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.
This line is a keeper, and it is so true of many facets of American politics as well. By the time the cure comes around, it not only doesn't solve the problem, but the problem doesn't even exist anymore.
The "lunatic mainstream" paradigm is there, because they've received lunatic left concepts from their most popular choices in media for most of their lives. They expect the government to take care of everything, including the maintainance of their bizarre, anti-American and anti-Jewish perceptions of what's happening in the world. To them, Panama is administered oppressed by a government of US leaders.
For some phantastic resemblance of sanity, they are fed intermittent doses of the illusion of symbolic monarchy--empire, and believe that the US is not properly administering its empire. They are taught that President Bush is a mildly retarded country bumpkin--a puppet of conspiratorial, corporate shadow dictators in a conspiracy to oppress the perfectly justified "Palestinian" "freedom fighters."
They publicly criticize our President mildly. In smaller circles of their own, behind our backs, they bash us all mercilessly and generally. There are no truth or lies there, and only cruel denizens of the radical right hold to dictionary definitions. To them, fascism is a "state of mind," rather than a form of government where businesses may be privately owned but are contolled, along with speech, by the government.
The UK has a brainwashed populace indoctrinated by fascists/communists, indeed.
...and the Democrat Party. For a moment I thought it was a description of Kerry's campaign platform.
Brilliant article.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it.
Fortunately, if the liberals are stopping their ears, that should slow their response time.
Heh, heh. ..."fantastic," even. ...long day.
The quintessential definition of Socialism.
You can always opt for communism: no taxes, no unemployment, no crime (except against the State)--and no freedom. ;)
Or you can go for our original Constitutional Republic: no taxes (except excise and tarrifs), little unemployment (if you didn't work, you didn't eat), and little crime--and very great individual freedom.
In a piece right after Fortuyn's assassination. Still a good line. Even Orwell and Mark Twain sometimes recycled stuff.
The politicians are getting further and further away from the people. Looks like term limits are going to be the only answer. I know that here, our forefathers never envisioned professional politicians.
If England doesn't feel "at home" in the EU. Rather than be isolated on their little island, they could petition to join the US. At least they'd speak (mostly) the same language.
Right you are, a keeper it is. What happened, I think, was that a political alignment that was used to ruling came to regard rule as its birthright. It is at that point that a political coalition morphed into a would-be ruling class, one that came to assume not only the right to rule its locality, but in company with like-minded political operators, the world. Their resentment of those outside their class is not that of political rivalry, but of upstarts attempting to withdraw a rightful entitlement. This is the stuff of aristocracy. May it find its guillotine.
How far away is this from happening in the United States?
Thanks, bump!
The patricians, the plebeians/productive workers and the blood suckers.
The Republicans are made up of Patricians and Plebeians; The Democrats of Patricians and Blood Suckers.
Our Patrician rulers divide their loyalties between their party and their class. This means no party fully represents my interests.
Both Kerry and Bush are Patricians.
As a mental exercise I developed the following percentages.
Bush is 30% beneficial to me 35% Harmful and 35% indifferent
Kerry is 15% beneficial to me 50% harmful and 35 % indifferent
I will obviously vote for Bush, but I will not deceive myself that the net result is beneficial to me.
placemark
Funny, funny, funny. Gosh, Steyn has a way with words. Sigh.
My favorite, too.
"If England doesn't feel "at home" in the EU. Rather than be isolated on their little island, they could petition to join the US."
- Actually, there was a serious suggestion raised by a small group of influential businessmen and economists about 4 to 6 years ago that, rather than have England join the EU, it should join NAFTA. The suggestion was never considered by the political class in England because, as Stein states, they had already decided that the matter was already settled and not worth debating.
As an aside, I've never been sure exactly when the EU, which I'd always thought of primarily as a sensible economic union, morphed into this monstrous super state that will devour the legal, political, foreign policy and military roles of it's member states. As it now stands it looks like France and Germany have been behind this conversion as they seek to control, through internal power politics, the overall direction of the super state. Their UN challenge of the US on the Iraq issue served as a wake up call as they prematurely tipped their hand as to how they will conduct affairs on the world stage if the EU plans continue on their present course. They see the EU as a global competitor of the US, replacing the old USSR.
Steyn isn't coming right out and saying it, but he is foreshadowing seriously dark developments, and the development of sinister forces. They live in interesting times, those Eurofolk do.
Bump for later ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.