Any government that has both Danny Alexander, who spent eight years working for the European Movement, and George Eustice, who ran the anti-euro ‘No’ campaign and stood as a UKIP candidate in 1999, on the same benches, is bound to fracture.
As much as we would love to help that fracture happen, our policy on Europe can never be about adopting postures for partisan purposes.
Triangulation on Europe (the Tories are ludicrously anti-European, the Liberals are wildly euro-phile) didn’t work. The voters didn’t believe we were ‘euro-realist’ and we surrendered the whole argument on Europe to the phobic media. So much so that last week people actually believed the story that Brussels is about to ban the selling of eggs by the dozen. (They’re not, in case you were in doubt.) The best partisan politics on Europe will require us to set out our stall, based on our internationalist and democratic socialist values.
That means supporting European cooperation where it matters. In particular the European Union needs a stronger shared foreign policy if it is to deal with the emerging economies of India and China and the political problems of Russia and Iran. We should not fight shy of arguing for far greater integration in this field. It’s in the British interest to have Poland, Portugal, Italy and Slovenia all arguing the same point and pushing the same policy on Afghanistan, climate change and people-trafficking.
Secondly, with conservative or liberal governments in many European capitals, we have to train an extremely eagle eye on the dangers of Europe-wide recession. We all know we have to live within our means. But every family makes a judicious choice to borrow at times and the danger is that with so many ideological small state slash-and-burners in power Europe’s economy will slump. If it does we (and our socialist colleagues across Europe) must fix the blame fairly and squarely with the Tories and their rightwing European allies for their deliberately excessive cutting crusade.
Thirdly, justice and home affairs. No-one can seriously doubt that Europe-wide cooperation is vital to tackling crime. It’s not just drugs and people-trafficking that have an international element to them. Many other forms of crime cross national borders, including domestic violence, fraud and child abuse. The UK has an opt-in provision on these measures, but every time the coalition decides to opt in or stay out of a Europe-wide measure we should assess whether this is really in Britain’s interests. Again, where ideological scepticism gets in the way of protecting British people we should ram the message home.
There may be early intra-coalition spats. Will the government withdraw from the European Defence Agency, as the Tories promised?
What will they do on the External Action Service when other countries want it to provide consular services?
How will they reconcile Tory promises on the so-called ‘referendum lock’ and ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ with Lib Dem sensitivities?
But the most dangerous territory will be the EU budget. Over the last year as minister for Europe I told my counterparts that we would veto any attempt to increase the EU budget. At a time when European governments are cutting their budgets the EU cannot absorb yet more of the economy. That means cuts to the common agricultural policy budget – and no reduction in the UK rebate. I suspect this will be a tough battle for the government to win against the 26 other member states. And that’s when the Tory backbenchers may finish off the coalition.
#RedWedge
I have three main objections to feminism. 1 The political territory which feminism claims to occupy is already covered by classical liberalism. We already have perfectly good theories about human rights and civil rights and political equality, and we just don’t need another one. Under a liberal reading, women are no different from anybody else: there isn’t really any such thing as ‘women’s rights’, any more than ‘left-handed people’s rights’. 2 The intellectual quality of the analysis offered by feminists is desperately poor. Feminists have appropriated the domain of sexual politics for themselves. ‘We are the authority on this matter’, they claim, ‘if you want to know about sexual politics, come to us, and we will tell you what to think. Your opinions are not welcome’. Not only is this a deeply authoritarian attitude, which should arouse our hostility in itself, but having seized power in this area, they have, from society’s point of view, done a spectacularly poor job. Surely the first task of any such organisation would be to produce an analysis, a model of the task domain. Yet not only is feminism’s analysis of sexual relations pathetically inadequate, it is, even worse, dangerously misleading, dogmatic, self-serving and divisive. 3 They are not fulfilling their responsibilities to society. Surely, the role of any organisation which claims to address problems in sexual politics should be, first and foremost, to act as an honest broker. Feminists should be the UN peacekeepers of the sexual landscape, the impartial police who arbitrate in disputes, who identify potential sources of conflict and pour oil on troubled waters. The primary role of any such organisation should surely be to promote harmony, good relations and communication between the sexes. Yet feminists do precisely the opposite. Far from impartial, they act only in their own narrow interests, they regard men as an enemy to be defeated, they stir up hatred and moral panic at every opportunity. They are not police but vigilantes. Forever married to the outdated Marxist and Psychoanalytic dogmas of the late 1960s, their analysis of issues can never improve. The 1960s counter-culture produced an outlook on life which is deeply anti-social and maladjusted to say the least. The society in which we grew up, the safest, wealthiest, healthiest and most liberal society in history, is regarded as the root of all evil in the world. The whole society in which we live, our own culture, must be completely razed to the ground. Only then can we rebuild a New Jerusalem from the ashes. To say that this is an irrational belief is putting it mildly. Revolutionary politics is misleading and pessimistic, because it teaches us that social reform is impossible. We cannot change anything unless we change everything. Yet that is the political outlook, derived from the most unsavoury role models, Marx, Lenin and Mao, that the hippies of the 1960s adopted. Feminism is the Western world’s last surviving bastion of that totalitarian thinking. Feminists have concentrated their efforts on attacking marriage, the family, heterosexuality and men in general. The fact that they think women’s interests will be served by this indicates just how deeply deluded they are. Coupled with this destructive and irrational hatred of one’s own culture was a peculiar narcissism. Experimentation with ‘alternative lifestyles’ was probably inevitable once a sufficiently wealthy and liberal society appeared. The data is now in, and the results are deeply unedifying. What the 1968 generation – the last surviving remnant of which is the feminist movement – gave us was widespread social collapse. Divorce, fatherlessness, family breakdown, abortion, crime, drug abuse, child neglect, sexually transmitted infections, personal heartbreak, educational failure. Single-parent households living off public funds, leading to an increase in traffic, pollution, housing shortage, taxation and the intrusive power of the State. The feminist movement has served the short-term selfish interests of middle-class white women, but its effects on the wider society have been catastrophic. They are under the delusion that they are trying to save a misguided world from its own folly. The arrogance of this position is stunning. There are several reasons why feminist theory is so intellectually bankrupt. One cause is an inherent left-wing distrust of the establishment. Any theorizing done by the male establishment must be rejected. Thus, science and logic cannot be pursued in any honest way. Aspects of mainstream science and philosophy will be appropriated (and then arbitrarily dropped) if they happen to suit short-term political convenience, but that is all. The second factor is that women are very socially-focused creatures. I know from my own experience that men will discuss science, economics, history and philosophy, but women only ever talk about themselves and other people. They find men’s conversation on these subjects boring and geeky. They concern themselves with the minutiae of personal relationships, almost to the exclusion of all else. This tends to militate against any kind of large-scale theorizing, which the feminist project requires. A second outcome from this preoccupation with social issues is a desire to fit in and be accepted. This tends to mean that women will latch onto any passing fad or trend. Most of the feminists I have known in my life are interested in every kind of mysticism from astrology to reiki to homeopathy. It’s easier and more fun than reading evolutionary psychology. With a lack of intellectual rigour and a desire to be trendy and popular, every kind of nonsense is actively embraced. This tends to make for very poor theory. Post-modernism comes to the rescue by claiming that every theory is just as good as every other, a notion as intellectually bankrupt as it is possible to get. Thirdly, there is the dogmatic moral arrogance of feminism. Anyone who dares to ask questions is pilloried as a misogynist. This is a deliberate tactic used to suppress debate and silence criticism. Naomi Wolf recommends that dissenters should be subjected to female psycho-social violence around the middle-class dinner table. At every social gathering, the unfortunate victim will be subjected to scorn, filthy looks and verbal abuse until they cave in and stop disagreeing with feminists. This is an openly totalitarian mindset. It is the middle-class equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. This behaviour can have real and very severe consequences, including the breakup of relationships and damage to people’s mental health. For some reason, feminists seem to think that they are immune from scrutiny or criticism. Such attitudes simply cannot be accepted in a democracy. Lastly, feminism is a modern-day religion, and its adherents act like any other religious believers. They dare not question the Holy Writ for fear of excommunication. They hold established religious ideas in sacred reverence. Anyone who does not do so is a heretic or an infidel. They create cults of personality around significant past leaders, whose wisdom cannot be questioned. This religious mindset is anathema to free intellectual enquiry, which, again, makes for very poor theory. Once a bad idea has become established, it is very difficult to displace it. Feminists are not fulfilling their responsibilities towards the wider society because they simply do not believe that they have any; they believe only that society has responsibilities towards them. I don’t have to do anything, I’m already perfect. It is a cult mindset which strokes the ego of insecure and dysfunctional women. It is long past the time when this bizarre cult must be openly challenged.
Europe is bigger than China (a little) and rather more than USA. We have the largest reservoir of skilled and educated people in the world .we are the worlds biggest economy. Why then are we so impotent in the world? We are divided by some 28 languages (China has 58 but one commonly understood written language). The only reason I can thinkl of is that we have only just emerged from the Warring States period which I think ended in China 1400 years ago ,their’s ended in unity ours was not quite so sucesfull in that respect. Can we not hope that we will all get our act together? we could be a great force for good if we did succeed. It would be a brave and noble cause to fight for and history would be on our side( but not perhaps at the next election) though even in that timescale the way our government and the others are running back to 1932 there may be a demand for change like there was in 1997. Well you “Got to have a dream” as the song goes