Nasty and Unpleasant!

We have just experienced a most illuminating week. In the UK, the press is awash with praise for Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party. Many of our European partners followed suit and opted for similarly Eurosceptic candidates to represent them in the much maligned European Parliament in Brussels.

The new European Parliament looks set to be dominated by various coalitions of predominantly Eurosceptic members whose raison d’etre is to cancel their country’s membership of the EU or, at the very least, seek meaningful reform. This is hardly good news for an organisation which is still grappling with the reality that many of it’s members remain on the brink of financial bankruptcy. It would be misleading to leave things there though.

In the UK, over two thirds of eligible voters didn’t bother to vote. So in spite of UKIP gaining nearly 30% of the votes cast, more than 66% of eligible votes weren’t even cast. This is hardly a resounding victory. This is the danger of small voter turn outs and the relative apathy which causes them. They can give an inaccurate account of how things really are. The big danger is that the media feeds off these figures and influences their readerships accordingly. The reality suggests a rather different picture. Successive opinion polls have found that 42% of UK voters want us to leave the European Union and 49% want us to stay. Granted, 9% remain unsure but the overall figures strongly suggest an overall Europhile tendency. It would seem that a large number of Europhiles did not bother to vote last Thursday in spite of their stated preference for our continued European integration. The trick is to convert your opinion in to a vote otherwise the opinion remains worthless.

As in other countries, the UK electorate has never been overly engaged with European elections and so last Thursday’s poor turnout wasn’t really surprising. One trend emerged which did interest me though. Contrary to what I might have expected, support for UKIP was stronger in the North and weaker in the South. Given that the South is closer to Europe and has traditionally embraced closer trading routes with Europe, this is difficult to understand. It may well be though that the numbers of people from abroad who live in large cities like London have expressed their opposition to separatism. That would be entirely understandable. Because of the poor voter turnout, it is difficult to draw any concrete conclusions but it would appear as though those in the North seem the most pro-European.

In recent years, the Gaelic trio of Ulster, Wales and Scotland have all prospered from European funding and all three also continue to fund huge public sectors. These two facts would appear to explain this apparent voting anomaly. Again though, the small numbers who bothered to vote render such assumptions tenuous.

Paradoxically, the Ukrainians have just voted in a pro-European president. Having just experienced months of Russian bullying, the Ukrainians have expressed what the wider world suspected all along. They are desperate to break free from the shackles of Moscow and join what they perceive to be a more democratic European Union. Oh that it was! As with the communist model they seek to escape, democracy is equally conceptual. It would be very hard to make an argument defending EU democracy given the amount of money which has been unnecessarily squandered and the lavish lifestyles of it’s elected representatives. As the Greeks approached the reality of starvation following the financial crash, the Eurocrats were still choosing between caviar and foie gras. When any country falls on desperate times, the doors are thrown open for the extremists. It was ever thus. This was an election in which extremists of all nationalities prospered and it was the majority who didn’t bother to vote who allowed it to happen.

While the European votes were all being counted, a meeting was taking place in the Middle East whose impact could be huge for all of us. During his visit to the Holy Land, Pope Francis invited the leaders of Palestine and Israel to his modest apartment in Rome. Within minutes, they had both accepted. Pope Francis bypassed the political wing of the Vatican in extending this invitation and thus achieved progress. Already, he has done much to restore the value of faith in a world drowning in apathy. While voter apathy in European countries was driving the European Union closer to disintegration, Pope Francis was trying to bring two warring factions together. He is to be congratulated for his efforts and we will all feel a little safer if he is successful. At the very least, he is trying to achieve a positive outcome. If the majority of voters who didn’t bother to vote last Thursday had adopted the attitude of Pope Francis, it is doubtful whether the Eurosceptic parties would now be dominating the make up of the new European Parliament. 

Tony Blair has set new standards in hypocrisy by branding UKIP as "nasty and unpleasant". From a man who did so much to alienate so many people both at home and abroad, these are rich words indeed. Blair will forever be remembered as the man who took us to war in Iraq despite a continued lack of evidence for doing so. To engage in any war is futile as the centenary of the Great War reminds us. To engage in a war principally to support the American thirst for oil is about as nasty and unpleasant as you can get. No amount of blood is worth shedding for such a cynical gain. Blair famously converted to Rome during his leadership. He would do well to learn from the example of Pope Francis; much better to seek peace than war. Perhaps more Labour voters might have come out to vote if their party had given them something to vote for? As it was, Labour was the only mainstream political party with sufficient arrogance to tell the British people that it had no intention of granting them their say in a referendum. It is easy to assume that calls for a referendum equate to a Eurosceptic outlook. Such assumptions miss the point entirely. It is time for a large cohort of people born after 1957 to have their say. Their inclinations are irrelevant to the argument. The argument is simply to allow us to have our say as our Grandparents did in 1975. Failure to do so amounts to political arrogance. At a time when people feel more disconnected with politics than ever before, pursuing such a political path would be suicidal. If UKIP are guilty of anything, they are guilty of tapping in to people's anger at being denied their say for such a long time. Although UKIP will struggle to translate their recent success in to seats at the next General Election, they have achieved something really meaningful. They have reminded the political elite that they remain detached from their electorate at their peril. 

The recent success of UKIP South of the border has been largely due to their open approach. That same approach has been successfully adopted by Alex Salmond North of the border. Neither Farage or Salmond belong to the political elite and yet both find themselves standing on the brink of cataclysmic achievements. I wonder if the Westminster career politicians have been taking note?