The people of Britain have spoken and our political life will now have to be conducted on quite different terms, right? Wrong. Here’s another statement that seems to have passed for a truism over the past week which is equally wrong: large swathes of the populations of Europe have shouted a warning to their governments, and thus shaken the confidence of the whole European Union edifice. And another: national leaders in most of the major EU member states realise that they must respond to the demands of their electorates and reconsider the basic principle of ever-closer union.
When I say that all of these statements are false, I do not mean to detract from the thunderous importance of recent electoral events. I am not one of those delusional commentators who believe (or claim to believe) that nothing much of any significance has happened and that all this excitement is just overblown media froth. On the contrary, my reason for insisting that none of the things that are assumed to be self-evidently true about the post-elections world will actually prove correct, is that the results were too important – so devastating, so cataclysmically mind-altering that they cannot be assimilated. There is no way that the European Union – which is to say, those who run it, think entirely within its conceptual parameters, have their political and personal futures invested in it and can conceive of no reality outside of it – can come to terms with the consequences of these elections.
The facts do not compute. They are incomprehensible. Therefore they must be dismissed as some irrational, contemptible spasm to which the masses are occasionally susceptible and which the enlightened institutions of the EU were specifically designed to over-rule.
Here in Britain, in our own little bastion of denial, party leaders are jamming up behind one another to assure voters that they “get it”: they hear you, they understand your concerns, they are going to address your anxieties, blah-blah. So what does all this lesson-learning and self-abnegation amount to? David Cameron announces firmly that he knows the EU is seen as “too big, too bossy and too interfering”, which makes the whole thing sound like a children’s playground squabble. Is it just me or does the word “bossy” sound just a little bit patronising and trivial – especially given that what we are talking about here is the withdrawal of our right as a democratic polity to have power over own criminal justice system and our national borders?
Ed Miliband insists that he now recognises that people’s concerns about immigration must be taken seriously. I’ll bet he does – especially as so many of the voters with the greatest concerns are likely to have been ex-Labour supporters. But what exactly does this commitment to taking people’s concerns seriously amount to? A change of Labour policy on immigration? An explicit admission that the decision by the last Labour government to permit immediate unlimited migration from the new East European accession countries – when most other member states did not – was a mistake? Not that I’ve heard. Until it translates into some meaningful new policy, this is just pious codswallop. Saying “we hear you” in a soothing voice means nothing. It just buys a bit of time – which is the real object of the game.
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The Conservatives can play at this with the most confidence. So far as they are concerned, they emerged from the bloodbath with barely a scratch. All they need do is murmur a few attentive platitudes, re-affirm their promise of a renegotiation with a supposedly humbled EU, wait for the public hysteria to fade in the face of good economic news, and then face an utterly demoralised Labour party led by (ha, ha, ha) Mr Miliband.
What’s to worry? If they beat Ukip in the Newark by-election – even if their 16,000 majority is drastically cut – they will privately (and possibly even publicly if they are particularly foolish) declare the present emergency officially over. Their most urgent worry, bizarrely, is that the Lib Dems are now dead in the water, which leaves a lot of disenfranchised voters who could become a dangerously unknown quantity at the general election. (We could yet be faced with the nightmare possibility of a tiny rump of Lib Dem MPs still holding the balance in a hung parliament, if the Conservatives cannot manage a working majority.)
Yes indeed, the Tories know how to manage this “crisis”. Sit it out. Hunker down and let it blow over. I promise you that, within weeks, they will be doing and saying exactly what they had been doing and saying before The Earthquake. As will Labour, for a slightly different reason: because it simply does not have the philosophical resources to cope with this shift in reality.
So everybody in mainstream British politics – even Nick Clegg, the dead man walking – will lie low, stay calm, and hope that when summer comes, this will all be forgotten. Because the awful truth is that nobody in politics actually knows how to respond to a spontaneous demonstration of public anger any more. They have become so practised at manipulating, image-projecting and rebranding, that a full-frontal confrontation with raw democratic outrage leaves them stupefied.
But what about the EU itself? Hasn’t it been shaken in its sublime self-regard? Won’t the mass revolts of electorates across its member states force it to reassess its own size, role, power, fundamental precepts, etc, etc, thus making Mr Cameron’s mission to reform it more practicable?
Wrong again. EU institutions are transcendentally oblivious to the democratic will: they were, after all, created precisely to ensure that the serious business of government could never again be taken over by volatile popular movements of dubious provenance. One of the EU Commission’s first acts after the elections was to demand a further £1.76 billion in contributions from member states, in order to subsidise those whose problems are almost entirely attributable to EU economic policy.
The European parliament, supposedly the elected voice of the governed, is so committed to the momentum of the federalist project that even in the wake of those spectacularly anti-EU election results it nominated Jean-Claude Juncker, an arch-federalist, as president of the Commission. Has anybody learnt anything? Presumably if there was to be an honest statement of basic principle engraved over the doors of the Brussels headquarters it would say: “The people are dangerous. Don’t listen to them.”
It has become received wisdom that the reason for that massive electoral rebellion against the EU was that the people were throwing a harmless tantrum: they were just letting off steam because they knew that their votes in this election did not matter.
And what do people do next when they realise that their votes don’t matter?
Re: EU election...
Originally Posted by InsaneApache
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