Note by Sean Gabb I agree with Richard that, after so many years of carping and agitating, the anti-EU movement should at least have an agreed scheme of exit. However, a bigger reason for the gathering collapse of anti-EU sentiment – and for my own partial defection from the movement – is the suspicion that an independent Britain would be worse than a province of any Eurostate.
Our ruling class wants a moralistic police state at home and a neoconservative war policy abroad. I agree that the Euro is a doomed experiment, that every economic initiative coming out of Brussels seems calculated to prevent markets from clearing, that all the European institutions are parasitic jokes. But we can live with these things. Do you really want our ruling class in charge of a sovereign British State? I’m not convinced by the argument that we need to get out of the EU before we can sort out the present rabble in Westminster. While they remain in charge, I sleep easier in the knowledge that they have to share power with Brussels. SIG
EU referendum: a prelude to defeat
Picking up on my piece from last night, we find Steven Tindale, an Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform, exulting in the fact that the “anti-EU side” does not have an agreed alternative plan to the EU, which he finds “encouraging”.
That the opposition can so easily make this comment says a great deal about our so-called movement. After all these years, it is not only the leading eurosceptic party that has failed to come up with a coherent “plan”. It is the movement as a whole – discordant, disjointed, fractious and antagonistic.
It can be no coincidence, therefore, that YouGov is now reporting that, from its routine EU referendum poll, 45 percent would vote to remain in the EU and only 35 percent would vote to leave. This is YouGov’s largest “in” lead since its records began in September 2010 (see graphic below).
There is, by contrast, the recent Opinium Poll which gave us 44 percent ion favour of leaving and 41 percent who want to stay in – a slender margin at best, but one which uses different methodology and cannot give comparable results.
YouGov’s data are comparable over time, and find support for EU membership at an all-time high of 45 percent, up from 42 percent last month, presenting a sombre picture for those amongst us who have ambitions of fighting and winning a referendum.
For Ukip, the polls present a similarly gloomy picture (for party supporters), at 13 percent on a downwards trend that has yet to reach bottom. And perhaps even more telling is the poll on the future of Ukip. In October last year, fresh after Douglas Carswell’s victory in Clacton, the polling company measured the public mood about Ukip’s future as a force in British politics – if it would fade away, or remain an important feature for at least the next ten years.
At that time, the public fell on the side of longevity, by 49-35 percent but, in the months since, that position has reversed, and by a wider margin. Currently, the majority (53 percent) think the party will fade. Only 30 percent think it will endure. And more than twice as many Ukip voters (12 percent) express doubts about their party’s future than in October (5 percent).
This is hardly surprising. As Autonomous Mindpoints out – and despite the denials – the “big fish” in the stagnant Ukip pond are shaping up for a battle for the heart and soul of what remains of the party after it’s electoral defeat.
Given that the Conservative Party then manages to form a government, our ragged, uncoordinated, leaderless troops will then be facing a battle for the a greater prize, the end of our membership of the European Union.
Here, YouGov illustrates the odds against us. Imagine the British government under David Cameron has renegotiated our relationship with Europe, it says, and says that Britain’s interests were now protected. Against his recommendation that Britain remain a member of the European Union on the new terms, respondents are asked how they would vote.
In this instance, the 45 percent who would vote to stay in the Union climbs to 57 percent and those who want to leave drop to a mere 21 percent.
Given that Mr Cameron – the man who “vetoed” an EU treaty – is quite capable of bringing back a real treaty from Brussels, with a renegotiation “package” sufficient to garner support from a gullible media, we will have been comprehensively outflanked and risk almost certain defeat.
Collectively, we have the better case, and the means to win the fight, but as time passes that looks less and less likely. Within the eurosceptic “movement” there is no will to win – that burning commitment to victory that is required for us to prevail.
The trouble is that, in order to reach rock bottom, and thence to develop that “killer” instinct that will eventually see us prevail, I think we must fight the battle – even if it means losing. But it must be a heroic failure, the lessons from which will lead us to understand what it takes to be successful.
The tragedy is, though, we do not have to lose – and even now our defeat is not certain until the final results have been declared. But for those who have led us to this pass, those who have put personal ambitions before the needs of the campaign, there will have to be a reckoning. They will have cost us dear.
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What is on offer is emphatically not a ‘referendum’. A referendum exists as of right, either triggered by prospective constitutional changes as in Ireland or Denmark, or by petition as in Switzerland and California. We have no right of referendum in the UK. On the other hand, a plebiscite is a ballot which takes place when our elders and betters think that they can gerrymander a result to their liking. Can we start calling this animal by its right name?
Sean Gabb is correct in saying that the prospects for such a plebiscite are gloomy in the extreme. The ‘Eurosceptic movement’ are lemmings.
1) The polling lead for a pull-out is fragile, where is exists at all … nothing like the lead in the run-up to the 1975 plebiscite, and we know what happened to that.
2) It is extremely unlikely that any poll lead would survive the inevitable Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) deluge which would ensure. We had a taste of this in the Channel 4 programme on a UKIP government the other evening. Although a crude and obvious piece of europropaganda, I thought it effective. I was struck by the storyline of an Airbus pull-out. I would not be surprised to learn that plans for major pull-outs of European companies (doubtless there wd be generous grants to relocate!!!!) … another high profile candidate would be the BMW plant at Oxford … were already well laid.
3) Such a plebiscite is most unlikely to succeed whilst a pro EU government remains in office in Westminster. That would only facilitate the FUD deluge. We would be inundated with ‘public information’, the multimillion costs of which would be taken outside campaign spending limits.
4) Even if we voted the ‘wrong way’, we would have to vote again! This situation would be engineered out of a supposed need to ‘approve’ the detailed terms of the exit. Such negotiations would be drawn out deliberately during which the FUD deluge would turn into an avalanche.
5) The ‘Out’ campaign would, like 1975, be a fragmented miscellany of unknowns, has beens and showmen, with few big hitters, easily traduced by the media as eccentric Neanderthals.
An alternative strategy would be rebellion from within the EU, a situation it has not confronted since deGaulle’s empty chairs in the 1960’s. Like any Papacy, secular or otherwise, the EU has a very limited tolerance for heresy of any kind. But, again, that would require a Eurosceptic government at Westminster, and some very firm leadership. Any candidates?
The European Union is an extra layer of government – and government in the United Kingdom is already vast without an extra layer.
We do not need the vast web of regulations from the E.U. – so there is no need for a detailed plan to cope with the sky falling in if those regulations were removed (as the sky would not fall in).
Nor would it be in the interests of E.U. member states to keep out British goods because, to put it crudely but accurately, “they sell us more than we sell them”.
And we are all members of the World Trade Organisation anyway.
All this stuff about we can not leave the E.U. without jumping through a flaming hoop whilst whistling Land of Hope and Glory, is nonsense – in fact it is nonsense on stilts, and thus plays into the hands of the E.U. people.
We could leave the E.U. right now (today) if Parliament passed the Act and the Queen signed it – job done.
We can win a referendum – but only if we do not play into the hands of the E.U. by long complicated “we should do this, and we should do that…… and was it all done up in the right colour tape….”.
I suspect that the agenda of people who insist on endless “detailed plans” is to STAY IN THE E.U.
After all “E.U. specialists” (even if they claim to be against the E.U.) would be out of a job if we actually left.
Short version – stop obsessing about the trees and see the forest.
I would vote to leave – as I don’t think we’ll get another chance at a referendum – and I think staying in in the hope that the Brussels technocracy limits our own ruling class amounts to an assumption that libertarians (small c-conservatives) will get nowhere politically in the UK for the foreseeable future.
Now, I think the underlying assumption that I detect behind Dr Gabb’s view may be correct – that the time is far from ripe for a political movement to restore things in the UK, and that the traditionalist opposition will go nowhere for decades hence – and so maybe he is right to see a reason to stay in the EU. Put it this way: the EU is likely to collapse before we get a proper hearing for our views in the UK.
The debate needs to include relations with the US. Every now and then the US does something that makes me realise how anti-British they are. For example, their support for Argentina over the Falklands. Their claimed right to be able to shut down any country financially is also problematic, and maybe the UK is better off in the EU, which can stand up to the US, or almost do so.
I could probably reconcile myself to an associate membership that was mainly about trade, and it has occasionally been implied the UK might try to go for this. However, I doubt this is what Cameron is really planning. He will only go for an associate membership if he is forced to by Eurosceptics. I think whatever happens, the membership fee of £10bn a year will be a Brussels redline. A renegotiation that gave significant powers back would depend on our willingness to carry on paying the membership fee.
I too am starting to agree with Sean that the EU is “a” problem, but not actually “_the_” problem.
We have periodic discussions about this matter, and indeed Sean came close to an hypothesis addressing what “the” real strategic problem inside the UK currently is, the other week, when we convened in the North West here. We were not specifically discussing the EU in that tranche of thoughts, but it was relevant.
I think, in our pleasantly wine-fuelled-haze, that I perceived that part of his thesis rested on the suggestion that the White-Ethnic-British PoliticalEnemyClass is using the EU as an excuse to execute universally-unpopular measures, bringing about what is coalescing into the idea of a sort of “little internal empire”. These are measures not all absolutely demanded by Brussels “directives” or “regulations” by any stretch of the imagination; and things for which the WEB-PEC (see above) then thinks it can’t be fingered or blamed by the media (mostly sympathetic anyway as the WEB-PEC-teat-suckers that they inevitably are)….but which are all measures that it, the WEB-PEC positively and orgasmically-blowjobly-salivates to execute, for its own wicked and hidden reasons, onto the British People, which it despises and likes to insult, bully and belittle.
But It’s fair that I will let Sean tell you his thoughts on this, which are currently _inchoate_ (good word that, I had almost forgotten it existed after first seeing it in Pierre Clostermann’s historical diary novel “The Big Show” almost 50 years ago.) In time, hopefully soon, he will reveal an hypothesis about what “the” problem for us in Britain, and particularly England, is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Clostermann
http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Show-Greatest-Paperbacks/dp/0304366242
Oh, and The Big Show is an effing good book. In parts it made me cry, even as a reflective teenager. But it is very uplifting in a strange way. Clostermann is a much better writer about air combat than poor old Douglas Bader or Richard Hillary; he is less theatrical in his style, but allows sudden emotional flashes of triumph and pathos to get through, all unannounced. You can’t know, in reading him, what’s going to happen next: you feel you are in the plane with him.