#and Welsh reading is still locked in even 10 years after doing any amount of Welsh regularly

[deareffie]

19 April 2017

Dear Effie,

After every BBC politics news alert these days:

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, political party in-fighting. Thrilling stuff, eh? So UKIP are born, and nothing really happens with that for a while. In fact, there were a bunch of small parties that sprung up in the early 1990s to contest elections on the basis of opposition to (at least some element of) the EU, and UKIP was probably the least successful.

Meanwhile, the Conservative party get beaten by the Labour party at the 1997 general election, so Tony Blair become Prime Minister, big Donald Dewar gets his Scottish Parliament, and we finally get a national minimum wage. That’s right, more than 100 years after New Zealand introduced minimum wage legislation, right up until you were about 18 months old, the UK still had no minimum wage. Don’t believe anyone who speaks fondly of the good old days.

And then there was also Iraq. But we’ll get into that another time.

Anyway, ‘New Labour’ arrives (so called as this government said they weren’t *really* socialists, not like the crazy Russians, they just thought that capitalism needing reigning in sometimes, and that businesses were usually a good thing because jobs, and if someone’s making loads of money, that’s fine because then they have to spend it and that means other people get some too. Or something.) and the Conservatives do what every political party does when it loses an election - it takes a good look at itself, does some soul searching and tries to find someone to blame. 

Of course, like every other time a political party does this (ahem, Scottish Labour, ahem), they don’t seem to realise that ‘talk amongst yourselves’ is an instruction that a teacher gives a room of students while they’re fannying about fixing a projector, not a viable election strategy. 

Political parties’ obsession with introspection and navel gazing is one of the reasons ‘ordinary people’ (vomit) hate them. To any unaffiliated voter, it seems blindingly obvious that the main reasons political parties lose elections are either a) lack of money/media pals, or c) being horrendously out of touch. You don’t become more in touch with voters by locking yourself in a cupboard, having a leadership crisis and accusing each other of factionalism. 

Like, I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve taken a long hard look at myself in the mirror, I just become convinced that I should really start taking better care of my skin and that maybe it’s time for a haircut. If I talked to other people instead, maybe I’d find out that no one else really cares about my skin or my hair and most folk are actually much more concerned about employment, education, health and welfare. Maybe. Who can possibly say. 

(And breathe) 

So the Conservative Party is banished to the opposition benches at Westminster for 13 years, and doesn’t even make it as far as the opposition benches in the new shiny Holyrood for almost 20 years. We’ll definitely come back to Holyrood and devolution and all that another time, but I’m trying(ish) to get through Brexit first (aren’t we all, eh?).

Between 1997 and 2004, a bunch of semi-important people die, a bunch of other people are born, and somehow, as the Conservative Party tries to work out how they’ve suddenly become irrelevant, UKIP fail at making any inroads at general elections, but get three MEPs elected in the European Parliamentary elections of 1999, and start making headlines. Partly because they’ve attracted semi-famous, old people celebrity, talk show host and former Labour MP, Robert Kilroy-Silk. He joined UKIP in 2004, about the same time he got his show cancelled by the Beeb for writing a controversial article headlined “We owe Arabs nothing”. Weirdly, Joan Collins also got in on this action for a bit. 

Hanging out with UKIP, that is. Not writing inflammatory articles generalising varied and diverse peoples. As far as I know. 

However, as Kilroy-Silk resigned from UKIP, formed his own party, and then resigned from that in the space of the next 15 months, the more important thing to note about UKIP in 2004 is that they beat the Conservative party in an election for the first time (hilariously, an election caused by someone resigning as an MP to go and work in the EU). 

“Ah-hah!”, thought some members of the Conservative party. It was UKIP’s fault that they had lost the 1997 and 2001 elections! Of course! 

And when people still didn’t elect a Conservative government in 2005, even though Iraq, and even though Gordon Brown, it must be because those baddies over at UKIP were stealing traditional Conservative votes, right?! 

A few more years pass. Nigel Farage becomes leader of UKIP. He gets a disproportionate amount of airtime on the BBC despite the party (initially) not having any MPs. What he does have are opinions. Loads of them. And the reason he got on the Beeb so much is because they have a legal duty to provide 'balanced' coverage of issues. 

Presenting two sides of every story sometimes means that the BBC is actually not very representative of UK majority opinion. Or sometimes it has to look quite hard to find someone who’ll present what is a minority view. For example, take “equal marriage”. A majority of people in the UK agree with the statement “Gay or lesbian couples should have the right to marry one another if they want to” (and have done since 2012). However, the way the BBC fulfill their “balance” duty means that if they want to discuss gay marriage on a news, current affairs or comment show, they need to find someone who disagrees with that statement.

Enter one Nigel Paul Farage. This BBC “balance” throws up a diverse cast of characters, but most of them fade into obscurity again relatively quickly, or they have limited interest in party politics. Farage however, is relatively articulate, not afraid of saying controversial things (often for the sake of it, as far as I can tell) and available for all your Question Time booking needs. Viewing levels spike, because we’re all complicit in this mess, and suddenly Farage and UKIP have a way bigger platform than expected, and a heap of cash from some grumpy former Tories. 

So, the new version of the Maastricht Rebels in the Conservative Party start rumbling that maybe they’ll join UKIP if the Conservatives don’t start listening to them about the big bad EU, and that maybe the Conservatives will keep losing votes to UKIP.

Meanwhile, David Cameron’s all “I’m a cool young guy, stop crushing my big society vibes with all your crotchety old man shouting. Nobody cares about the EU apart from crazy Scottish fisherman and Welsh farmers!”

Turns out he was wrong and Davey’s vibes continued to be crushed until he agreed to include a cheeky wee manifesto pledge for the Conservative Party’s next general election manifesto in 2010. 

A referendum on EU membership. A surefire vote winner, that will be easily won by the majority of the Conservative party who want to stay as members of the EU because it’s where all the holidays and champagne comes from.

The Lib Dems put it off for five years but are ultimately ineffective. 

MASSIVE EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT A REALLY KEY EVENT AND TOTALLY LIED ABOUT THE 2010 CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT SORRY. I realised on reading this back that I had missed a couple things. 

The 2010 manifesto pledge was actually to “amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that any proposed future Treaty that transferred areas of power, or competences, would be subject to a referendum – a ‘referendum lock’”. My bad, sorry Dave.

And in fact, the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto did include a commitment to an in/out referendum on the EU, but only if a British government signs up for “fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU”, including joining the Euro.   

But the really rather big thing that I missed, that just sort of passed me by because of all the excitement of #indyref1 in Scotland at the time was the 2014 European elections. In 2014, UKIP won the European elections in the UK, with 24 seats to Labour’s 20 and the Conservatives’ 19. Last time (in 2009), the Conservatives won as many as the other two put together (26 v 13 and 13).

Know how I’m always going about how Scotland isn’t the cool, internationalist socially-liberal, economically left-wing paradise it kids on it is? Well, in the first example of many, even the Glorious People’s Republic of Haggisland elected a UKIP MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in 2014: the baffling David Coburn (see previous and below caveat re: legit reasons for not being keen on the EU that may have prompted folk for vote for him), alongside two Labour MEPs, two SNP MEPs, and one Conservative MEP. 

It’s worth noting that Labour gained seats in this election. Under David Miliband, Labour increased their percentage of votes by almost as much as UKIP (around 10%) and they also won the most number of votes in the English local authority elections held the same day. Although only about a third of the people eligible to vote actually voted, and a lot of people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 had pretty much abandoned the party by this point, it’s a nice wee stat to keep on hand when anyone says that Labour has to do more to appeal to UKIP voters.

Anyway, that 2014 European election, although overshadowed up here by all the flag waving, seemed to be the final straw for the Conservative Party. This led to the 2015 manifesto commitment (I checked this time) for “the British people – not politicians – to have their say... over whether we should stay in or leave the EU, with an in-out referendum by the end of 2017″.

And so, in June 2016, the entire UK is asked to vote on remaining or leaving the EU basically because the Tories were having a tiff with themselves. A tiny number of very loud, very entitled people managed to be annoying enough that we literally had a referendum to try and get them to shut up.

Now, we talked before about how there are some totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reasons for opposing the EU. A really good example of this is in Scotland, where the fishing industry has had a long standing scepticism about the EU. It’s based on criticism of a EU rule called the Common Fisheries Policy that decides who can fish what kind of fish (and how much fish), and where. The EU policy is meant to protect the sustainability of fishing for the future (i.e. stopping someone accidentally catching all the fish, and there being none left), ensure all EU countries share their fish/fishing waters (e.g. Spain can’t stop Portgual fishing off its coasts), and ensure that fishing is carried out in a relatively environmentally friendly way (i.e. don’t throw loads of dead fish or gross chemicals back in the sea). However, the Scottish fishing industry says that in practice, the policy means that Scotland does not get a fair share of its own fishing waters, and that they love the environment as much as the next guy but that following the rules is cripplingly expensive. This means that people lose their jobs, or put up with terrible working conditions to make up for the policy costs, and/or that the price of a fish supper goes way up. See? Totes legit, not racist. Essentially about jobs and fish suppers.

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

Another totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reason for opposing the EU is that some of the trade deals the EU negotiates look like they might damage workers rights in the EU. Criticism of an agreement called TTIP ( which stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, not just me spelling T in the Park wrong) between the US and the EU suggests it’ll mean that companies will be able to sue governments if their health and safety or environmental rules are seen to affect that company’s profit. Leaving the EU could be a way to ensure companies don’t have that power, and have to respect things like national minimum wage and trade union membership.See? Again, totes legit, not racist. 

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

The Government held this referendum to stitch together its Frankenstein’s monster of a party for a bit longer. The driving force behind all the decisions leading to this referendum was internal party politics. Whatever the fallout is (and we still don’t know because they literally didn’t even consider the possibility it might happen so didn’t draft any plan), it’s being imposed on 64 million people as a result of the Conservative Party playing chicken. With itself. Except we’re the ones who somehow get run over. And that’s partly why Brexit makes me grumpy. 

I swear I’ll try and get onto Scottish independence at some point. 

Big love, 

x

P.S. If I seem to meander a bit when I’m meant to be talking about Scottish independence, I’m sorry… 

Except mine are all about politics. I do want to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles though. I feel that’d be one initiative that could muster cross-party support.