Dagger to the Heart
Matthew Parris can't hide his admiration for Tony Blair 'telling it as it is' in relation to the UK's membership of the European Union (EU) and the irony is that those who have long supported major reforms of the EU and its various institutions may now get their chance, as politicians finally respond to voter disenchantment which was expressed loudly and clearly in the recent Euro elections.
But unlike so many of Blair critics at least Matthew Parris had the good grace to listen to the message instead of shooting the messenger, which is a good sign.
By Matthew Parris - The Times
My Week
Pity me. The horror! The self-loathing! I was lying in bed yesterday morning, awoken by my clock-radio. Tony Blair was being interviewed. I snuggled under my duvet, anticipating the wicked pleasure of five minutes of snarling at everything the dastardly former prime minister and arch villain in my personal political constellation, said. That oh-so-reasonable voice, false logic, infernal plausibility . . . grrr.
But — oh no! — what was this? Blair was saying things I agreed with. Brave things. About the need not to be cowed by Ukip. He was clear, he was persuasive, he was . . . argh . . . right. And I wanted to cheer. And admiration twisted like a dagger in my heart. How could I feel this? How could Blair ever be right?
All day I’ve been in a daze, my world rocked to its foundations. I’ve been living only to see the destruction of Blair’s legacy. It’s all that’s been keeping me going. Please, Tony, don’t take that away from me! This is worse than losing my faith. I may need counselling.
Labour and UKIP (28 May 2014)
Former Labour leader Tony Blair has stepped into the Euro elections post mortem by urging his party to 'stand firm' in the face of UKIP's runaway success in topping the poll in England and Wales.
Now I agree with much of what Tony Blair says in relation to Europe - the big issues are about peace, economic prosperity and a culture of resolving political differences without resorting to violence or going to war.
The UKIP 'solution' of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a serious response to the overdue demands for reforming the European Union (EU) and a rebalancing of powers between EU institutions and its member states.
But there are two issues where I think that Tony Blair's analysis falls short - the first is that for many years the political establishment has denied UK voters a say over Europe and the absence of a public plebiscite has built up huge resentment which can now only be resolved by a decisive In/Out referendum.
Secondly, there is a widespread public perception that immigration has been allowed to spiral out of control in parts of England and that there is a real integration problem in specific areas, which is the responsibility of Labour and Tory governments going all the way back to the 1970s.
So while I'm all in favour of standing up to UKIP and exposing the fact that withdrawing from Europe isn't a miracle cure to any of the country's problems, I imagine this will be a whole lot more convincing if both Labour and the Tories at least accepted that they have taken people for granted up until now.
Tony Blair urges Labour to take on Ukip over immigration and EU
Former leader says Ed Miliband will not gain anything if he tries to follow 'nasty and unpleasant' party led by Nigel Farage
By Patrick Wintour - The Guardian
Tony Blair says an anti-immigration platform would confuse Labour supporters. Photograph: Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Tony Blair has urged the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, and the rest of the mainstream political class to take on and confront Ukip, saying it would only confuse Labour's own supporters if it now ran on an anti-immigration platform.
He also urged Miliband to stay put on the issue of an in/out EU referendum, saying that yielding to the pressure of Ukip had not done the Conservative party any good to date.
Behind the Ukip facade was something pretty nasty and unpleasant, Blair told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The former Labour leader said: "For the Labour party, if it tries to follow Ukip either on its anti-European platform or, even worse frankly, on its anti-immigrant platform, all that will happen is that it will confuse its own supporters and will not draw any greater support."
Miliband has repeatedly apologised for Labour's lenient approach to immigration in the past, saying it had not understood enough about the downsides of globalisation for working-class communities.
But Blair said: "I would very strongly support the position we took both on immigration and Europe. I fought the 2005 election on a campaign against immigration from the then Conservative leader. I have always said, of course you have got to have proper controls on immigration, you to have to deal with those parts of the immigrant community that are rejecting the idea of integrating into the mainstream, but to allow that then to trend into anti-immigrant feeling is a huge mistake for the country."
He added: "People in Ukip always say other the politicians don't get it; I do get it and I get them. You look a little bit beneath that Ukip facade and you see something, in my view, pretty nasty and unpleasant".
With some in Labour urging the party to respond to the Ukip rise with a tougher anti-immigration stance or a commitment to an in/out referendum, Blair said: "The way to deal with Ukip is to stand up to them and take them on. What they are putting before people is a set of solutions that anybody who analyses where Britain has to be in the 21st century knows their solutions are regressive, reactionary and make Britain's problems worse, not better.
"Attitudes that are closed-minded, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, stop the world I want to get off, those attitudes don't result in economic prosperity or power and influence in the world."
He said London was a great capital city precisely because it had a mix of different people and had gained from the energy and ingenuity of immigrants. "By all means have rules and controls, but the idea that the problems of Britain are due to immigration is a backward and regressive step, and we should contend every inch of that argument."
Blair praised the way in which Nick Clegg had shown leadership in confronting the anti-EU mood in the country.
"To be fair to Nick Clegg – I don't want to damage him by saying this – over the past few years he has shown a quite a lot of leadership and courage as a leader.
"The problem for the Lib Dems is nothing to do with Europe. The problem they have is very simple: they fought the 2010 election on a platform quite significantly to the left of the Labour party and ended up in a Conservative government with a platform that is significantly to the right of Labour.
"If you voted for the Lib Dems in 2010 because you liked their total opposition to tuition fees you are going to be somewhat disappointed when you vote for a government that ends up tripling them. That is the problem the Lib Dems have and there is not really a cure for that."
In response to suggestions that support for mainstream parties was eroding, Blair said: "I still think there is a progressive majority in the country. It is up to us whether we put it forward.
He said the rationale for Europe was stronger than it had ever been. While the rationale for his father's generation had been about peace after decades of war, for today's generation it was about sharing power collectively.
Once seen as a candidate for the European Council presidency, Blair said: "Europe has got to get away from this notion that the whole purpose of Europe is to diminish the nation state, and recognise that Europe works best when nation states come together to cooperate when they need the collective weight of Europe to prevail."
He added: "For a country like Britain, if you want to exercise weight, influence and power in the world you have got to do it through alliances, and the obvious alliance for us is the one on the doorstep, the biggest political union and commercial market in the world, and that is the European Union."
But he said he recognised the desire for EU reform. "Europe should get out of doing some of the things it does not need to do. That is where the principle of subsidiarity is so important. Some of the rules and regulations coming out of Brussels could be handled at national level."
He said EU leaders would regain support if they showed they were "gripping the big issues and getting out of the things that irritate people".
Achilles Heel (26 May 2014)
Instead of throwing eggs at Nigel Farage, metaphorical or otherwise, I wish more people tried to follow the example of Matthew Parris by tackling the politics of UKIP head on - rather than shouting their arguments down.
Not everything that Farage says is barking mad, but much of it is and the key issue to get across is that UKIP is not a serious party of government which is the party's real Achilles Heel.
A rather silly 'blame game' seems to have broken out in Scotland over who is responsible for UKIP winning their first Euro seat, but the voters are responsible of course having found UKIP more convincing and credible than any of the other parties, strange as it seems.
Yet UKIP's share of the vote in Scotland stands at 10% which is an awful long way short of its support which topped 30% in parts of England.
Fight Ukip. Fight their lies. Fight them now
By Matthew Parris - The Times
The Tory leadership must stand up to Nigel Farage and persuade voters not to fall for his dangerous populism
By the knowing, this column will be laughed at for playing straight into the hands of my enemies. I realise that. I realise it pays them the ultimate compliment: it takes them seriously. I don’t care. There are moments in life and in politics that are too important for tactics. Such a moment arrived for me this week when on to the doormat in the flats where I live in London’s East End, dropped the UK Independence Party’s election leaflet.
And, no, of course it isn’t the first piece of idiotic political literature I’ve ever encountered: I’ve seen plenty in my time, including from my own party. And delivered it too.
And, no, it isn’t the first time I’ve written about the wrongheadedness of Ukip’s approach, or the danger it poses to Britain’s centre-right. The reasoned case needs to be made again and again, and I’ll keep trying.
And, no, this won’t be my first or last column to berate the sly nastiness skulking beneath the covers of the party’s pitch. The Ukip phenomenon provides in itself a case study for psychiatrists as well as politicians.
But it’s the first time I have felt just a little bit frightened. This thing has a bad smell. I picked up that leaflet, read the lies and saw the menace.
As it happens, a young woman of Eastern European origin — always so pleasant and conscientious — who sweeps and cleans the entrance and staircase in the block, had arrived before I left. I wondered how the purple and yellow leaflets on the doormat would strike her, were she to look down.
Put yourself in her shoes.
She’s here legally, working legally, working hard, working for wages above the minimum that Parliament has laid down, in a job that any young British person is also free to take, and some do. On the doormat she reads purple-highlighted phrases from Nigel Farage’s declaration: phrases such as: “4,000 people a week come to live in Britain from the EU . . . the damage done to our national sovereignty, our pride and — dare I say it — our patriotism is immense . . .” Finally: “Enough’s enough”.
How wouldyou feel? I think she might feel insulted: insulted and threatened — almost physically threatened — by the response this appeal had been carefully phrased to trigger. When a few hours later at an almost empty Derby railway station I passed a little posse of youths with purple badges and pound-sign stickers and (probably because of what I’d been thinking about their party) felt just momentarily menaced. My reaction was irrational. They were no more a “posse” than groups of Tory canvassers of which I’ve often enough been part. But I was starting to look at the Ukip phenomenon with new eyes. I’ve always known it was nasty, hypocritical nonsense but now, for the first time, I’m wondering whether it might catch on.
A word, first, about the nonsense. There’s nothing like reading an untruth about yourself for bringing its brazenness home with copper-bottomed certainty. When I read (in a Ukip attack on this newspaper) that I was “privately educated” there was no need to fact-check the five government schools I remember attending before, at 15, being sent to a “private” non-apartheid school. And Mr Farage presumably does know that he himself went to a top public school, and does remember that he set up the Farage Family Educational Trust in an offshore tax haven — to confer (one supposes) similar privileges on future Farages.
Or take those “4,000 people a week” who “come to live in Britain” (says my leaflet). Or the “£55 million a day” that the EU “costs the UK”. If I told Mr Farage that Britain gets £8 billion a year from Brussels, or that people are emigrating from the UK at the rate of 131,000 a year, would he call that honest? No, he’d expose furiously my removal from my sums of the amount we were paying in to the EU, and my omission to mention the number of immigrants coming in to this country. My claims would deserve to be called lies. So do his.
You may think my purpose here is to take the attack to Ukip. Only in passing. Anyone with a mind of his own can see what kind of people they are without any help from me. I expect nothing of Ukip’s leadership and am not disappointed by them.
It’s the leaders of my own party who disappoint me. Ukip are not a political party; not really. They’re an unpleasant mutiny within the Conservative party. Having placed themselves outside the party they pose as an external foe; but they have many friends within it, willing them on.
My side in the Conservative party needs to take a stand too: vigorously, unapologetically, and soon. I’m ashamed that the cleaning woman on our East London staircase finds nobody among the Conservative leadership to speak up for her in public. I’m ashamed that Ukip’s provocations litter doormats across Britain, without my own party countering the falsehoods or protesting at the hatefulness. I hear the Tory voices murmuring that the “strategy” is not to give these rascals the oxygen of publicity. I hear the nervy assurance that “this will blow over” if we keep our heads down and walk by on the other side.
I hear the warning that voters attracted by Ukip need our love, not our insults, and must not be branded as racists. I hear the knowing chuckle that columns such as this are music to Ukip’s ears.
Stop these calculations, I say to self-respecting Tories, and fight. Let’s have an end to “understanding” dangerous populists. Many racists are attracted to Ukip; many foreigner-hating feelings are inflamed by Ukip. Many with feelings of personal disappointment or inadequacy are sucked into the comfort of blaming someone Other, something from over the water.
It is not wrong to stigmatise the party that is doing this. It’s not wrong to warn those voters that they would be idiots to fall for these hate-mongers. Whatever is to come, nobody who today takes arms against this pernicious new force will be less admired one day for doing so.
I finish as I started: there comes a time when you recognise something as bad: simply, unambiguously bad. This is the moment to put aside your calculations, tear up the strategists’ advice, decide which side you’re on, and shout it loud.
The Tory leadership must stand up to Nigel Farage and persuade voters not to fall for his dangerous populism
By the knowing, this column will be laughed at for playing straight into the hands of my enemies. I realise that. I realise it pays them the ultimate compliment: it takes them seriously. I don’t care. There are moments in life and in politics that are too important for tactics. Such a moment arrived for me this week when on to the doormat in the flats where I live in London’s East End, dropped the UK Independence Party’s election leaflet.
And, no, of course it isn’t the first piece of idiotic political literature I’ve ever encountered: I’ve seen plenty in my time, including from my own party. And delivered it too.
And, no, it isn’t the first time I’ve written about the wrongheadedness of Ukip’s approach, or the danger it poses to Britain’s centre-right. The reasoned case needs to be made again and again, and I’ll keep trying.
And, no, this won’t be my first or last column to berate the sly nastiness skulking beneath the covers of the party’s pitch. The Ukip phenomenon provides in itself a case study for psychiatrists as well as politicians.
But it’s the first time I have felt just a little bit frightened. This thing has a bad smell. I picked up that leaflet, read the lies and saw the menace.
As it happens, a young woman of Eastern European origin — always so pleasant and conscientious — who sweeps and cleans the entrance and staircase in the block, had arrived before I left. I wondered how the purple and yellow leaflets on the doormat would strike her, were she to look down.
Put yourself in her shoes.
She’s here legally, working legally, working hard, working for wages above the minimum that Parliament has laid down, in a job that any young British person is also free to take, and some do. On the doormat she reads purple-highlighted phrases from Nigel Farage’s declaration: phrases such as: “4,000 people a week come to live in Britain from the EU . . . the damage done to our national sovereignty, our pride and — dare I say it — our patriotism is immense . . .” Finally: “Enough’s enough”.
How wouldyou feel? I think she might feel insulted: insulted and threatened — almost physically threatened — by the response this appeal had been carefully phrased to trigger. When a few hours later at an almost empty Derby railway station I passed a little posse of youths with purple badges and pound-sign stickers and (probably because of what I’d been thinking about their party) felt just momentarily menaced. My reaction was irrational. They were no more a “posse” than groups of Tory canvassers of which I’ve often enough been part. But I was starting to look at the Ukip phenomenon with new eyes. I’ve always known it was nasty, hypocritical nonsense but now, for the first time, I’m wondering whether it might catch on.
A word, first, about the nonsense. There’s nothing like reading an untruth about yourself for bringing its brazenness home with copper-bottomed certainty. When I read (in a Ukip attack on this newspaper) that I was “privately educated” there was no need to fact-check the five government schools I remember attending before, at 15, being sent to a “private” non-apartheid school. And Mr Farage presumably does know that he himself went to a top public school, and does remember that he set up the Farage Family Educational Trust in an offshore tax haven — to confer (one supposes) similar privileges on future Farages.
Or take those “4,000 people a week” who “come to live in Britain” (says my leaflet). Or the “£55 million a day” that the EU “costs the UK”. If I told Mr Farage that Britain gets £8 billion a year from Brussels, or that people are emigrating from the UK at the rate of 131,000 a year, would he call that honest? No, he’d expose furiously my removal from my sums of the amount we were paying in to the EU, and my omission to mention the number of immigrants coming in to this country. My claims would deserve to be called lies. So do his.
You may think my purpose here is to take the attack to Ukip. Only in passing. Anyone with a mind of his own can see what kind of people they are without any help from me. I expect nothing of Ukip’s leadership and am not disappointed by them.
It’s the leaders of my own party who disappoint me. Ukip are not a political party; not really. They’re an unpleasant mutiny within the Conservative party. Having placed themselves outside the party they pose as an external foe; but they have many friends within it, willing them on.
My side in the Conservative party needs to take a stand too: vigorously, unapologetically, and soon. I’m ashamed that the cleaning woman on our East London staircase finds nobody among the Conservative leadership to speak up for her in public. I’m ashamed that Ukip’s provocations litter doormats across Britain, without my own party countering the falsehoods or protesting at the hatefulness. I hear the Tory voices murmuring that the “strategy” is not to give these rascals the oxygen of publicity. I hear the nervy assurance that “this will blow over” if we keep our heads down and walk by on the other side.
I hear the warning that voters attracted by Ukip need our love, not our insults, and must not be branded as racists. I hear the knowing chuckle that columns such as this are music to Ukip’s ears.
Stop these calculations, I say to self-respecting Tories, and fight. Let’s have an end to “understanding” dangerous populists. Many racists are attracted to Ukip; many foreigner-hating feelings are inflamed by Ukip. Many with feelings of personal disappointment or inadequacy are sucked into the comfort of blaming someone Other, something from over the water.
It is not wrong to stigmatise the party that is doing this. It’s not wrong to warn those voters that they would be idiots to fall for these hate-mongers. Whatever is to come, nobody who today takes arms against this pernicious new force will be less admired one day for doing so.
I finish as I started: there comes a time when you recognise something as bad: simply, unambiguously bad. This is the moment to put aside your calculations, tear up the strategists’ advice, decide which side you’re on, and shout it loud.
