Ukip
This site, basing itself on the unholy combination of Johann Hari and the Daily Mail has been at the forefront of defending our nation against the loopy UKIP, or as it seems it's now called, EweKip.We will not get the European election results until Sunday, but already the party has picked up some seats in the council or local elections and some forecast the party will get 12 or more seats in the European elections.
Now for a moment forgetting about the personalities (hard as it is) let's concentrate on an aspect of their policy that seems to me remarkable.
In their manifesto they note that they are keen on "freedom". They declare they want "freedom" from the EU, from crime, from overcrowding, from bureacratic politicans and from political correctness (bizarrely the last seems to mean the freedom to graffiti buildings but I digress. They also express much of this longing for "freedom" as a wish to leave the EU, the EU that is 'setting our laws in secret', out to 'destroy' our agriculture, attempting to 'tie up' our businesses in 'red tape'.
This is the remarkable thing. For a party that cries out for "freedom" and "independence" for the UK there is nothing anywhere on their website, or in their manifesto, about Britain's relationship with America. Nothing about the US bases on British soil, Britain's membership of Nato (which obliges it to defend foreign countries), its reliance on the US nuclear deterrent, the admission that we cannot fight a war without America, etc etc. But in EweKip world these issues do not affect our "freedom" and "independence". It reminds me of that time when 'libertarians' were getting all worked up over a suggestion by the Council of Europe that a "right to reply" should be allowed on online media. This was proof, they declared, of an EU-led assault on freedom of speech. That it wasn't an EU body, that it wasn't a law, that it wouldn't have been an assult on freedom of speech was irrelevant. At the same time the US had negotiated an extradition treaty with the UK in which US courts could get a suspect without UK courts approval, but oddly in reverse the opposite didn't apply. And not a word from those defenders of freedom. The conclusion, as with EweKip, is that it's simply Europhobia.
Secondly, there is a wider issue here on why people hate the EU so much. When you speak to EweKip supporters, or Conservatives, or even conservatives, at first they will tell you it's to due with the expense of the European parliament, or the fact they're letting Polish people into the country. But scrath a little deeper (to use a Melanism) and their main complaints about the EU (and let's not deny it -- they don't like it) is essentially that is is destroying an image of 'old England' that they believe in. This is the Roger Scruton approach, where the EU is to blame for the removal of the Archers, imperial measurements, the hedgerows, the villages, the sound of larks in the morning, 'the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy', the squirearchy, the aristocracy, the...well you get the picture.
Now clearly there is some truth in this. The EU, through basically making Britain more a part of an integrated continental economy, has wrought major changes to our way of life. But what they fail to realise is that most of the far-reaching changes in Britain -- add in a more relaxed and permissive social sphere -- have only something to do with the EU, and much more to do with global capitalism and Thatcherism. Labour governments up to Callaghan had basically been a bulwark against this, for want of a better word, 'modernism'. It was Thatcher that destroyed "old England", for better or worse, and regardless of the hopes of EweKip and the Tories, it ain't coming back.
Ps: I also think a lot of it is pure ignorance. Remember David Carr, presumably an intelligent man, who was shocked that Brussles had cafes and bars.
posted by Matthew @ 6/11/2004 08:54:00 AM
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