Media

Lost In The Media’s EU Referendum Coverage: Any Mention Of Democracy

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

EU Referendum - Brexit - Democracy

–

The media’s fixation with personality politics and the petty ups and downs of individual political careers distracts us from the only thing that matters when it comes to the EU referendum – the future of our democracy

The Times’ Red Box briefing email today leads with more sneering commentary about the supposed shortcomings of the broader anti-EU, pro-democracy Leave campaign:

Maybe it’s a stunt to show how difficult it is to work together for the greater good, thus undermining a key argument for staying in the European Union.

Or maybe the campaigns to leave the EU are a total bloody shambles.

While Remain was pumping out letters to ten million homes yesterday, the Outers were out to get each other. Again.

The briefing continues:

The infighting is also causing another problem: who would want to join this rabble?

Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, has suggested that a senior cabinet minister will eventually lead the Out campaign, though refused at the weekend to say who that might be.

There are suggestions that Chris Grayling and Theresa Villiers are not high profile enough, and the likes of Michael Gove will fall in line and support the PM.

Which leaves Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader who remains popular in some parts of the party and has long argued against staying in the EU.

Yet he too has history with Cummings, who was his director of strategy during his ill-fated leadership before quitting and later declaring: ” Mr Duncan Smith is incompetent, would be a worse prime minister than Tony Blair, and must be replaced.”

Because of course that is the most important question in this whole debate – whose reputation and political prospects will be most enhanced or damaged by the stance they take on the future of British political governance.

What ambitious, self-respecting politician would want to associate their glittering career with the grubby and laughable concepts of national sovereignty and democracy? Which of the petty, superficial personalities who pass for statesmen today will win a coveted promotion, and which will find their career progression halted because they pick the wrong horse in this race? The sheer superficiality of the media’s EU referendum debate coverage absolutely beggars belief.

Is there currently a lot of unseemly (to outward appearances) infighting among the eurosceptic, pro-Brexit crowd? Yes. But a lot of this is necessary fighting. Though our first instinct may be to separate the squabbling factions with cries of “can’t we all just get along?”, in actual fact this fighting serves an important purpose.

Many people and organisations who purportedly oppose the European Union are actually either ambivalent about leaving, or busy spewing out contradictory and uninformed messages which will ultimately harm the Leave campaign and provide the Remain side with plentiful campaign fodder. This harms the Brexit cause, and so must be confronted and dealt with if the Leave campaign is to win the referendum.

Vote Leave in particular is filled to the brim with people who don’t actually want Britain to leave the European Union, but simply want the government to use a “leave” vote as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from Brussels. Meanwhile, UKIP and others are often guilty of promoting an overly simplistic view of Brexit, conjuring a fantasyland where Britain quits the EU on Day 1, bans all immigration on Day 2, and holds a big Bonfire of the Regulations on Day 3.

None of these things are possible, nor even desirable. And pretending that they are achievable reflects badly on the entire Brexit movement. And so while it may appear unseemly to outsiders and the half-interested media, it is essential that eurosceptics have these essential debates now, while relatively few people are watching, so that we go into the campaign with the message that carries the greatest chance of success.

As Ben Kelly points out over at The Sceptic Isle:

[..] it is impossible for everyone to agree and therefore impossible to have one unifiedLeave campaign. The Remain campaign is entirely based on disseminating fear, uncertainty and doubt amongst the populace and propagating myths about Brexit. Thus, as a movement Remain is easy to unify; Europhiles are unified in their duplicity, unjust smugness, their lack of faith in democracy and their inability to stop clinging to an archaic ideology and an ideal that is redundant and bad for Britain.

The debate over leaving the EU is more nuanced and therefore necessarily divided; this makes the europhiles positively gleeful because they see it as an advantage. It isn’t. Those of us who want to leave the EU are now involved in a great competition, a battle of ideas, over how exactly we achieve Brexit both in terms of convincing the public, winning the referendum, and the plan for what we should do with our independence.

Remember, this referendum is the europhiles’ to lose. They have the government on their side, nearly the entire political establishment, the European Union itself and the lion’s share of the funding. They also have the most powerful advantage of all – the incorrect perception, fuelled by the media, that this referendum is a contest between staying in the EU as it is now (the “safe” status quo), and taking some deathly plunge into the unknown. Both of these axioms are utterly wrong, but they are widely believed and toxic to the Brexit cause.

Of course, in reality there is no status quo when it comes to the European Union. The EU is but a process, set in motion half a century ago, whose end destination is a single European state. And frankly, I am getting tired of pointing this out when the EU’s founding fathers and today’s euro-federalists have repeatedly said so in their own words.

At this point, it is for the pro-EU campaigners to explain why a humble organisation that supposedly only wants to promote free trade and co-operation requires a parliament, a judiciary, a flag and an anthem in order to accomplish these basic tasks. It is most certainly not for me to continually explain why the person pointing a gun in our face and demanding that we hand over our cash is in fact a mugger, and not a kind-hearted charity collector.

But it is hard to promote any kind of message about democracy, governance or anything else when all of the oxygen in the debate is sucked up and wasted on breathless speculation about whose careers will be helped or hindered by their eventual stance on the Brexit question.

I couldn’t care less whether Boris Johnson biding his time is a smart move in terms of his Tory leadership ambitions, or whether the likes of Theresa May and Sajid Javid are wise to lie low and obey David Cameron’s command for eurosceptics to keep quiet while his pro-EU ministers are given free reign to sing endless hymns of praise to Brussels. It doesn’t interest me. The only abundantly clear thing is the fact that none of the supposed Conservative eurosceptics truly care about safeguarding our democracy and sovereignty, because if they did they would be promoting Brexit for all they are worth rather than weighing up the options and deciding whether campaigning for Brexit might hurt their careers.

I know it is hard for the legacy media to remain focused on issues rather than personalities for any length of time, but given the gravity of this particular debate – and its profound, far-reaching consequences for how the British people will be governed in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time – it would be nice to see more than the usual token effort.

The current gossipy, high school style fixation with personality politics and the petty ups and downs of individual reputations and political careers is more toxic than all of the Remain campaign’s lies, distortions and evasions put together. For it distracts us from the only thing that matters in this referendum: democracy, and whether we surrender it out of fear, or stand and fight for it.

Britain - UK - European Union - Referendum - Brexit - Punishment Beating

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones And The Thin-Skinned Labour Commentariat

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Dan Hodges - Owen Jones - Labour Party

–

A campaigning journalist or opinion writer must write according to their conscience, without a second thought for whether it helps or hurts their own party in the short term

Owen Jones is angry that his attempts to make sympathetic, reasoned critiques of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are attracting the same levels of vitriol and hatred that those of us on the Right experience every day.

In his Guardian column yesterday, Jones complains:

I have several criticisms of the Labour leadership, held in good faith and constructive in approach. Because I want the left to succeed – otherwise, what’s the point? The need to build coalitions of middle- and low-income people; to reach out beyond the converted; to have a credible, coherent economic alternative; to rebut smears of being hostile to the country; and so on.

But when voiced, the right will use these as evidence that “even the left is losing faith”. Some on the left will see such suggestions and criticisms as playing into the hands of an aggressive media campaign regarding anything but blind loyalty as treachery. The isolated sympathetic commentators end up almost duty-bound to stay in line.

Such is the unrelenting nature of the media attack, any balanced discussion of the Corbyn leadership risks being shut down. That the media can be so dominated by one opinion – and so aggressive about it – is a damning indictment of the so-called free press. I’m an opinion writer: my opinions appear in the opinion section. But the media is swollen with opinion writers, and in too many cases their work ends up in the news section. A constructive critique of the Labour leadership is still needed for its own sake if nothing else. It is, however, an almost impossible task.

Meanwhile, Dan Hodges – a commentator with absolutely no concern about the potential impact of his words on the short term prospects of the Labour Party – has cancelled his direct debit and cut up his membership card (again) in no small part because of the vicious response to his opinions from the Corbynite Left.

In announcing his decision to quit Labour again, Hodges writes:

I’m done. Yesterday I cancelled my direct debit to the Labour Party. “Why don’t you just sod off and join the Tories”, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters regularly ask anyone who dares to challenge their rancid world view.

I won’t be joining the Tories. But I am sodding off.

What’s a left wing polemicist to do if they find themselves disagreeing with the direction of the Labour Party in the Age of Corbyn?

It’s funny. Many of us on the right are well used to being called Evil Tories or labelled as heartless, uncaring monsters utterly lacking in all compassion – not because we don’t want to help the poor and disadvantaged, but simply because we don’t believe that endless, uncapped government spending is the best solution.

We are used to mainstream media outlets – heck, even the current Chancellor of the Exchequer himself – unquestioningly accepting and repeating the notion that conservatism is only about helping the wealthy, rather than the many. And when we are not being actively spat on or jostled in the street because of our political opinions, we are still used to being reviled, and our ideas not given a fair shake. And as a result, we have developed superior reasoning abilities, reserves of fortitude and patience, and very thick skins.

The left-wing commentariat utterly lack these qualities. For years they have marinated in the sanctimonious belief that their side has a monopoly on truth, compassion and decency. And since Labour lost power in 2010, it has been the easiest job in the world for them to sit on the sidelines throwing stones at the Conservative government.

(I’ll make an exception here for Dan Hodges, who correctly called Ed Miliband’s vacillating uselessness from the very beginning, and correctly predicted that he would lead the party to electoral ruin. And for his Cassandra-like efforts, he is now a pariah figure in the party he loves, with the small consolation of being David Cameron’s favourite columnist).

But to say that the left wing commentariat have had trouble adapting to the new reality under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn is a huge understatement. Because now, more than ever, the Labour Party has devolved into warring factions and bitter rivalries. And all of them – MPs, writers and activists alike – are now treating each other with the same contempt and raw hatred that they previously reserved for “Tory Scum” like me.

And it turns out that the Left can dish it out, but can’t take it.

Owen Jones in particular seems to be struggling with the fact that writing critically about tactical errors by the Corbyn leadership is not generating a warmer and more receptive response:

I have several criticisms of the Labour leadership, held in good faith and constructive in approach. Because I want the left to succeed – otherwise, what’s the point? The need to build coalitions of middle- and low-income people; to reach out beyond the converted; to have a credible, coherent economic alternative; to rebut smears of being hostile to the country; and so on.

But when voiced, the right will use these as evidence that “even the left is losing faith”. Some on the left will see such suggestions and criticisms as playing into the hands of an aggressive media campaign regarding anything but blind loyalty as treachery. The isolated sympathetic commentators end up almost duty-bound to stay in line.

And when Dan Hodges found himself implacably opposed to the current direction of his party – with his anti-Corbyn positions being received even more coolly than his tirades against Ed Miliband – he simply upped and left.

One might suggest that Owen Jones & company could learn a thing or two from this site. I’m a natural conservative supporter, though I reluctantly voted UKIP in 2015 out of frustration with the pro-EU consensus, in solidarity with good people like Douglas Carswell who went out on a limb in pursuance of their ideals, and because my local constituency fielded a dithering left-wing Wet Tory candidate. And I made clear that the Conservative Party did not deserve my vote because in every important area – national sovereignty, rolling back the state, fiscal policy, civil liberties and more – they were quite simply not behaving like a conservative party.

This blog is the exact right-wing mirror image of left-wing commentators like Dan Hodges: a natural supporter of my party, but with complete contempt for the current leadership (Cameron and Osborne) and a strong desire to see the Tories move in a more conservatarian direction. Dan Hodges can’t bring himself to remain within the Labour Party while its leadership refuses to countenance military action against the middle age barbarians of ISIS. I can’t bring myself to give money to the Tories so long as their leadership remains slavishly pro-EU and believes that the British people can be distracted from the gradual loss of their sovereignty and democracy by manufactured “table-thumping rows” and a sham renegotiation with Brussels. Or when they field a Conservative In Name Only parliamentary candidate who rails against the “bedroom tax” and thinks that we should do away with our independent nuclear deterrent.

I get a lot of stick for my views. I’m universally hated by the Left (and recently discovered a Tumblr page full of foul-mouthed invective about yours truly), and can hardly get deeply involved in Conservative politics when I disagree so fundamentally and vehemently with the centrist wet rag of a leader who just delivered a resounding general election victory only in the total absence of a viable Labour prime minister in waiting.

But that’s my lot in life, and I accept it. I’ve been called every name under the sun on Facebook and Twitter, earned the opprobrium of friends and acquaintances, and written lots of mean things about my own party, taking them to task for their failure to advance conservative policies while in power. But the one thing I have never done is pull a punch or moderate a sincerely held opinion because of the friends I might lose or the immediate electoral damage I might do to the political party I used to call home.

Love him or hate him, Jeremy Corbyn remained a Labour Party member through all of the long wilderness years of Blairism, years which must have seemed to Corbyn like an unbearable compromise with flawed Tory-lite policies. Ridicule and obscurity were his crosses to bear, and he bore them patiently until quite unexpectedly his fortunes changed.

For many of the left-wing commentariat, however, just a few short months out of power and favour within the Labour movement is apparently already taking a psychological toll on people more used to calling the Tories “evil” and sitting back to soak up the lazy applause than being tarred with the same brush and called Red Tories themselves.

I have no sympathy for any of them. Jeremy Corbyn sits atop the Labour Party because of the wretched job that the centrists and their establishment buddies did in making a convincing public case for moderate Labour. And on the flip side, I accept my share of blame for the Conservative Party’s current directionless, centrist malaise – I should have done more and worked harder in my own small way to keep the party true to Thatcher’s legacy, and fought harder against the Cameron project. Sadly I only began writing in 2012, when it was far too late anyway.

But if nothing else, perhaps now that major and influential left-wing commentators like Owen Jones have been on the receiving end of the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth left wing demagoguery that libertarians and conservatives receive every day, they will refrain from indulging in it themselves.

Of course, that would require that they stop feeling sorry for themselves long enough to recognise the pattern staring them in the face.

Jeremy Corbyn - Paris Attacks - Terrorism - Appeasement

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Credulous Media Swallow David Cameron’s EU Renegotiation Myths

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

David Cameron - Donald Tusk - EU Renegotiation - European Union - Brexit

–

Nobody in their right mind seriously believes that David Cameron will campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. But that didn’t stop the media from earnestly reporting Number 10’s Brexit bluster

David Cameron is about as far from being a eurosceptic as a Conservative prime minister could possibly be. Sure, he was forced by the rise of UKIP into pledging a referendum on Britain’s EU membership – despite having previously stated that he didn’t think a referendum was appropriate – but this was only ever a matter of political expediency, not heartfelt desire for Brexit or deep conviction that the people should have the right to decide their own destiny.

But this has not stopped the media from willingly and credulously lapping up the latest spin emanating from Number 10 Downing Street – the risible idea that if David Cameron’s EU partners continue to treat him like the pesky kid at the adult’s table, he might seriously campaign for Brexit.

From the Telegraph:

David Cameron has privately conceded he will have to campaign to leave the European Union if he continues to be “completely ignored” by Brussels, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

[..] It has now emerged that Mr Cameron is telling senior figures in his party that he will be willing to campaign for a British exit if EU leaders do not back down over his key reform plans.

“He has said that if he is completely ignored or if they give him nothing he will campaign to leave,” the source said. “He has made that clear.”

Anybody with even one foot rooted in reality should be able to tell that this latest court gossip is nothing but spin. Having (unsurprisingly) gotten nowhere with his renegotiation efforts thus far, David Cameron needs to appear tough and resolute for the home audience. After all, it is pretty embarrassing that the leader of a global power and the world’s fifth largest economy has achieved precisely nothing, despite having embarked on a well-publicised begging tour of Europe. When begging and pleading with the Czechs for permission to change UK welfare rules yields no fruit, some kind of strong public stance is essential to preserve any kind of dignity.

And let’s be frank – the Telegraph didn’t so much “learn” that Cameron is considering campaigning for Brexit through canny investigative journalism, but rather they probably received a tip-off authorised by the Conservative Party hierarchy to place that narrative into the news cycle.

And what a successful stunt it has been. Now we are duly talking about how the prime minister feels so frustrated with the progress of his renegotiation that he is considering this drastic step, when deep down they (and most of us) know that David Cameron would sooner leave his daughter unattended in Nigel Farage’s local pub than recommend to the British people that they vote to leave the EU.

The truth, of course, is that this was always a sham renegotiation. David Cameron didn’t even bother to consult with the British people as to what they wanted out of any new settlement with Europe before jetting off to Brussels to set out his puny demands, so how could he claim to be representing the public’s real concerns?

This whole exercise has been about starting with the outcome of a “Remain” vote and then working backwards to determine the least possible number of concessions required from the EU to deliver that goal, rather than starting with a hard-headed assessment of Britain’s own national interest or public sentiment. And such a back-to-front renegotiation was never going to bear fruit.

As Mark Wallace points out in Conservative Home:

The conventional wisdom is that the Prime Minister has cut back his list of renegotiation demands in order to reach a swift agreement, in which he can claim victory and then hold an early referendum. That probably was his hope; it would certainly make political sense. Unfortunately for him, each aspect of that plan is foundering while the clock ticks down.

With every day that this supposed renegotiation goes on, Britain looks more and more like the weak supplicant nation asking its superiors for scraps from the table – and being rebuffed. This would be humiliating enough, but it is also self-reinforcing. The fact that our EU partners have already seen Cameron going cap-in-hand around the capitals of Europe begging for concessions (rather than boldly stating the UK’s national interest or presenting a radically different vision of EU membership) means that they are emboldened to give away fewer concessions when he comes knocking again.

Right now, the EU has bigger fish to fry than the Brexit question. And with immigration and terrorism top of the agenda, EU leaders feel confident in pushing our renegotiation way down the list of priorities because they know – even if our credulous media claims not to know – that David Cameron will campaign for a “Remain” vote, come what may.

France and Germany are both diplomatically canny countries. If they suspected for a moment that their treatment of David Cameron might seriously cause him to snap and embrace the Brexit cause then they would immediately start making more conciliatory noises. Secretly they might be glad to be rid of Britain, but they know that Brexit would be a stunning, unacceptable repudiation of their vision for Europe. Thus the fact that there is no diplomatic panic in Berlin or Paris is proof that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande know that their British counterpart remains utterly pliable and sickeningly eager to please.

David Cameron can continue to authorise leaks suggesting that he is contemplating campaigning for Brexit, if it makes him feel better when he is politely ignored by the leaders of other countries a fraction of our size and power. He can promise all the table-thumping rows in the world, too.

But the one thing he cannot do is convince those of us who see through his cheap tricks that he is a real eurosceptic, or that he would ever allow his name to go down in the history books as the man who led Britain out of the European Union.

David Cameron - Angela Merkel - Francois Hollande - EU Renegotiation - Brexit

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Why Can’t We Raise The Quality Of The Debate On Europe?

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

EU UK Britain Flags

–

The stakes could not be higher for our country, and yet the debate about Britain’s place in Europe takes place in a febrile atmosphere where blinkered partisanship and confected outrage on social media draws a larger audience than reasoned argument. No wonder we are incapable of disagreeing with honour when it comes to our place in the EU

Why can’t we disagree well on Europe?

That is the question posed by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, in a thought-provoking intervention posted at Reimagining Europe, a new Church of England blog examining Britain’s place in Europe and the world from a Christian perspective.

In his piece ‘Learning to disagree well on Europe’, Welby writes:

People will say that we should not take the risk of leaving, others that it is less of a risk than staying. There will be talk of national sovereignty, of national confidence, of repatriation of laws, or being bound by European laws over which we have no control. The only certainty is that there will be much heat, probably slightly less light, but that it is a hugely important decision, with thoughtful and committed people, including Christians, on both sides.

But what about those in the UK for whom our membership, or withdrawal, from the Union, is not a major question, those for whom the needs and responsibilities of each day take precedence, and mention of political debates such as this leave them cold?

[..] How can we revitalise ideas such as sovereignty and subsidiarity – ideals formed out of Christian faith whose political dimensions capture their meaning only in part – and help encourage a clearly values-based approach to Britain’s future relationship with the EU; one that includes, but does not end with, economic and political perspectives?

All worthy questions. And in the spirit of making a constructive response, I would offer two main reasons that the quality of the debate has been – and is likely to remain – so desperately low.

First, the stakes of the debate are so high: we are not talking about tweaks to the tax code or welfare system which can be easily undone by a future administration, this decision will shape the future of our country, and the way in which the whole world responds to the challenges of globalisation. And secondly, the quality of our political discourse in general is driven by the internet and social media, democratising in their way but also a megaphone for those with the loudest and most outrageous opinions to seize control of the narrative.

Continue reading →

Conservative Media Demeans Itself By Calling Cameron’s Debate Critics ‘Totalitarian’

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

General Election 2015 Leaders Debate Cameron Miliband Totalitarian

 

The new political week picks up exactly where last week left off, with much of the right-wing press waging a furious rearguard effort to distract attention from David Cameron’s cowardly attempt to scupper the televised leaders’ debates.

The Telegraph in particular is hitting back at the near-universal condemnation of the Prime Minister with nearly the same intensity with which they defended themselves against ex-columnist Peter Oborne’s devastating accusations of compromised editorial standards relating to the newspaper’s coverage of HSBC, an important advertiser.

But now some in the Tory-friendly media have outdone themselves, accusing those who criticise David Cameron’s weaselling out of the television debates and who want to see such debates permanently enshrined in the British political calendar of harbouring “totalitarian” instincts.

Graeme Archer writes in his latest Telegraph column:

Continue reading →