Land of No-Hope Nonsense

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For some reason Britain, or at least that mythological middle-Eng-land at any rate, have had an uncomfortable relationship with Europe.  Edward Heath took us, dragged many, into what was then the EEC and for his troubles not only got sprayed with ink on his return and was duly ejected from office at the first available opportunity.  Thatcher, while perfectly willing to play up to the nationalistic press when it suited, maintained a pragmatic relationship with the rest of the continent which her authority at home permitted, but then quickly descended into Conservative civil war under her successor, John Major.  For Blair it was rarely an issue, but away in the background were the “swivel eyed fruitcakes, looneys and closest racists” congregating under the UKIP banner.

In the summer of 2001 I was walking from the DLR station to my then-office in Docklands.  The sun glittered off the stagnant dock waters and straight into my hangover.  I walked with my head down wondering about the dreadful dreariness of the day to come, when I stepped on some breasts.  I paused and looked again.  To my surprise, underneath my shoe, were a pair of large, naked breasts. 

I looked up.

Fluttering in the morning breeze, clumping, sodden in the corners of the docks and slipping under the heels of commuters were hundreds of loose pages from pornography magazines.  As far as you could see, the flickering, flustering and floating images of boobs, bums, strained smiles and everything in-between.

In those days Richard Desmond’s publishing empire was based on the same block as my office.  It specialised in a range of specialist, cheaply assembled porn magazines: Asian Babes, Mega Boobs, Readers’ Wives.  While those titles were sold in2004, he remains the publisher of the Daily Express and the Daily Star, hardly the best regarded parts of the national press, and has recently contributed £1.3million to UKIP.  This is the sort of person the party attracts.

Five years ago, UKIP’s only significant action was when Nigel Farage, then standing in John Bercow’s, constituency against the convention that the impartial Speaker goes unchallenged, crashed his private plane.  Five years ago the BritishNational Party was the menace from the sidelines.  Abhorrent as the BNP are, and despite Nick Griffin’s sudden widespread media exposure, the threat level turned out to be exaggerated.  Or Griffin was given enough rope to hang himself.  Take your pick: either way, the party managed to finish the 2010 election with less elected representatives than it had started with, widespread condemnation from the Tory voters it had been wooing and dissolved into in-fighting from which it has yet to emerge from.

However, in the past five years racist, xenophobic politics have not gone away.  Indeed, they have swelled.  UKIP have, somehow, managed to go from an anti-EU protest vote given MEP status by the power of proportional representation to a significant political party afforded equal billing in political discourse and with two sitting members in the House of Commons.  If the media have been playing a strategy of assuming the party will combust if given enough airtime, it has spectacularly backfired.

Farage and company will consistently deny that they share any characteristics with the BNP.  They are not, they claim, a racist party, merely one that believes the UK to be “full” and therefore a policy of rigorously controlled immigration is required, only enforceable by an exit from the EU, and that every other aspect of political discussion – from health to housing – follows this.

One could easily disagree.  Okay, so the councillors who admit, on camera, that the “only people”they “have a problem with” is “the negroes” are suspended from duty, but when Farage says he wouldn’t want to live next door to Bulgarians or Romanians it is difficult to feel that nationality isn’t the first step towards differentiation by race.  And the really frustrating thing is the issues they identify, that the seduce voters with, are not caused by immigration.  Their claims are based on half-factors and wilfully misinterpreted data.

Farage claims that there are schools in London where none of the children speak English.  A further investigation of the figures, show that they are referring to schools where a majority don’t speak English as a first language, but they make no claim on their fluency in it as a second language.  Presumably, as Farage is married to a German his own children are bilingual. 

Farage cites extended waiting times or difficultly in securing an appointment with your GP as proof that we are past peak population, ignoring the fact that changes to how GP practices are regulated have meant they can set their own hours, and many now choose to operate shorter working hours than they did in the past.  This coupled with the late nineties/early noughties drive to get medical students onto other specialities, such as anaesthetics, has seen a reduction in the number of qualified GPs coming through the system – an issue already being addressed through an expansion of GP training posts around the country – and you see the issue is not necessarily an increase in patients but a decrease in the number of doctors and the hours in which they are accessible.

It’s hard not to get livid with Farage.  He claims that the left wing media metropolitan mafia elite – and presumably everyone else whose opinion differs from his – live in a fantasy where people of different nationalities hold hands and skip through our perpetually sunny multi-cultural society.  In painting such an absurd picture he suggests the reality is that people are hunkered down, living in fear as invading hordes from a variety of countries and religions burn down merry olde England.  Neither are true, unsurprisingly, but I shouldn’t be surprised that Farage’s extreme views get me so enraged for UKIP is playing the politics of division.

They are correctly identifying some of the problems in society, but not the causes.  Poverty, unemployment, poor standards of public services, disengagement from the political discourse, education and health standards, these are all things that need to be tackled and addressed, but by simplifying the cause to immigration and membership of the EU, UKIP are just looking for someone to blame.  The Nazis did the same thing in the 1930s: making Jews the scapegoats for a range of socio-economic fault-lines which fell out the First World War and crossed the globe.

I hated writing that line.  Comparing UKIP to the Nazis belittles my argument.  I too am making this all simplistic.  And yet it is hard to avoid the similarity in their cultures of blame.

The truth is that we always want someone else to blame.  It’s the easy solution.  It’s not our fault.  If it wasn’t for someone else, we would live in the land of milk and honey.  If they go away then everything will be perfect again.  Not only is that naive, it is self-deluding.

So, instead of having sensible, structured debate around the causes of social deprivation and economic inequality, all the parties have been forced to respond to the finger pointing of UKIP and talk about immigration and Europe.  If the Conservatives are returned to office, their manifesto promises a referendum on EU membership by 2017.   And the debate in the run up to that referendum will not, unfortunately, be about the value of EU membership – the benefits of free travel and a shared market – but the fallacies that curbing immigration will fix a whole raft of problems which aren’t even related to it.

UKIP cites the cost of remaining a member of the EU as a negative without recognising the clear benefits.  EU migrants into the UK are net contributors in taxation and to society.  The majority of migrants not working are students, not benefit claimants.  A diverse, elegant and progressive society can only be a good thing.  We cannot return to the 1950s.  Too much has happened in-between.  In last Thursday’s election debate, Farage claimed that the NHS had become an International Health Service doling out free healthcare to anyone passing by, that health tourism was causing it grind to a halt.  Perhaps its ignorance or perhaps he’s twisting the facts to suit a pre-determined argument, but there is no health tourism in the UK.  NHS services are free at the point of delivery and A&E services will never check your passport on entry, but it only remains free for residents.  If you don’t live here, then there will be bills to follow.  The much quoted figure of £55million per day that it “costs” Britain to be a member of the EU ignores the money coming back, including multi-billion rebates and the mechanism for trade it creates which saw British companies enact 12billion Euros worth of business in September 2012alone.

In Farage’s nightmare of 2015 companies are able to suppress wages by immigrants being prepared to work for less than minimum wage, putting other people – UKIP voters  - out of work.  Again, this is not immigration’s fault.  Paying less than the minimum wage, operating a gang-master type racket, is simply illegal.  That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but we can improve the paypacket of everyone by enforcing the rules that are already in place.

But the point of all this is that immigration and membership of Europe is not really a financial question.  It creates diversity which should be celebrated.  As a tiny island nation which once had the nerve to carve out an empire upon which the sun never set, we should welcome the world, embrace it and learn from it.  Britain, Europe, continents, countries; these are artificial constructs.  Humanity is based on the principle of migration, of freedom of movement.  Even over the comparatively short past two thousand years, the population of this tiny lump of land in a northern ocean has been fluid, mixed and all the better for it.

And yet, some people are clearly persuaded by UKIP.  The constituencies that are most closely contested by UKIP – Clacton, Thurrock, Rochester, South Thanet, Castle Point and Great Grimsby – are areas clearly facing challenges and difficulties in the modern world.  They are parts of the country left behind, left in a different generation, but blaming the rest of the world is not the answer.  

We need immigration.  Our universities are run as businesses and so they require high quality, fee paying foreign students from around the world.  The NHS staff shortages are not because there are queues of British passport holders being denied opportunities to join the workforce, but because the demand is not there.  A diverse and multi-cultural health service reflects the population it serves and so staff – both newly qualified, trainee and experienced – should be taken from wherever they are available.  Like it or not, thirty years of Thatcher and her heirs telling us that a man using a bus in his twenties should consider himself a failure, means that many people are not willing to work on building sites, to serve coffee, to drive buses, to start at the bottom and work up and so the workforce is imported.  Immigration doesn’t cause the problem: it offers a solution.  If it is a solution you’re not happy with, or don’t agree with, fine: what’s your idea?

What irritates me most about Farage is his fag dangling, pint swinging image as a maverick outsider, a real man, not a polished politico.  This facade is ridiculous.  Private school educated, he’s as working class as David Cameron is.  Note earlier in this post that he had a private plane, until he crashed it.  He earned a fortune working as a metals trader in the City, where he was famed for his twelve hour liquid lunches, and has the audacity to say he represents the “working man”.  In his years as an MEP he has claimed the maximum travel allowance (otherwise known as expenses) in each and every year, refusing to submit his claims for voluntary assessment, and yet berates his counter-parts in Westminster as having their snouts in the trough.

Remaining part of the EU is beneficial to us as a country for a whole range of socio-economic factors.  The only things one can miss about the years when there were looser ties was the old inter-railing experience of carrying a wodge of multi-coloured, different currency around and more frequent stops along the borders where smartly capped men would parade the carriage stamping passports.  Bouncing through a few old Warsaw Pact countries for a few days rapidly filled the pages up, giving you the look of a more far flung traveller than you really were. 

The Conservatives are, of course, hardly pro-European themselves.  The party has a notorious number of hardliners determined to raise the drawbridge and bring an idea of self-sufficiency back across the English Channel, having somehow failed to notice that the world has moved on since the 1930s.  This has been charmingly portrayed during this government by the sight of Go Home vans trundling around seaside towns.  Designed – allegedly – to encourage either illegal immigrants or those who have stayed beyond their visa to return home, the small print somehow hasn’t come across as clearly as the more fundamental xenophobic message which might make those here legitimately to feel somewhat unwelcome.

1979.  In the writing of these blogs, so frequently have I come back to the year of my birth and wondered what might have happened if the nation had voted the other way, if the Conservatives hadn’t embraced advertising, if James Callaghan hadn’t responded to a journalist with a pithy “crisis, what crisis?”, if oil and interest rates hadn’t been spiralling out of control.  All those, and many other factors, put her Margaret Thatcher in office and nothing was ever the same.

It’s easy to portray Thatcher as some sort of wicked witch, a demon hell bent of crushing the country (and, occasionally, members of her own cabinet).  We need to remember the dire straits things were under in 1979, the country verging on a general strike, with economic strife beholden.  Yes, the unions needed their powers curbed so that the right to legitimate industrial action wasn’t abused; yes, it was bizarre that the state owned all the pubs in Carlisle.  And there are strong arguments against nationalisation – ones I don’t happen to agree with, but they’re not entirely irrational or filled with malice. 

But, as we have seen with Asquith’s early twentieth century governments, there are ways to introduce reforms and modernisation and Thatcher didn’t use them.  She was a divisive not an inclusive politician.  She pushed through an agenda by creating scapegoats and enemies.  She lined up targets that included the poor, society, the left, gays, the unions and, yes, anyone who wasn’t of a certain sort of Britishness.  In this way, Farage resembled her, even if he lacks her political acumen, ability and intelligence.

People felt betrayed by Blair’s aggressiveness in the Middle East, but they weren’t producing assassination fantasies.   Hilary Mantel has been criticised – and praised – for her short story the Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.  In the eighties such works were not uncommon, from post-punk music to comics, such as Grant Morrison’s and Paul Grist’s StSwithin’s Day, a story about a teenage fantasy of justified murder.   It may have led to questions in the House of Commons and condemnation from the Sun, but the publishers simply used it in the publicity material: her potential murder was a selling point.

This is not how it should be.

And yet, Thatcher remains one of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century.  Her reforms changed Britain fundamentally and, for better or for worse, underpin where we are today.  From the loosening of the regulation of the financial markets, to nationalising electricity, water, gas, oil, trains, the telephone lines and almost everything else bar the Post Office and the NHS (one of those sacred cows was flogged off by the current crop; the other waits in the slaughterhouse); from denouncing society and promoting the notion of the selfish company to beginning the shift to student debt with the reduction of grants and the introduction of loans (followed today by massive fees). 

Aside from the extended existential identity crisis Grant Shappsappears trapped in and the shocking revelations that Ed Miliband had sexualintercourse with an attractive woman before he met his wife, the 2010 political highlight of last week was the BBC debate.  There was an odd feel to this one.  With David Cameron refusing to attend – an action which if he was seeking any other job than Prime Minister would have seen, under the rules he introduced, his job seekers allowance cut for not actively trying to gain employment – and BBC seemingly forgetting to invite Nick Clegg the balance ended up with Farage on, appropriately, the far right of the stage attempting to debate four varying levels of left leaning parties.  The debate ended with Natalie Bennet, Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood enjoying a group hug before shaking Miliband’s hand while Farage stood alone, the little boy who smelt of wee and nobody would play with.

In complete fairness to Farage, with the Tories absent and the centre ground of the Lib Dems not represented this was not a true representation of the country’s political landscape.  However, his attempt to dismiss the audiences’ negative reaction as being because they were specially selected by the left-biased BBC was ridiculous.  The BBC is renowned world-wide as an impartial news source.  You only have to look to the USA (or almost every other country in the world) to see what partisan reporting and political presentation is like.

Here’s the thing, Farage: Possibly the audience was selected, by the independent polling company, to be representative of the parties debating.  Or, it could be that everyone appears rabidly left-wing compared to UKIP.  Or, just maybe, it could be that believing in a fair, equal and just society for all is how most people think.

The country is a very different place to what it was in 1979.  In many ways it is better: a fairer, more tolerant society, but much of that came through thirteen years of Labour government easing a relaxing of attitudes to difference.  Many of the so-called improvements just look shinier on the surface.  People still moan about the trains; power costs are spiralling again only we’re paying for it direct rather than through taxation; infrastructure is creaking at the edges and a cavalier financial sector plays high stakes poker with the whole economy. 

There are many things we can do to improve our country, to improve the society in which we live.  Leaving Europe will not help.  All it will do is leave us isolated, poorer, inward looking and still mourning for a perfect life in a past that never really existed.