Samizdata

I get the feeling that the next general election in Britain could be the first one to be seriously altered in its overall result by the internet. I definitely hope so. My ideal result would be for Gordon Brown and David Cameron and that LibDem guy all to emerge from the election feeling equally humiliated, and all sounding like they are on the same side, that of Big Politics, while all the conviction parties, the silly parties, including silly conviction parties whose silly convictions are the absolute opposite of my own convictions, do far better than they were supposed to and compared to the amount of and nature of the mainstream media coverage that they got.

In particular, I hope that UKIP does really well. I’ve heard the complaints about this party, most of which boil down to the claim that they are all just too weird. But scratch any active participant in any political party and pretty soon the weirdness spills out.

My feeling-stroke-wishful-thinking along these lines is based on seeing things like this:

I came across that here, a few days ago. It’s basically a greatest hits compilation of UKIP snippets taken from the European Parliament, mostly about Climategate, with a few bits from some internet TV show in the USA spliced in. I particularly like the Liverpudlian guy.

That EU Parliament is an odd place. People make these little speeches in it, which almost none of the people present pay any great attention to, but which, on YouTube, can sometimes escape into the wild, to the point where mainstream media non-coverage becomes impossible to sustain.

More fundamentally, even if such non-coverage persists, as I expect it to persist at least until the forthcoming general election, so what? More and more people can now receive such messages as these anyway.

Enough to embarrass Brown, Cameron and Whatsisname? Maybe. As I say, I do hope so.

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, writes, at Devil’s Kitchen, thus:

Part of the problem for eurosceptics has been that we have too often only engaged in one half of the argument. To be fair, we’ve all made a pretty good case that the EU is a costly, harmful, antidemocratic monstrosity – so much so that the public are in great majority convinced of that.

It is the second half of the argument which has been somewhat lacking – what is the positive alternative? Convincing people there is a problem with the current situation is not enough; we need to lay out what life would be like without the EU, how things could be better and, crucially, how it is perfectly feasible to get there.

To that end, the TaxPayers’ Alliance is publishing a new book, Ten Years On: Britain without the European Union which lays out a vision of what Britain could be like in 2020, governing ourselves and with the freedom to cooperate and trade with whomsoever we like.

Even better, it is available free to pre-order through this link!

I think this is spot on, not necessarily in the sense that Britain would be better off out of the EU, but in the sense that this is the bit of the argument that has been neglected. After all, the same lying politicians, stubborn bureaucrats, town hall little Hitlers and idiot voters that got us into this mess would still be around to screw up the alternative. So how would being out of the EU necessarily make their position weaker? Might the alternative actually be worse? I believe – partly because I want to believe (see paragraph one of the quote above) – that it would an improvement, but I would like to hear this argument made.

Also, would we, Norway style, still have to endure EUrocrats making our rules for us, for the privilege of trading with the EU? Seems unlikely, but again, I’d like to hear the argument.

So, as Instapundit would say, it’s in the post. The ordering seemed to work very smoothly. Nothing like free of charge to simplify things.

“David Cameron ditches referendum and backs away from EU bust-up” chuckles the Guardian… followed by “Eurosceptics welcome ‘never again’ rhetoric”.

So in effect Cameron is saying “yes I know I said we get a vote before… “iron clad” was the words I used… but if those mean old Euros want to grab even more power than all that stuff you are not going to get a vote on after all, we will have a referendum next time. Really, you can trust me”.

Of course the Eurosceptics are happy, because after all, if David Cameron promises something, you can be sure he will keep his “iron-clad” word, right? Amazing.

Never forget that the party of Winston Churchill was also the party of Neville Chamberlain.

Tory politician and London Mayor Boris Johnson bets that Tony Blair will not get the post of European Union president, a role that will carry enhanced powers if or when the Lisbon Treaty (or Constitution) gets rammed through. He argues that countries such as France will not tolerate having this former big mate of George Boooosh take the role, representing not just France but 500 million souls across an entire continent.

Boris has a point: Blair is still heartily detested in France for arguably the one act that makes me think quite well of Blair – his determination to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, even if one would choose different justifications from him in that course (an argument that continues to divide libertarians, by the way). Nevertheless, Boris’s underlying logic is strong: it is monstrous that a man who played a part in ensuring that Labour failed to honour its 2005 election manifesto pledge over a EU referendum on the EU constitution should be in the frame for the job that this Lisbon Treaty stitch-up has made possible. And as the Treaty is more or less the same as the Constitution, the position taken by Blair and by Gordon Brown represents their contempt for the democratic process.

But remember, however much one might loathe Mr Blair and the transnational progressivist, corrupt politics that he represents, it is the very idea that the EU needs some grand president at all, not simply the personality of this rather creepy individual, that should be kept front and centre. Even if the holder of the office is some drone from central Europe given to vacuous pronouncements on “good governance” or whatever, no such post should exist. It is hard, I know, to play the ball and not the man.

Of course, there is another theory: if Blair is elected to the job, his strutting, fake-charm might actually help discredit the idea of a EU presidency per se. Perhaps, though, that it is being too clever on my part.