Tag Archives: EU Referendum

Look, I know it’s tempting to vote Leave just to give David Cameron a bloody nose. You’re all pissed off with deteriorating public services and falling standards of living. But don’t fall for Vote Leave’s lies that it’s all the fault of the EU and migrants. It’s six years of Tory cuts that caused that.

Cameron is probably toast whatever happens now. Only Remain winning by an overwhelming majority will save his premiership, and that’s not going to happen. Voting Leave will only see Cameron replaced by something even worse.

Leaving the EU is at best a desperare gamble, and the Leave campaign have completely failed to articulate their vision of how Britain outside the EU will look. But it will almost certainly leave Britain a less prosperous place, with less opportunity for you and your family. By the time it’s your job that’s lost in the economic downturn, it will be too late.

I’m probably just preaching to the choir here, but it needs to be said.

Good piece by Ian Dunt on the way purity politics has spread from the Toytown worlds of student unions and social media activism to infect the world of real politics, and has a negative impact of the ability to make positive change in the real world

There are two options in politics: stay pure and accomplish nothing, or compromise and affect change. No one ever changed anything on the basis of moral purity. The history of radical change is the history of principled men and women making painful compromises. It’s terribly easy to sit on the sofa and shout righteous indignation at the television. It’s much harder to work on how to expand the audience which might be interested in your campaign, to convert those who might be open to some of your ideas. But as soon as you do that, as soon as you get into the mucky business of debate and compromise and practicality, there will always be people out there calling you a traitor to the cause.

It’s always been like that, but right now it’s worse than ever. Much of the blame must surely rest with the digital echo chambers of social media, the daily self-propaganda machine in which we can surround ourselves with those who already think like us and then shriek with outrage when the it turns out the world does not agree.

It’s making us incapable of nuance or compromise and highly sensitive to the visuals of cooperation, which we take to be a sign of corruption. That’s where the online and student debate is. And mainstream politics is just now learning to profit from it. The SNP and the Tories have proved highly adept at it. And Labour, previously the victim of these efforts, is now gearing up to use the same rhetoric itself. The frenzied tactics of student politics and Twitter shouting matches are increasingly the common currency in Westminster.

The way the falout from the Scottish referendum campaign deeply damaged Labour’s brand north of the border suggests that the electorate is as guilty as the parties. But it would be a tragedy if the parties, especially Labour, were to risk the European referendum to be lost purely for short-term electoral advantage.

The European Union in deeply flawed, and structured in a way that makes it difficult to reform. It has a very bad democratic deficit. It’s handling the Syrian refugee crisis very, very badly. And the implementation of the Euro was an ill-conceived mess that we were right to have kept out of.

But for all its flaws, I’m voting Remain in the referendum in June. Because remaining in Europe is still far better than the alternative. What the EU does will continue to effect the UK whether we’re still in it or not, and we cannot influence or reform something if we’re we’re no longer a member. Love it or loathe it, the EU matters.

At best, voting to leave the European Union is a reckless gamble.

At worst, it’s a decisive move towards a meaner, nastier vision of Britain that will be a worse place to live in for everyone other than the wealthy elites. Look at some of Tory Brexiter Priti Patel’s comments about British workers being the laziest in the world and her demands that the life of the young must be all work and no play so that Britain can compete with the sweatshops of the far east. That’s the vision of the people who want us to leave.

Looking at the faces of the “Out” campaign; it’s like a rogues gallery of the worst people in British politics. Almost all of them are those who believe that the Social Democratic values at the heart of the European project are an anathema. There are a few leftist troglodytes who still believe in a Soviet-style command economy, but the majority are ideologues who have read far too much Ayn Rand, or the out-of-touch nostalgic for the days of Empire.

We’ve got Nigel Farage, about whom more than enough has been said. We’ve got the loathsome and repellent George Galloway. We’ve got new-age conspiracy moonbat David Icke. We’ve got the utterly cynical opportunist Boris Johnson. The bulk of them are the worst half of the Tory party, typified by Iain Duncan-Smith, one of the few people I’m willing to use the word “Evil” to describe. There is a Labour Out campaign, but it’s a motley assortment of has-beens and B-listers; all the big hitters of the party are on the “In” side.

And what about the rest of the world? Paddy Ashdown stated today that all of Britain’s NATO allies want us to remain. Who wants us to leave? French neo-fascist leader Marine Le Pen for one. And Vladimir Putin.

If you vote to leave the EU, those are the people you are siding with.