Shall we take a nostalgic trip back to the distant past of two weeks ago? You’ll remember there were local elections in England, in which the pro-Brexit parties took a pasting, while the anti-Brexit parties surged. You might also recall how the main parties interpreted those results: they hailed them as a heartfelt plea from the voters to get on with Brexit....Up against a spin machine [not a Remainer Guardian journalist who just knows what rhe results meant] capable of hearing a repudiation as an endorsement, voters will need to be louder and clearer this time, closing down the scope for wilful misinterpretation...
Conviction leavers seem to have understood [really? Not just been lied to again?] that brute point, shifting their support from the Conservatives – who are reduced to single figures in the latest YouGov poll – to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, which may well grab first place next week. [How to explain this mysterious possibility?] But how should committed pro-Europeans make their own views known?
Well, Freedland thinks they need a bit of morale-raising first, in the classic form of reminding the voters what and who they are against:
If the last three years have confirmed your fear that Brexit is a disaster in the making, a reactionary project that will damage our economy, narrow the horizons of future generations, shrink Britain’s influence and curb our ability to cooperate on grave and urgent questions that go beyond national boundaries, that it will make life harder, not easier, for those who most desperately need change, that it is an enterprise championed by Farage and the two men he admires most, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – if you believe all that, how best to say it in the polling booth?
So what are the choices?
if you do manage to divine a coherent Labour stance, it’ll be that Labour wants to leave the EU but to close the door nicely, rather than storming out in a huff.... you cannot argue is that Labour is unambiguously opposed to leaving the EU.[But] Each election is about the decision in front of you at that moment – and this week’s decision could not be clearer. It is a European election for a European institution: the question is Europe and Britain’s place in it.
It might be especially puzzling for Celt Remainers:
paradoxical as it might sound, a vote for the nationalist parties is a vote for the body that seeks to transcend national boundaries: the SNP and Plaid Cymru are adamant advocates for continued membership of the EU.
It is a bit paradoxical isn't it? What should we make of it? Farage sees it as an opportunity for Scottish votes:
“You cannot be independent if you’re governed from the European court of justice. You cannot be independent if you’re in the EU’s customs union and single market. You cannot be independent if you’re governed by Monsieur Barnier and Mr Juncker..If you’re genuinely a nationalist lend your vote to the Brexit party, let’s get out of the EU and then have an honest debate about independence.”.
'The latest polling..predicted his Brexit party could win two of the country’s six MEPs.' Freedland needs to move on, having left us with this minor and amusing and only seeming paradox. What of former Graundian squeeze Change UK?
Change UK had high hopes of becoming the party of the remainer hardcore, the million who took to the streets demanding a people’s vote, the six million who signed the petition to revoke Article 50. These European elections should have been its ideal launchpad. But it has been as ham-fisted as the Brexit party has been slick, if only in the basics of political tradecraft, from branding to timing. To hear candidate Rachel Johnson joshing with a Radio 5 Live interviewer last week about her chats with an unnamed “former prime minister” on the tennis court was to conclude that it might as well have changed its name to Metropolitan Liberal Elite and been done with it.
Others?
A big Lib Dem vote would send a deafeningly loud pro-remain message: lest there be any ambiguity, their slogan is “Bollocks to Brexit” [meaning what exactly -- they will revoke? Have a PVCV?]. Indeed, since percentage share will have more political impact than the number of seats won in these elections, remainers might want to see the Lib Dems pile up the largest possible vote tally. YouGov shows the Lib Dems in second place, [way behind] pushing Labour into third: if that were to happen next week, it might tip the internal battle inside Labour in the remainers’ favour....but memories of [something actually positive that they did] the Lib Dems’ enabling role in David Cameron’s austerity coalition lingers.
Happily, there is one more option. The Green party is unequivocally anti-Brexit. Indeed, Caroline Lucas has been one of remain’s most potent voices. A vote for the Greens would both oppose the disaster of leaving the EU and foreground the greatest crisis of our time: the breakdown of our climate. [no possible contradiction or even tension between those two policies?]
Freedland aims for the higher (and more frightening) of the two moral grounds:
Remain’s strength is that it is, despite the name, an argument about the future – specifically about the life chances of the next generation. Losing their rights as EU citizens will narrow those chances, but the heating of the planet could destroy them.
So -- overall?
Shorn of the pressure to choose a government, unshackled from the winner-takes-all unfairness of first-past-the-post, we can, for once, follow our convictions. If you believe that Britain’s destiny [ah yes -- let's believe in destiny -- all we now need is a charismatic leader who will just know the Will of Destiny] is to live and work with our neighbours, rather than to be an outpost of xenophobic Trumpism, a closed island whose national emblem will be the grinning, gurning face of Nigel Farage, then you have several good choices.
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