Tuesday 29 September 2015

Toby on Tuesday

‘We’re all in this together’

 

Funnily enough, it was the Guardian’s Assistant Editor, Michael White, who best summed up the mood at UKIP’s Conference last week at Doncaster Racecourse. Writing on Saturday under the headline “Teflon Nigel Farage bounces back again with help from foreign friends” he declared, “Nigel Farage bounced back on Friday from his own and UKIP’s General Election rebuff. Teflon Nigel always does. Election defeats and party splits, personal toxicity and even plane crashes – he climbs out of the moment’s wreckage clutching a gold watch and grinning…But in a bravura performance in time for the TV lunchtime news, Teflon Nigel brushed it all aside. Rested after a fishing holiday in Cornwall, he was in statesman mode…Most memorable was the Swedish Democrat MEP Peter Lundgren, a bulky road-haulier who had been drawn into politics for Farage-ish reasons. ‘In Sweden I would say Nigel Farage is like a god,’ he said at one point. Lundgren apparently derives social prestige as one of the very few Swedes to have Nigel’s mobile phone number (like half the pubs in Surrey), ‘Look whose number I have,’ he says when showing off at home. ‘If I could be half as good as Nigel I would be fantastically happy.’ After unforced testimony like that, what’s an election defeat here or there? Or splits in the Brexit ranks? Nigel the god duly walked on Doncaster water. ‘I was right,’ he said. He knows it.” Well, that’s quite a tribute from the Guardian!

And on the way to Doncaster, I was lucky enough to be a dinner guest of the good-hearted and generous-spirited people from Business for Britain. We were there to hear James Wharton, the young Conservative MP for Stockton South. He is only 31 but plainly has a wise head on young shoulders. He also has an impressive lack of vanity and ego, so deserves to go far. He earned his spurs with his private member’s bill for a Referendum on EU membership, which failed in the 2013-14 Parliamentary session but did him great credit. He is now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Communities and Local Government responsible for the Northern Power House and is clearly constrained in what he can say by ministerial responsibility. However, if David Cameron were to allow his ministers to campaign freely in the forthcoming EU Referendum, he would be an impressive advocate in the ‘Leave’ campaign. 

Yet the difficulty for so many well-intentioned groups like Business for Britain, with its “Reform or Leave” strategy, is that the days of fence sitting are really over, any so-called “reform” will be only cosmetic and the car crash that is the EU is now heading for terminal disaster. And to take the motoring analogy further, the crisis over Volkswagen’s “defeat devices” is an allegory for the whole rotten EU project. If it does now sink into the abyss, it is vital that Britain should not be dragged down with the other members.

So for Business for Britain and other moderate, reasonable and well-intentioned “soft Eurosceptics”, the moment has come to accept that no genuine compromise with the EU is on offer. And where this is relevant is that the Electoral Commission, which has been completely meticulous so far in handling the EU Referendum, will soon need to nominate a lead group for the “Leave” campaign. This will have to be an all-party group, so by definition UKIP cannot be the lead. What we shall do instead is support a credible all-party campaign, mobilising our membership and indeed our close to 4 million votes in May’s General Election for the good of our country as a whole. So far only one all-party campaign has shown its hand and that is Leave.EU. In the words of its founder Arron Banks, “The new campaign slogan better represents the question and fits with the strap line – Love Europe, Leave the EU.” In the absence of any other candidate for leadership of the “Leave” campaign, it is this group that will clearly have the support of UKIP’s members. If other candidates do come forward, including the public-spirited members of Business for Britain, so much the better but we are now at a fork in the road and time is very short.

It was our one MP, Douglas Carswell, who best summed up UKIP’s position at Doncaster when he said, “We must be prepared to work with anyone, left or right, politician or undecided…There are good patriotic politicians in all parties and we must work with them all.” And he declared that he was “very loyal to people called Eurosceptics in all parties, as we’re on the same side.” As at so many other times in our long history, Britain faces an existential crisis. The time has come to put our differences aside and combine for our country’s good. That is the message from Nigel and Douglas, it is a message that makes perfect sense and one to which all UKIP’s members and nearly 4 million voters will happily respond!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

Tuesday 22 September 2015

Toby on Tuesday

 ‘Poodles and Politikos’


This week, I don’t want to write about the tens of thousands of “refugees” pouring across Southern Europe, nor about the warning by the director-general of the Security Service Andrew Parker, head of MI5, that “Britain is facing an unprecedented threat from home-grown fanatics who are being turned into violent terrorists within weeks” and who “now see their home country as the enemy.” Instead I want to write about Sunday’s election in Greece where at the time of writing Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing Syriza party and Vangelis Meimarakis’ centre-right New Democracy party are running neck-and-neck. But the truth is that, with both parties committed to the Eurozone’s so-called reform and bailout package, turnout is likely to be low and the sacrifice of Greece on the altar of the Euro-project will continue whatever the outcome.

There is a very simple reason why Greece will never be allowed to follow the classic formula for failing countries weighed down by debt and depression, namely to default, devalue their currencies and then recover. The Capital and Reserves of the European Central Bank amount to some 100 billion Euros. Yet the ECB’s lending to Greek banks now amounts to some 126 billion Euros. A default by Greece would wipe out the ECB’s capital base and effectively bring the whole Euro experiment to an end. In addition, the exposure of the private German banks to Greece at the end of last year amounted to over 11 billion Euros, with the private UK and US banks having only marginally less exposure and Italian private banks’ exposure running at around half their level. But for Germany in particular, with its policy of driving their big banks to lend indiscriminately to purchasers of German exports, the situation is now perilous. 

I am grateful to one of my well-informed Thirsk and Malton colleagues for alerting me to the announcement just over a week ago that Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s largest, is considering cutting its workforce by some 23,000 jobs, nearly a quarter of its workforce. The reason was that that “a string of settlements and seemingly endless accusations of malfeasance underscored deep seated problems with the bank’s corporate culture.” And in Italy, UniCredit is set to cut its workforce by around 10,000, some 7% of its workforce, across Italy, Germany and Austria. The whole Eurozone is still dancing on the edge and Sunday’s Greek election, whatever the final outcome, will resolve nothing.

And the funny thing is that Britain’s equivalent of Alexis Tsipras, our very own Jeremy Corbyn, who had vowed to take on the whole system before becoming Labour leader, is like his Greek counterpart already buckling under EU pressure and committing his party to a “Remain In” vote for our hard-won Referendum. Whatever Mr. Tspiras’ brave words, office without power is the bitter cup from which all elected politicians in the EU have to drink. Power itself is reserved for the unelected civil servants in Brussels and the officials at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. So Mr. Tsipras is no different from any other EU politician and the evidence is already building up fast in Britain that the same could be said of Mr. Corbyn. Having promoted himself as the friend of Syriza and Europe’s other parties of the left, his brave words are, like those of Mr. Tsipras, just that! They may be very left-wing poodles, but they are both Brussels’ and Frankfurt’s poodles nonetheless!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

 

Tuesday 15 September 2015

Toby on Tuesday

 ‘Golden Opportunities’


So the revolution has happened, at least within the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is leader. He will get a supportive run from the BBC, both by statute and because he has promised to “put Labour at the forefront of the campaign to defend the BBC”, from Channel 4 News which openly shares his convictions, and from the Guardian and the Independent. So that’s a solid support base in the media before he starts. What I’ll try to do in this piece is to share some random thoughts about Mr. Corbyn and the consequences of his election. The first point, which is significant at a time when MP’s expenses are again in the spotlight, is that during the 2009 expenses scandal he was revealed as claiming the lowest amount of any Member of Parliament. Again, he claimed the smallest amount in 2010 when he declared, “I am a parsimonious MP…I think we should claim what we need to run our offices and pay our staff, but be careful because it’s obviously public money.” This is a distinction shared with UKIP’s Douglas Carswell, another thrifty MP and indeed a Parliamentary friend of Jeremy Corbyn’s. A record of care with public money will have positive electoral consequences in the years ahead, something that should not be overlooked.

As to the EU, the Corbyn Labour Party will openly and strongly identify itself with Greece’s leftist Syriza Party, which looks set to win the General Election there on 20th September, with Spain’s Podemos Party, with Portugal’s Left Bloc and with France’s Socialist Party. All these parties of the left are rightly horrified by the economic crises and chronic unemployment that have beset their countries, although for ideological reasons they cannot accept the clear need for them to leave the Euro, devalue and default, then let their economies recover. This must be the logic of their position although the Corbyn Labour Party is unlikely to endorse it. But he will immerse himself in the European left’s campaign to “end austerity” through more borrowing for large-scale public works. As to the EU referendum, he is unlikely to show his hand for a few months yet as he develops relationships with those other parties of the European left.

As for the Conservative Party, there is no doubt that David Cameron and George Osborne will use the Labour Party’s move to the hard left to seize the fabled “centre ground” of politics. For my part, I have always believed in a “common ground” rather than a “centre ground”, but the ‘heirs to Blair’ will stake out that point in the hope of a landslide General Election victory in 2020. Of course for UKIP all this presents a golden opportunity, as with the Labour Party now well to the left and the Conservative Party as a centrist managerial party, there is a huge vacuum that a popular centre-right UKIP can fill. The themes of nationhood and family are as strong as ever and a UKIP that campaigns for 30 years of integration after 30 years of immigration, for rebuilt armed forces, for a nation self-sufficient in energy using carbon capture and safe shale (with proper compensation for those affected), in which our fisheries can be reclaimed and our farmers assured of a decent price for their food, should win 8 million votes in 2020, up from 4 million in 2015, and countless Members of Parliament.

And one last thing – at the next General Election Mr. Corbyn will be just short of 71 years old. So the days of handsome young technocrats, epitomised by Tony Blair and David Cameron (who will be gone by 2020), are drawing to a close. And the age of weather-beaten veterans, their hoary faces lined with years of campaigning against the fashions of their time, may just have arrived. Heaven knows, we’ve plenty of weather-beaten veterans in UKIP (including myself) and, if nothing else, Jeremy Corbyn’s triumph could just give all our vintage campaigners a new lease of life as well!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

 

Tuesday 8 September 2015

Toby on Tuesday

‘Voiceless and diluted’

 

Last Friday Nigel, firmly back in the saddle as UKIP’s leader, launched our campaign for the forthcoming EU referendum. Having pressured the Government into conceding the vote we must now ensure that it is free and fair. No doubt every trick in the book will be used to prevent this but fortunately we have the Electoral Commission on our side. Following their intervention, the actual question has been amended from “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?”, with all the negative connotations of a ‘No’ vote, to “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”, with ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ having no such implied connotations. Equally, the so-called ‘Purdah’ rules have been partly reinstated although UKIP will be watching hawk-like for any improper attempt to use public money to support the ‘Remain’ campaign.

And by Nigel’s side on Friday was UKIP Trade Spokesman William Dartmouth MEP, who had just put the final touches to his compelling case for ‘Leave’. Now entitled “Britain and the EU: A Dysfunctional Relationship – why it’s time to call off our relationship with the European Union”, it runs to a simple 20 pages, well illustrated and easily readable. Written in plain, straightforward language its theme is clear, “The best relationships make life better. They’re mutually beneficial, with two individuals working as a team to create something better than the sum of its parts. But not all relationships are positive ones. Some are dependent, dysfunctional and destructive. Britain’s relationship with the EU isn’t healthy.” And using the North American Free Trade Agreement as a precedent, the pamphlet touches on the powerful truth that “NAFTA is a very successful trading bloc – that doesn’t include the free movement of people in any sense. Trade, not travel: NAFTA stimulates trade without borders. Not the movement of people across them. You can maintain a trading relationship – a successful one – without the free movement of people.”

As to the laughable argument about ‘British influence’ William’s paper declares, “There is only one thing more destructive in a relationship than a lack of influence. It’s the illusion of influence where there is none. The UK has tried to block proposals from the EU Commission 55 times. And we have never, ever succeeded. The truth is that we have no meaningful influence. While our presence suggests that we have a voice, every new member state dilutes our influence further. Ultimately, to the point where it is worth nothing at all. Today, Turkey is next in line to ascend. With its population of more than 80 million. And its borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria.”

Simply written and clear research like this, alongside Nigel’s inspired oratory, will be among UKIP’s campaign resources in the coming months. The EU, with its dysfunctional single currency and failed ideology, represents a terminal threat to our country. Through a ‘Leave’ vote in the referendum we can extricate ourselves from this danger, revert to a straightforward trading relationship which we always had as a member of the European Free Trade Association and gradually become again the outward-looking nation we once were. And we must never forget that, without UKIP, none of this would ever have been possible!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

Tuesday 1 September 2015

Toby on Tuesday 

‘Our common European destiny’



Last week I wrote about the 1972 trade agreement between the European Free Trade Association, of which Britain was a founding member, and the European Community (now Union). Put simply, Edward Heath’s government deceived the electorate when it claimed that, to trade with Europe, we had to be part of a political union. With the EU referendum now looming, the time has come to explore the roots of this whole dysfunctional project.

Now, it needs to be recognised that one important strand was the Europe a Nation movement, begun in the 1950’s by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, one of the fabled Mitford sisters. After their failure with the British Union of Fascists and incarceration in Holloway Prison during the Second World War, they moved to Ireland and then to France. There they launched “The European” magazine, which formed part of their Europe a Nation movement. Following Germany’s defeat, they claimed that the nations of Europe should be subsumed into a European entity but still run on pre-war corporatist lines with governments and large corporations colluding for their mutual benefit. Free trade should be opposed at every turn in favour of economic micro-management, which effectively is what we have now 70 years after the end of the War. And if you think that this is all old hat, I suggest that you google www.oswaldmosley.com and look up Europe a Nation. There you will see that the “Oswald Mosley Directorate” and “The Friends of Oswald Mosley” are still hard at work, with their project now in sight of its final fulfilment.

And looking back after 45 years or so I recall a surreal private dinner to which I was invited to meet the Mosleys in I think 1970. My hosts were generous, cultivated people of the very sort to be dazzled by their charisma, as so many were in the 1930’s. As a young man, what struck me most about them was their eyes, his dilating with intensity, hers completely motionless and with the colour of cornflowers. The conversation was bizarre as he exclaimed, “There have been three great men in my lifetime, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Hitler I knew, Stalin I met and it is a great sorrow to me never to have known Mao.” Then Diana Mosley spoke of their wedding in Berlin in 1936 declaring, “We were married in Goebbels’ drawing room. Goering was our best man. He wore a powder blue uniform. The Fuerher could not be there but we called on him the next day.” Then they spoke of our common European destiny, of the new Europe that was in the making and how vital it was the Britain should play a leading part in it. He had written about it in his 1947 book “The Alternative” and had sought to build a National Party of Europe. Two years later Edward Heath achieved his, and their, goal.

At the end of the evening, I drove them back to the Ritz Hotel where they were staying. They talked more about our shared European destiny. After saying goodbye to them I felt distinctly queazy, to put it mildly, just as I have always felt queasy about the whole European project. What used to be called English liberty is a precious trust, to be nurtured and protected, and the memory of that evening has always stayed with me as compelling evidence of this!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby