individuals and groups campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union held its launch in Westminster.

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who didn’t realise that anything had happened. The media is still having trouble wrapping their collective mind around the fact that in a referendum, the voices of politicians are no more important than those of ordinary citizens. That’s why every time Boris Johnson opens his mouth to utter his latest half-baked Brexit plan it is considered front page news, but when a group of private citizens and organisations form an independent campaign group to fight a national referendum it is deemed so un-newsworthy that it receives barely a ripple of attention.

Even when that launch takes place in the heart of Westminster, literally down the street from certain venerable news organisations (hello, Spectator), the idea of the Westminster media dispatching a journalist or two to see what was happening in their own back yard is apparently unthinkable. Every last resource simply had to be committed to this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of George Osborne’s 2016 Budget, Omnishambles Revisited.

To be fair, The Leave Alliance – of which this blog is an enthusiastic supporter – did register a mention in Christopher Booker’s Telegraph column:

[Boris] Johnson’s empty-headed amateurishness only typifies the fatal failure of any of his allies in the “Leave” campaign to agree on a plausible, properly worked-out exit plan. One after another they come up with their own equally half-baked suggestions, which only demonstrate how none of them have done their homework. This is giving Cameron’s “Project Fear” an open goal, by failing to show how we could practically leave the EU while continuing to enjoy full access to the single market.

The only group that has done so, the Leave Alliance – launched last week with support from the Bruges Group, the Campaign for an Independent Britain and others – is too small to bid for the lead role in the campaign (although I am told on good authority that its expert and exhaustive analysis of all the options has been found very useful by civil servants).

But for a full account of the Leave Alliance launch you have to turn to the blogosphere. Lost Leonardo, writing at the Independent Britain blog, provides this summary:

The Leave Alliance (TLA) is a network of new and established political groups, bloggers and tweeters who are committed to winning the EU referendum for the “leave” side. What makes TLA unique among the declared leave groups is its support for a credible Brexit plan.

Flexcit: The Market Solution is a six-phase plan for recovering Britain’s national independence in stages, as part of a continuous process, rather than as a one-time event. That change of perspective shifts the Brexit debate firmly in the direction of pragmatic and practical politics. The exact form that our post-Brexit deal takes is less important than our vision for what we will do with our national independence. Self-governance means taking responsibility unto ourselves and, if our politicians are any indication, a long process of discovery and rediscovery lies ahead.

So as to short cut the economics- and trade-centred debate that has been allowed (some might say encouraged) to obscure the more important political question—who governs Britain?—the Flexcit plan advocates remaining in the Single Market and then working to create a genuine free trade area in Europe whilst also rebuilding the national policy-making framework and enhancing our democracy by means of The Harrogate Agenda.

This gravity of this referendum on Britain’s EU membership compels us all to think as fully engaged citizens, not merely as frightened consumers or “low information voters” easily manipulated by the cynical propaganda emanating from the major Remain and Leave campaigns. And in this campaign, it is the Remain campaign which benefits from our ignorance and the Leave campaign which is strengthened by knowledge.

When people educate themselves about the European Union, its history and its workings, they almost inevitably become more eurosceptic as the scales fall from their eyes and they realise that the EU is in fact not just a friendly club of like-minded countries who gather together to braid each other’s hair and have a good chat.

As I recently confessed:

Growing up, I was the most ardent European Union supporter and federalist imaginable. I firmly believed that the age of the nation state was over, that patriotism was silly and gauche, and that our only hope of a prosperous future lay in dissolving ourselves into a greater European collective. Adopting the euro, creating an EU army – you name it, I believed in it.

[..] Only when my appreciation for democracy and self-determination (and small-c conservatism) caught up with my authoritarian Utopianism did I realise that the accumulated wisdom of the British people might exceed my own, and that there may be good reasons to be sceptical of the European Union. And only when I came to realise the extent to which the EU is a creation of a small group of European intellectuals and political elites who thought that they knew best – and that the only way to bring about their creation was through stealth and subterfuge, never declaring the ultimate federal destination of travel – did I come to see how profoundly wrong it is.

[..] There is indeed an army of swivel-eyed ideologues in this EU referendum debate. And though they would hate to admit it, it is those on the Remain side who are most likely to be impermeable to facts, and who are least likely to have ever held a different view on the EU and been on an intellectual journey to arrive at their present position.

And as a rule of thumb, it is generally wisest to listen to those who can show evidence of having thought deeply about an issue and been persuaded by the steady accumulation of evidence to revise their thinking, rather than those who were born with their deeply-engrained love of the European Union pre-programmed in their brains.

One of the reasons I am proud of my association with The Leave Alliance is the fact that it is full of other people who, like me, have been on an intellectual journey. Sure, some of us saw through the EU from the beginning, but others – myself included – were won over to the side of Brexit by the steady accumulation of incontrovertible evidence.

We count Britain’s foremost authority on the European Union among our number, as well as several independent writers who possess more patiently acquired knowledge about the global regulatory environment than most of the Westminster media combined.

And if nothing else, the fact that the Westminster media failed to cover something as significant as the Leave Alliance launch – despite the fact that it was happening right in their midst – should be enough to convince anyone of the importance of doing one’s own research on Brexit, and not relying on any one single source or campaign when making this most important of decisions.

 

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Cameron’s EU Deal – Reaction

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

BELGIUM EU SUMMIT

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Didn’t he do well?

As our victorious prime minister returns to London to chair the fateful cabinet meeting which will now likely set the wheels in motion for a June referendum, it’s worth taking a brief survey of how David Cameron’s deal – essentially an embossed, artfully decorated statement of the status quo – is being received.

The division between those who are angry or depressed and those who are buoyantly cheerful really tells you all that you need to know.

Toby Young bristles at being asked to greet the status quo like a shiny new present, but recognises that such a devoutly europhile prime minister could scarcely be expected to to any better:

The attempt to spin this deal as a great victory, which grants Britain a “special status” within the EU, is unlikely to win the Prime Minister many friends. On the contrary, it may end up alienating people who haven’t yet made up their minds who will feel they’re being taken for fools.

[..] Crucially, the EU leaders made it clear that there won’t be any further reforms, at least none that will mean a transfer of powers away from the centre. So Downing Street won’t be able to spin this agreement as the beginning of a reform process rather than the EU’s best and final offer.

Many of the “wins” Cameron boasted about in his speech were just assurances that the EU isn’t going to take away the protections for Britain already won by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. We won’t be forced to join the euro! Whoopee doo.

Tim Stanley channels his inner Tony Blair and declares Cameron’s pitiful outcome to be “weak, weak, weak”:

David Cameron’s deal with Europe is weak, weak, weak. It could never be anything but. Why? Partly because the Prime Minister is an inveterate Europhile.

He approached these negotiations from the stance of someone who ultimately wanted to stay in – and how could he negotiate from strength when everyone around the table knew that he was bluffing? More importantly, the idea that Britain can build for itself a “special status” within Europe is pure fantasy.

The EU cannot be decentralised; the UK cannot prosper on its fringes. The only real choice is between the status quo and Brexit.

[..] The Europeans made it clear from the outset that there would be no rewriting of the fundemantal principles. Rightly so: one country cannot determine the direction of travel for the entire continent. And if one country gets to pick and choose its own rate of integration into the new super state – why, everyone else will want to do the same.

So Cameron could never have been given substantial reforms because just putting them on the table would have jeopardised the grand European project. We have reached a point in the history of the EU when what Britain needs and what Europe wants are no longer compatible. The only logical thing left to do is to leave.

Paul Goodman compares David Cameron’s loftily declared original list of renegotiation objectives with the limp and shrunken prize he now holds in his hand – and he makes the choice facing Conservative MPs crystal clear:

Many Conservative MPs told their voters and Associations at the last election that Britain’s relationship with the EU cannot go on as it is.  They are fully entitled to say now that they have changed their minds.  That they have been persuaded that Britain’s future is brighter as an EU member state.  That they will swallow any misgivings they have about the deal, and back their Party leader – who, after all, is on some measures the most successful Conservative leader of modern times bar Margaret Thatcher.  That this is no time to campaign for a referendum result that would turn an election-winning Prime Minister out of office, and destroy the reforming work of the first majority Tory Government in over 20 years.

What they cannot say, if they have declared that Britain’s relationship with the EU must see real reform, is that this deal makes a difference.  And if they want to see such change, the lesson of this summit is that it isn’t on offer.  Which leaves only one option open to them, and to Party members of the same mind – to back Brexit.

Meanwhile, the Guardian is priming its core audience of nodding-dog virtue-signallers with key arguments to use against Brexiteers, and confirms what any thinking person knows – that the ultimate decision has nothing to do with David Cameron’s non-existent concessions from Brussels:

First of all, the details of the deal are not the crucial issue. Months ago, when David Cameron revealed his renegotiation agenda, it was already clear that this was not going to be a fundamental redefinition of Britain’s relationship with the EU. Nor would we suddenly find ourselves in “a reformed Europe”. On this, Eurosceptics are right: Cameron’s demands were less than he pumped them up to be, and inevitably, given that 27 other European countries had to be satisfied, what he achieved is even more modest. But it would be madness to let a decision about the economic and political future of Britain for decades ahead hinge on the detail of an“emergency brake” on in-work benefits for migrants.

New Europeans – that pressure group of proto-EU citizens waiting impatiently for the new  European that they crave to finally hatch – are happy too:

The Prime Minister has secured his so-called “emergency brake” on in-work benefits paid to mobile EU citizens coming to Britain. However, it will not be his hand that is on the brake, despite his announcement to the contrary.

The brake is in the hand of the Council.  The Council may be ready to pull the brake for the UK already – but it is still the Council’s hand on the brake. The European Parliament would need to pass the necessary legislation.  So the earliest the legislation could be in place is 2017.

The emergency brake will operate like the transitional arrangements – after 7 years it will drop away. In the meantime, very few people will be affected because mobile EU citizens rarely apply for in-work benefits in the first four years. There is very little evidence to show that EU citizens are claiming in-work benefits on arrival in Britain.

[..] The potential savings from David Cameron’s “clamp down” on other benefits for mobile EU citizens are trivial and petty in the context of the national accounts. They amount to about £30m on some estimates. This is less than what it costs to run the Royal Opera House.

And they are right – the main “headline concession” that David Cameron managed to secure from Brussels remains entirely in the hands of the EU rather than Britain, and would make absolutely zero tangible difference to anything whether it is ultimately pulled or not.

These people have no reason to lie. They are the people who were potentially most affected by any major changes that David Cameron might have negotiated, so their relief (bordering in crowing) is absolutely genuine – and utterly damning of Cameron’s claim to have fundamentally changed our relationship with the EU.

Back to Tim Stanley for another eloquent denunciation of this brazen establishment stitch-up:

There are a million reasons to hate politics: the groupthink of the establishment is one of them. Cowardice is another. It’s like being governed by jellyfish: spineless synchronised swimming in one terminal direction.

For years Tories have used the issue of Europe to win votes, promising us either serious reform or a campaign to leave.

But not only was David Cameron’s renegotiation effort a paper tiger (Francois Hollande: “Just because it lasted a long time doesn’t mean that much happened”) but now the Cabinet has largely decided to follow its leader and back the In campaign.

[..] The entire weight of the state, media and big business will fall behind a campaign saying that Europe is good for us even if, from a distance, it appears to be a giant ball of flame hurtling into an abyss of despair.

Against this confederacy of dunces stands a small number of politicians brave enough to risk friendships and careers to tell us the truth – that this deal is a sham, the EU is dying and Britain is better off out.

I myself have nothing to add at this time. Others have already encapsulated what I feel, and said it better than I could – most notably Dr. Richard North at eureferendum.com, who echoes my reference last night to Neville Chamberlain:

Mr Cameron may have in his mind’s eye the image of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich in 1938, triumphantly waving his “piece of paper” at Heston Airport (where the M4 service station now stands), but at least Mr Chamberlain’s “deal” bought us critical time, allowing us to re-arm sufficiently against the Nazi menace.

But this piece of paper is nothing but a fraud – a pretence. This Prime Minister has brought nothing back, nothing of substance, and is now intent on using is as the basis for a referendum where he is intent on selling his snake-oil “special status”.

Yet, all the time, Mr Cameron’s efforts have been a sideshow besides the main event – the real renegotiation under way to transform the 19 members of the Eurozone into a single state. That is the EU real agenda not the stage-managed drama of the Prime Minister emerging blinking into the light and announcing he has secured our future for a generation.

Nor should we assume that the Brussels barons will treat us kindly if we vote to remain in the EU. They will brush aside future British protests, telling us that we have had our chance to do things our way and rejected it. Our prospects sitting uneasily on the margins of the emerging superstate will not be promising. Unloved, ignored and marginalised, we face an uncertain, even risky future, on the outskirts of the new European empire.

But I, and this blog, will have much to say as we now fight onward to the 23 June referendum date. And those politicians who built their jealously-guarded careers and reputations on what turns out to be paper-thin euroscepticism should expect no understanding and no mercy.

The divided Leave camp has been caught napping – Cameron is going to the country with a desultory deal, entirely based on the belief that we are so divided that we will not be able to mount an effective Remain campaign – and by publicly embracing people like George Galloway, it seems that some of us are determined to prove him correct.

If you haven’t been paying attention so far, or have only half tuned in, then now is the time to perk up and fulfil your duty as an engaged citizen. We have just four months to win our freedom from the European Union and, if we succeed, potentially spark a renaissance of real democracy through Europe.

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Small Minds Discuss People: The Media’s Coverage Of The EU Referendum

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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The EU referendum is about the British people, not the Westminster game of thrones

Another day brings another tiresome round of court gossip about which Conservative ministers might potentially campaign for Britain to leave the European Union in the coming referendum.

This time the breathless gossip is reported in Guido Fawkes:

A co-conspirator tucking into his ravioli in Westminster’s Quirinale restaurant looked up to see Theresa May and Liam Fox settling down to lunch. An hour earlier Fox had asked the Home Secretary for assurances over the government’s line on Russia, so you can bet that was on the menu. Though the main topic for discussion will almost certainly have been Europe.

There has been speculation that May has been meeting with leading Eurosceptics as she keeps her options open ahead of the referendum. Where better for Dr Fox to lobby her to lead the Out campaign than one of the pricier Italian restaurants in SW1? 

While the Evening Standard gushes about Boris Johnson:

What vexes the fledgling campaign to stay in the EU is the prospective behaviour of Boris Johnson and Theresa May: in the words of one Westminster insider, “they are the only players who could change the weather”.

True enough. Boris has the popular appeal to make the Out campaign blossom with optimism and good cheer, ridding it at a stroke of its negative, wintry disposition. May, on the other hand, would bring the authority of a great office of state to the Brexit campaign. Both politicians are taken seriously within the Tory tribe as prospective successors to Cameron. Small wonder that their every move is being scrutinised so closely.

Seasoned Boris-watchers (or Bozzologists) admit that his behaviour is presently inscrutable. Those I have spoken to incline — just — to the view that he will decide eventually to stick with the In camp, though without much conviction.

Before going on to say of Theresa May:

In 2010 May was startled to be given such a senior brief. Since then she has become incrementally persuaded that she has what it takes to succeed Cameron. Like Boris, she knows her leadership prospects are intimately entangled with her conduct in the EU referendum. But if she is serious about taking on the boys for the top job, she should give the Out camp a wide berth.

As Michael Heseltine used to say as he prepared his challenge to Margaret Thatcher, most contenders only have one bullet in the chamber. If May aligns herself with the Out movement, she will be handing the gun to others and inviting them to do as they please with her accrued political capital. So if her head has indeed been turned by the flattery of the Brexit crew, it should be turned back — and fast.

Because we all know that the really important thing in this referendum is not the profound and historic choice that the British people will make about how we wish to be governed in the twenty-first century, but rather the salacious court gossip over which cabinet ministers and wannabe future Tory leaders will risk their bright young (or not-so-young) careers by allying themselves with the Brexit cause.

Never mind that awkward S-word, sovereignty. That’s boring. Never mind a detailed and difficult discussion about the realities of global governance. That would require research. Proving the adage that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people, most of the British media is happy to talk about people and the petty personalities involved in the public debate, to the near total exclusion of everything else.

If you want serious, granular analysis and argument on either side of the referendum debate, there is no point looking in the pages of the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Spectator or any other publication claiming prestige. All you will find there are thinly veiled press releases from one or other of the groups squabbling for lead designation, or worryingly naive editorials from household name commentators who sound suspiciously like they have done no independent research of their own. Very unimpressive.

No, for serious analysis you have to turn to the blogosphere, and sites like eureferendum.com and Leave HQ on the Brexit side, or Hugo Dixon on the Remain side. And the difference is like walking from a junior school classroom to a tutorial room at Oxford or Cambridge. Absent are the mindless platitudes and stale (often long-ago disproven) talking points that are so often repeated on television and in the broadsheets, and in their place are references to the real, murky world of global regulation – a world which, once discovered, proves that the EU is not the “top table” as europhiles blithely claim, but also that an orderly Brexit would not lead to an instant “bonfire of the regulations” as some on the Leave side stubbornly insist.

Some eurosceptics and Brexiteers would say I am wasting my time by even bothering to mention low-grade newspaper gossip such as the Boris Johnson vs Theresa May game of thrones. And they have a good point, to a degree. This referendum is about the British people and what they think is best, not what government ministers, opposition politicians or establishment media figures may want. Fair enough.

But you can’t just look at these shenanigans in isolation. Is the coming Brexit referendum the most important thing to happen politically in a generation? Yes, absolutely. But that does not mean that we should focus on the referendum outcome to the extent that we ignore the failings and misdeeds of the political class who were here before the referendum became a reality and will (sadly) be here long after it is but a footnote in history.

There is the future stewardship of the country to think about. And I want Britain’s future political leaders to be (so far as possible) principled people with the courage of their convictions. If they claimed to hold a certain view on an important issue like Britain’s membership of the European Union to get elected, they should then follow that through once in office.

Consequently, this blog will be taking a very dim view indeed of any Conservative politician who wrapped themselves in the cloak of euroscepticism to win selection, only to run loyally to David Cameron’s heels like an obedient dog and campaign for a “Remain” vote when it really counts.

This debate should be about ideas first and foremost. That is where this blog will focus. However – and maybe this a sign that I lack a great mind – I for one will certainly remember those people who put their personal careers ahead of their commitment to democracy when it comes to this existential referendum.

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