Little Englanders: right again?

During the last referendum campaign in the UK, in which we in England were denied a vote, did you ever hear the advocates of Scottish independence derided as “little Scotlanders”?

No, me neither. Yet we will surely hear a lot in the months ahead about how “little Englanders” threaten our future prosperity and security by advocating British withdrawal from the European Union.

How did Scottish independence come to be marketed and widely accepted as a progressive aspiration, and British independence as an entirely reactionary one?

It clearly represents a failure of leadership and communication by those tending towards the “no” camp before the referendum starting gun is fired.

And I fear that this failure is all too likely to continue if the loudest voice in the “no” campaign is that of Nigel Farage.

UKIP is brilliantly typecast to play the role of Labour’s “loony left” in the referendum of 1975, convincing moderate voters that if they are on one side it would be better to be on the other.

Nigel Farage with pint, 2015

Tony Benn with pipe, 1975

How easy it will be to characterise the advocates of independence as backward-looking, fearful xenophobes, and the EU’s supporters as optimistic representatives of the future.

Which is ironic, given that little could be further from the truth. The EU is a sclerotic 20th century creation, fixated on building a single nation called Europe.

They didn’t invent the euro to make our continent richer, but to drive it towards their obsessive political goal of “ever closer union”.

The current shenanigans with Greece are duly demonstrating that you cannot have a single currency without a single treasury and tax system, just as they were designed to do.

Fear will be the “yes” campaign’s weapon of choice in this referendum, just as it was the main asset of the “no” camp in Scotland.

Not sure about the chains imagery, to be honest

Prepare to hear much about the four million jobs at risk, regional development funding that will be lost, new trade barriers erected, a fatal loss of influence and dangerous isolation in the world.

All of which is cobblers, since the rest of the EU sells more to us than we do to them, and the funding they so generously dish out is but a fraction of the money we pay to them in the first place for the privilege of membership.

The “we will have to obey them anyway so we must have a seat at the table when they are drawn up” argument about EU rules and regulations does not stack up because there is ample evidence that our influence is already minimal.

We have to comply with US regulations to sell to America, and Chinese regulations to sell to China, and I don’t recall anyone arguing that our non-participation in devising them is a fatal barrier to trade there.

Throughout my lifetime we have been beset by the belief that Britain is in terminal decline and that we need to cling to the skirts of nanny EU for fear of something worse.

It is high time we took stock of our many advantages as the world’s fifth largest economy and the home of its most widely spoken language and premier financial centre.

We have some of the world’s finest universities and a track record of innovation in science, technology and culture that is simply second to none.

Why on earth do you think that so many immigrants from the EU and elsewhere are desperate to be here?

Our many natural advantages mean that we are uniquely well placed to forge new trade links with the faster growing world outside the EU, and to become a more optimistic, confident and successful country than we have been at least since the end of the Second World War.

Unlike this newspaper and the Prime Minister, I have not absolutely made up my mind which way I shall vote, but my inclinations are clear and they are solidly based on hope, not fear.

If anyone dares to call me a “little Englander” I shall politely point out that this was mainly used as a term of abuse against those who opposed the Boer War to expand the British Empire in South Africa.

So from the viewpoint of any self-respecting modern liberal, weren’t the little Englanders absolutely right?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Referendums add to the gaiety of a nation

Anyone who doubts that history repeats itself would do well to take a look at Harold Wilson and the great European referendum of 1975.

Wilson led a government that had been returned with a slim majority, and a party that was divided on Europe. His way out was to argue not that membership of the European Economic Community was wrong per se, but that the Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath had secured entry on totally unacceptable terms.

So Labour “renegotiated” those terms, secured a few footling concessions, declared a famous victory and put the result to the great British public in a referendum with, inevitably, the more positive and appealing “yes” option being for continued membership of what was then generally called the Common Market.

Nearly every apparently sane mainstream political leader campaigned for a “yes” vote. The “no” camp was dominated by the barmy Labour left, though it also contained a few obvious nutjobs from the Tory right, the by then Ulster Unionist Enoch Powell, and – intriguingly – Plaid Cymru and the SNP.

Small wonder that I was conned into voting “yes”, along with 67.2% of my fellow electors.

We were reassured by entirely dishonest claims that continued membership involved “no essential loss of British sovereignty” and also strongly influenced by what appeared to be the economic reality of the time: that Britain was stuck in perennial doldrums while the Continent powered ahead. Can we blamed for fancying a share of that prosperity?

I can’t say that I have regretted my decision ever since, though I have certainly done so since the political nature of the European Union project became impossible to ignore from the late 1980s. 

Today the UK political background is eerily similar to what it was 40 years ago, and the master plan in Downing Street is clearly exactly the same: claim success in the “negotiations” and campaign for a “yes”.

The difference today is that it is the UK which is doing pretty well economically and the rest of the EU that is in the doldrums, mired in the entirely predictable consequences of its economically illiterate, politically driven euro project.

Whether this will have any impact on the outcome I rather doubt, given that every business voice that can be wheeled out in support of the EU is already burbling on about the vital importance of our continued membership.

Just remember, won’t you, that most of those making this case also told you that the UK would be finished if it didn’t join the euro when it was launched in 1999? An issue on which they have since fallen curiously silent.

I for one will take some convincing before I repeat my mistake of 1975, though I am at least open to reason.

I also find that I am warming to the idea of referendums in general. They may be expensive and introduce the risk of dumb people making the wrong choice, rather than the one preferred by the man in Whitehall who knows best.

But they do help to encourage real public engagement in political issues: witness the high turnout in Scotland last year. And, as Ireland proved so convincingly last week, they can add greatly to the gaiety of a nation.

Back in the 1970s we endured real agonies debating whether a referendum had any place in the unwritten British constitution. It was condemned as an assault on Parliamentary sovereignty, and the sacred principle that thick people elect slightly less thick people to take all the important decisions for them.

Today the agonising has been narrowed down to whether EU citizens resident in the UK should be allowed to participate, which is a bit like debating the franchise on a turkey farm just in advance of Christmas.

And, bizarrely, whether 16 and 17 year olds should be allowed to vote. In the same news bulletins where we hear appeals to trace 16 year old girls who have run off with older men or headed for Syria to be jihadi brides.

Because in those instances they are still children who cannot be held responsible for their actions. 

Exactly. You can’t have it both ways. So I say yes to referendums, and no to votes for children.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Reckless by name, reckless by nature

What’s in a name? The Conservative MP Mark Reckless will certainly have pleased believers in nominative determinism by defecting to UKIP at the weekend.

If only the victim of the Sunday Mirror’s sting had been called Randy Gullible instead of Brooks Newmark the case for names determining life’s outcomes would surely be completely unassailable.

Perhaps even now Mr Newmark is filling out the requisite deed poll forms that just reached him by email, along with a request for his bank account details.

Leaving aside questions on the morality of entrapment, we must weigh the welcome evidence that MPs and ministers are only human against the worrying reflection that these are the people we trust to make decisions that affect all our lives.

If the rampant expenses fiddling of the recent past were not enough to sow a few doubts about the wisdom of this, we might pause to reflect on the fact that a whopping majority of them were convinced last week that dropping a few bombs on the fighters of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq (though not in Syria, where IS is actually based) will help to make us safer here in the UK.

Just as the best way to protect yourself from a ravenously hungry and mentally unbalanced tiger is always to climb into its cage and give it a playful tug on its tail.

This makes about as much sense as Conservative MP’s Justin Purblind’s belief that the best way to secure the EU referendum that is the be-all and end-all of his political life is to split the right of centre vote at the next election and so hand power to Labour leader Ed Forgetful.

Of course Messrs Reckless and Purblind are right in thinking that Dave Poshboy has no intention of holding a free and fair vote on British membership of the EU. The full resources of the political establishment and business community would be deployed in a “shock and awe” strategy designed to ensure that we voted to stay in.

But I’m afraid that’s the only sort of vote we’re ever going to get on the issue, so surely it would be better to stay put and campaign for it within a party that stands a small (though rapidly diminishing) chance of actually getting elected?

I have been instinctively opposed to our involvement in the European project ever since it dropped the pretence of being simply a “common market”, but I accept that it was my fault for not paying adequate attention to the small print when I was conned into voting “yes” in the last referendum on the subject in 1975.

However, to be honest, while the flow of EU directives is maddening (have you tried buying a mouse killer that actually works lately?), I am frankly a little more concerned about the chances of having my head hacked off by a lunatic next time I pop out to the shops.

Yes, the chances of being a victim of terrorism are always likely to remain low. But why increase the risk by taking sides in the difference of opinion between Sunni and Shi’ite that has been running for centuries and which no one in the West appears even faintly equipped to understand?

Though you might think we would have spotted by now that every attempt to weigh in on the side of the good guys seems to be hampered by severe difficulty in working out who the good guys are, and to end up creating an even worse mess than the one with which we started. Libya springs to mind as an example.

All of which leads to the conclusion that we are in trouble that can only be described as big, and unlikely to get smaller any time soon. Particularly when you consider that in less than a year our national finances could well be in the hands of that prime example of nominative determinism, Ed Balls.

Still, not to worry. It could well be that he is already formulating a foolproof plan to eliminate the deficit by flirting on Twitter with a Nigerian prince who is desperately eager to share the good fortune of his multi-billion dollar inheritance.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.