Posted on 06/14/2004 4:06:57 PM PDT by Pokey78
Well, they may be Little Englanders, but they're getting bigger, and the big parties are getting littler. In Sunday's results, the only two governing parties most Britons have ever known couldn't muster 50 per cent of the vote between them.
In a functioning party system, you're never going to agree with your party on everything. You might, for example, be opposed to wind farms or in favour of toppling Robert Mugabe. But, even if you are, it's unlikely to be the big political priority in your life. So you vote on the economy and Iraq and healthcare, and accept there'll be a few disagreements by the time we get to page 73 of the manifesto. That's why parties like to talk about themselves as "big tents".
But, as Peter Oborne pointed out in last week's Spectator, poll after poll shows that up to half the British electorate wants out of the EU - i.e., their disaffection goes a little deeper than mixed feelings about insufficient subsidiarity in sub-clause XXIV(b) of the new constitution. This isn't a peripheral issue, but the central question facing Britain today - and the views of 50 per cent of the voters are not reflected in the country's big three parties.
By "big three", incidentally, I'm referring to last week's rankings: when Charles Kennedy says that next year's election will be all about "three-party politics", he's overlooking the fact that in England and Wales on Sunday he didn't win, place or show. On Europe, the three parties failed to notice their big tents are half-empty and there are tons of folks milling around outside with nowhere to go. That's when UKIP pitched up.
In the East Midlands, UKIP was in a statistical dead heat for first place. The "lunatic fringe" - UKIP, BNP, Greens, Respect, etc - won 40 per cent of the vote. And the so-called looniest of the lunatics, UKIP and BNP, pulled 32.6 per cent. Between them, Labour and the Lib Dems got 33.9 per cent. What, other than the blinkers of the media-political Westminster village, makes 32.6 per cent the fringe and 33.9 per cent the mainstream?
Indeed, the real problem in Britain would seem to be a lunatic mainstream, set on a course of profound change for which there is no popular mandate whatsoever. In that sense, what happened last week was not a Little Englander spasm but, alas, quintessentially European.
In the late 20th century sur le Continent, politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beneath discussion, beyond the bounds of polite society. In Austria, year in, year out, whether you voted for the centre-Left party or the centre-Right party, you wound up with the same centre-Left/centre-Right coalition presiding over what was in effect a two-party one-party state. Then Jörg Haider came along.
In France in 2002, the presidential election was supposed to be between Jacques Chirac, the Left of Right of Left of centre candidate, and Lionel Jospin, the Right of Left of Right of Left of centre candidate. Chospin and Jirac ran on identical platforms, both fully committed to high taxes, high unemployment and high crime. Faced with a choice between Eurodee and Eurodum, the French electorate decided they fancied a real choice and stuck Jean-Marie Le Pen in there. Same in Holland until Pim Fortuyn got gunned down by a crazed vegetarian, the first fruitarian to kill a fruit Aryan.
In much of western Europe, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of an insular elite, with predictable consequences: if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones. If Britain's historically more responsive politics is now on this characteristically Continental track, well, happy the land whose foaming demagogues are as benign as Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins. For the moment.
Yet already Britain's lunatic mainstream is lapsing back into its customary condescension on this issue. If your views on Europe don't fall between the broad parameters from, oh, Neil Kinnock to Chris Patten, you must be barking mad and we need pay you no further heed. The political class has refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. Are you still here?
This is unworthy of a democracy, and more to the point deeply unhealthy. One reason why the Eutopian dream has fizzled across the Continent is because the entire political class took it for granted no right-thinking person could possibly disagree with them, so they never felt they had to bother arguing the case and, now they have to, they can't remember what the arguments were. Those who subscribe to inevitablist theories of historical progress often make that mistake: the lazy Aussie republicans did in 1999, for example.
Almost every Europhile argument is weaker now than it was a quarter-century ago, when the EU - or whatever it was called back then - had a stronger economy, healthier demographics, and the devastating implications of the Continent's social costs were not yet plain. Yet pro-Europeans remain wedded to their ancient arguments: for a good decade and a half Edward Heath in his tetchier moments has airily waved the interviewer's question aside and said all these things were decided in the 1970s and we need to get on with it. Otherwise, Britain will be "isolated in the world" and unable to survive unless it allows its relatively buoyant economy to be yoked in perpetuity to the FrancoGerman statist gerontocracy.
That's why Labour's decline to its pre-Great War vote share is as telling as the hit the Tories took. Neither of Britain's two main parties reflects the real division on the critical issue of the day. In a less diseased political culture, we'd have one party that argues honestly for a highly centralised European superstate - that's the only one on offer - and one party that wants to keep a flat in Spain, sell Scotch eggs and saveloys to supermarkets in Slovenia, saunter along the beach at St Tropez flaunting its wedding tackle to adoring frauleins, and doesn't see why any of these economic and cultural ties require a European public prosecutor or foreign minister.
But the respectable parties aren't honest on this subject, and so a frustrated electorate has loosed strange new forces upon the land. Thus the paradox: in its rejection of Europe, the British electorate was never so European.
Same in Holland until Pim Fortuyn got gunned down by a crazed vegetarian, the first fruitarian to kill a fruit Aryan.would never have appeared in his version.
ROFLOL
So9
Most Britons don't want to be part of a super-Eurasian state. They want to be governed from London from a Parliament they elected to represent them, not grandees from a distant Brussels.
Actually, I believe that Steyn is recycling that line, as I'm positive I've heard him use it before.
Simple.
The quintessential definition of Socialism.
Man you can't beat Steyn with a stick!
Eurocrazi bump.
But do as you please.
Normally, I'd chide Mark for using the same line in more than one article, but considering it is by far the most clever line ever written, I'm inclined to give him a pass.
What's so maddening is that he only cuts off 2 paragraphs, so you happily read along until you scroll a little bit, and there you have to click over. I would much rather have the first two graphs posted.
Steyn actually recycles a lot. Some of his best columns are in the Telegraph, National Post and Sun-Times, with a slight variation to account for regionalities.
Between the Eutopian dreams in Eurabia full of Eurinals led by Eurodee and Eurodum, the humor says the EU loses if it ever comes before the people. The question becomes whether the elites ever allow it to come to a vote.
I wasn't very amused by the Pim Fortuyn reference... Steyn usually has more class than that. But the rest is spot on insightful as usual.
Immigration is a comparable issue in the US. Neither party wants to talk about it. Most of the public does.
I think we need to have an intervention regarding quidnunc and Mark Steyn. Call everyone in on a special thread and plead with him to leave Steyn alone!
Steyn BTTT
'We are a nation that has a government - not the other way around." Of all the marvellous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that's my favourite.
The best posts are when anyone posts one sentence and then excerpts. And, there are a lot of posts done like that from sources that need no excerpting.
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