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.
Ministry of Defence ordered to find £1 billion of further cost savings from the defence budget while OFGEM gives £500 million to power companies to make electrical power lines look prettier
Government has no more fundamental duty than the protection of the realm from threats foreign and domestic. But while David Cameron’s Conservative majority government is quick to take action against domestic threats (eagerly spending money and passing laws which undermine our fundamental freedoms and civil liberties in the process), it is worryingly weak when it comes to keeping Britain well equipped to deal with foreign dangers.
Isabel Hardman, writing in The Spectator, remarks:
Even though the prospect of Britain failing to meet that Nato target is upsetting Washington, and even though it is something that agitates Tory backbenchers, and even though one Labour leadership candidate (Liz Kendall) has said they would stick to 2 per cent, this is unlikely to cause as big a row in Westminster as perhaps it should.
For starters, the Opposition is still officially not endorsing the 2 per cent target. For another thing, one of the best-briefed proponents of the Tories keeping their commitments, Rory Stewart, is no longer chair of the Defence Select Committee and is now a minister. And for another thing, Tory MPs are trying their best currently to behave rather than pick fights. Even if they did, a rebellion organised by a backbencher would number a few dozen at the most and would unlikely to be joined by Labour unless Liz Kendall wins the party leadership. There will be criticism from the sidelines, but few are expecting any sort of real trouble that is troublesome for the government.
Of course, this is only if you measure trouble as being purely confined to the walls of the Palace of Westminster, rather than the sort of trouble the armed forces may be required to deal with but just with even further reduced capabilities, but there we go.
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.
Semi-Partisan Politics 