Ah, ‘the people.’ What lies are told in your name. To be with ‘the people’ is to be a good neighbour and a good citizen. To be against ‘the people’ is to be against the sole source of legitimacy in a democracy. If you are not a traitor or an agent of a hostile foreign power, you are at the very least an ‘enemy of the people’; an aloof member of ‘the elite’ that fixes the system for its own benefit. Who does not want to be on the people’s side? Who will admit to standing with their enemies in the ‘elite’?
One of the most distasteful attacks on an alleged elite figure appeared in the Daily Mail (Buckley et al. 2016). Both sides in the referendum campaign welcomed celebrity endorsements, with the scientist Sir Stephen Hawking, the author J. K. Rowling and the former footballer David Beckham supporting Remain and the Monty Python star John Cleese, the actress Elizabeth Hurley and the former cricketer Sir Ian Botham speaking up for Leave. When the actress Emma Thompson, interviewed while filming in Germany, made an impassioned appeal for Britain to stay in the EU, the Daily Mail responded with carefully crafted indignation and a personal attack in a piece entitled Luvvie Emma sneers at Britain: I’m European, she claims in bizarre tirade against us quitting Brussels (2016). In British slang luvvies are people in show business, especially actors, who take themselves too seriously and imagine that they are qualified to comment upon all manner of subjects. The use of luvvie in the headline implies that Ms Thompson’s words need not be taken too seriously, a suggestion reinforced by describing her comments as a bizarre tirade. The choice of the reporting verb claims instead of says is perhaps an attempt to cast doubt upon what ought to be indisputable, that is, that a citizen of the UK, a country belonging to the continent of Europe, is European. The opening sentences continue in the same vein.
She has never been afraid of spouting her London metropolitan elite views on matters of political importance.
So it no surprise that she has waded into the referendum debate with a bizarre rant against the UK.
The outspoken darling of the Left sparked outrage yesterday by deriding Britain as a ‘tiny cake-filled misery-laden’ island which must stay in the European Union.
Emma Thompson is not merely guilty of being a member of the ‘London metropolitan elite’; she is additionally culpable because she has a history of supporting left-wing causes. Her greatest sin, however, is that she is a woman. The adjective outspoken often has positive connotations of frankness and honesty, and tends to be used in this sense in descriptions of Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. It becomes a derogatory term in ‘The outspoken darling of the Left’, as if Ms Thompson does not have the same right to express her views that a man has. But she is not known for expressing her views at all, but for ‘spouting’ them, while the content of her spoutings, a ‘tirade’ in the headline, are a ‘rant’ in the second paragraph of the article. She ‘waded into’ the referendum debate, a prepositional verb that suggests a clumsy intervention rather than a reasoned argument.
Readers of online articles often have the opportunity to comment upon them, their identities hidden behind a nickname. This particular article spawned a huge number of comments, many of them overtly sexist and extremely vulgar. The Daily Mail chose to highlight a comment sent by Godfrey Bloom, a former UKIP MEP who was forced to resign from the party in 2013 for, among other instances of intemperate behaviour, describing women in the audience at the party conference as ‘sluts’. His response to Emma Thompson’s opinions was expressed in the form of a polite request, or possibly of a generous offer: ‘May I be the first to spank her silly bottom? Something her mother should have done years ago.’
As mentioned earlier, most people read newspapers that confirm rather than challenge what they already believe, so it is probable that the Daily Mail’s attack on Emma Thompson galvanized support among people who had no problems with comments like Godfrey Bloom’s but did not win over new converts. Neither did it create apostates, however, for Remain supporters missed the opportunity to bring this article to a wider and different readership in order to expose the nasty strain of sexism exhibited by certain readers of The Mail.
People may be more willingly to identify themselves with an inclusive we if the pronoun is used in contexts that demonstrate, or claim, that we are smarter or more competent than a clearly identified they are. The Brexit camp chose the field of security and military might to show that we, the British, do a far better job than our European partners.
Although the idea of establishing a European Rapid Reaction Force has been discussed over the years, nothing concrete has yet emerged. In 2016 Brussels began to prepare the way for a military research and development programme, which put the prospect – or the threat – of an EU army very firmly on Leave’s agenda. The former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove (2016), writing in a pro-Remain magazine, noted that Britain’s active role in NATO and history of sharing intelligence with the United States meant that leaving the EU would not endanger the UK’s security in the slightest. Charles Moore (2016) in The Telegraph, in an article bearing the splendidly disparaging headline ‘The EU is a huge version of Belgium – and it can’t deal with the modern world’ (written days after suicide bombings at Brussels airport and a metro station in the city had exposed the limitations of the Belgian security services), argued that Britain was already part of a far better intelligence-sharing alliance than anything the EU could ever construct.
By far the highest level of intelligence trust in the world is the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance, between the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. They share an experience of cooperation in wars, a language, a Common Law tradition and, in four cases, the Crown.
Dearlove and Moore both refer to the UK in the third person in articles based on real data. Nick Gutteridge (2016) in the Daily Express adopts an altogether more emotive approach with quotes by army veterans, photographs of the Queen inspecting the troops and of British tommies in a trench during the First World War, references to past victories, a soundbite from UKIP’s defence spokesman and, of course, the pronouns we and us.
Britain has by far the biggest and best equipped army in Europe and is to plough some £2.2bn into developing new weapons this year alone.
But under the new EU plans we could in future be blocked from researching new military technology which would benefit the British army, instead being forced into ploughing money into projects for the wider benefit of the whole EU project.
. . .
But UKIP’s defence spokesman Mike Hookem – himself a former serviceman in the RAF – warned an EU army would leave the UK unable to defend its own interests in the world, including the Falklands.
He said: ‘When you sign up you pledge allegiance to her Majesty the Queen. Who are you going to swear allegiance to in the future, Jean-Claude Juncker?
‘Are we going to be pulling the Union Jack off our uniforms and stitching on the EU flag. It’s scandalous.
‘During the Falklands war France was selling weapons to the Argentinians. If they try to take back the Falklands again will France let us use this EU army to defend them? I doubt it.
‘There’s only one people who can defend the British, and that’s the British themselves.’
Many British citizens would not identify themselves in the inclusive we employed by Gutteridge and Hookem despite the alleged superiority of Britain’s military capability with respect to other EU member states. Plenty of people believe that the UK’s military budget should be cut and the money diverted to other purposes, while others see little point in retaining the Falklands and other anachronistic remnants of a lost empire. Few of them, however, would ever read the Daily Express. As with The Mail’s attack on Emma Thompson, The Express could use we secure in the knowledge that it really was an inclusive pronoun as far as its readers were concerned.
5
Democracy myths and facts: A double defeat for David Cameron
In a referendum offering a choice between change and maintenance of the status quo, it is incumbent upon those wis
hing for reform or innovation to be proactive in stating their case clearly and convincing the voters of the credibility of their position. For people aiming to leave things as they are, there is the risk of slipping into reactive mode, merely gainsaying whatever arguments their opponents propose and presenting their own position as the safe option. The Remain camp’s attempt to be proactive, the so-called Project Fear, was ultimately ineffectual, as we will see in Chapter 9. Much of their time and energy, however, was spent reacting to Leave’s claims; indeed, David Cameron’s lengthy negotiations with Brussels in early 2016 to secure a special deal for the UK was essentially an attempt to defuse the Brexiteers’ position by arguing that their concerns had already been met.
Leave campaigners (though generally not those of the Lexit persuasion) made immigration a key topic in the debate, and this is looked at in Chapter 8. An issue that saw UKIP, Conservative Leavers and Lexit supporters in total agreement, however, was the alleged lack of democracy and accountability in how the European Union is run and, more specifically, the European Commission’s disregard for the views expressed by the electorates of member states. Seldom do the right-wing Daily Express and the hard-left Morning Star find themselves on the same side but that is what happened when Nick Gutteridge (2016) in the former and an unsigned editorial entitled It’s Operation Desperation (2016) in the latter reported on the EU’s free trade treaty with Ukraine, a move widely seen as the first step in Ukraine’s eventual accession to the Union, despite the fact that a referendum in the Netherlands had seen 61.1 per cent of Dutch voters reject the deal.
‘Your vote means NOTHING’ Brussels insists land grab plot WILL go ahead despite Dutch ‘no’
EUROPEAN UNION leaders were tonight plotting to override the democratic wishes of the Dutch people and plough ahead with a rejected plan to tighten their grip on Ukraine.
Arrogant Brussels politicians insisted the plot to bring Kiev further into their sphere of influence will go ahead, even though last night it was overwhelmingly rejected by the Dutch people.
Germany’s Angela Merkel told journalists the Dutch ‘no’ vote ‘will be managed as we have managed other difficult issues before’, whilst French president Francois Hollande said the EU ‘will implement and apply’ the rejected treaty.
And EU President Jean-Claude Juncker today expressly REFUSED to rule out steamrollering the Dutch people’s democratic rights and enforcing the deal on them anyway.
No country was more pro-EU dream than the Netherlands. It was a model European country in every aspect.
But things have changed. Living conditions have deteriorated. Insecurity has increased. The ‘social Europe’ gains proclaimed in the 1980s have been whittled away.
The dream has turned sour for the Dutch, so they have rejected the EU free trade deal with Ukraine.
The EU elite is intent on constant expansion of the bloc’s borders, disregarding its failure to harmonise relations in the wake of previous headlong enlargement.
Brussels turns a blind eye to rampant corruption in Kiev, the undemocratic banning of the Communist Party and the role of neonazi armed militias.
Why should the EU stance be surprising? It was up to its neck in the Maidan 2014 coup d’etat, rejecting Ukraine’s right to have relations with both the EU and Russia and demanding all or nothing.
Given that Nick Gutteridge is unlikely to be unduly concerned about the fate of the Communist Party in Ukraine, it is not difficult to identify which extract comes from an article in the Morning Star. However, what strikes the reader is the fact that in two newspapers that have very different ideological stances, the eagerness to sign a deal with Ukraine is not seen in terms of trade but of territorial expansionism and both use highly emotive language. Gutteridge’s headline contains the expression ‘land grab’, the lead refers to the EU’s wish to ‘tighten their grip on Ukraine’ and his first sentence describes the ‘plot to bring Kiev further into their sphere of influence’, which reminds us of the kind of language used during the Cold War when the United States and the USSR competed to draw developing countries towards their respective visions of the world. Allusions to the Cold War are even more explicit in the Morning Star, particularly with the use of the word ‘bloc’, which recalls the days when the continent of Europe was divided between the Western Democracies and the Eastern Bloc. It is a word that evokes images of a bureaucratic monolith unable, or unwilling, to permit change or reform, and in 2016 the bloc is the European Union seeking ‘constant expansion’ of its borders and ‘headlong enlargement’.
That the right-wing Daily Express and the left-wing Morning Star should both describe a free trade treaty in almost militaristic terms is remarkable enough, but their respective reasons for doing so might also share some common ground. The Morning Star has repeatedly warned that in prematurely admitting the Baltic states and Poland, the EU was recklessly provoking Russia, and in the lines quoted above, Brussels is accused of having a role in the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected but pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych. In June 2015 UKIP MEPs voted against a European Parliament resolution condemning Russia for human rights abuses, a year earlier Nigel Farage accused the EU of ‘having blood on its hands’ for encouraging the turmoil in Ukraine that eventually led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea (Morris 2014), and a number of Brexit campaigners argued that the EU’s imposition of sanctions against Moscow was harming Europe’s economies more than Russia’s. Gutteridge expresses outrage at the EU’s disregard for a referendum result in the Netherlands, something he sees as symptomatic of Brussels’ disdain for democracy, but his use of the language of territorial occupation and control suggests that he sees the proposed treaty with Ukraine as being about far more than free trade, and in this he is an unlikely bed fellow for the Morning Star.
Criticism of the EU’s lack of democracy was expressed in powerful language and Remain’s response was feeble by comparison. In the lead-up to the referendum much was made of the EU’s five unelected presidents: Jean-Claude Juncker (European Commission), Mario Draghi (European Central Bank), Martin Schulz (European Parliament), Donald Tusk (European Council) and Jeroen Dijsselbloem (Eurogroup of economy ministers). Anti-EU commentators of various political shades portrayed the British public as being at the mercy of five bureaucrats they could not even name (with the possible exception of Juncker), much less vote out of office, while the elected European Parliament, if it was mentioned at all, tended to be described as weak and ineffectual.
Suzanne Moore (2016), in an article previously cited in Chapter 2, adopted the simple style and short sentences usually associated with the tabloids:
It doesn’t look to me like a democracy. Nor does it appear accountable. This matters. Not a single one of my pro-EU friends could name their MEP when I asked them. Maybe this pales among issues like security, workers’ rights and border control, but as a representative democracy it is sorely lacking.
In the right-wing Sunday Express the novelist Frederick Forsyth (2016) argued that the EU was never meant to be democratic because Jean Monnet and the other architects of the post-war European project, obsessed by the fact that Hitler had risen to power via the ballot box, concluded that ‘the people, any people, were too obtuse, too gullible, too dim ever to be safely entrusted with the power to elect their government’.
Przemek Skwirczynski (2016), an activist for the little-known Poles for Britain campaign, also took the view that the development of the European Union had been planned from the beginning as a process leading towards an undemocratic superstate, and claimed that the last president of the USSR, Mikhael Gorbachev, had described the EU as ‘the old Soviet Union dressed in Western clothes’.
Lexit supporters tended to avoid undocumented, arguably rather hysterical accusations that the post-war plan for Europe was designed from the beginning to deprive citizens of their democratic rights, and focused instead on how the best of original intentions had been betrayed over the years, resulting in the refusal in recent times to accept
views expressed by the electorates of supposedly sovereign member states. Another unsigned editorial in the Morning Star, entitled The Opposite of Democracy (2016), recalled such incidences as the 2008 Irish referendum that rejected the Lisbon Treaty and the subsequent pressure on Dublin to hold a second vote, and, more recently, interference from Brussels that led to the replacement in Italy and Greece of governments that were democratically elected but deemed to be incapable of running the economy.
For an organisation that parrots the word ‘democracy’ relentlessly, whether in criticising other world powers or preparing the way for another illegal invasion, the EU record on respecting democracy is shaky.
When voters in countries like Ireland and France have erred by voting against EU treaties, they have been ordered to try again until they redeem their mistake by getting it right.
Elected governments in Italy and Greece have been replaced by appointed ‘technocrats’ – effectively bankers and their nominees – to run the show and drive through economic ‘reforms’ that benefit the rich and powerful.
The balance of income and wealth across the continent has swung from rich to poor as the inevitable consequence of wage freezes, unemployment and benefit cuts.
Even now as the working class is over a barrel, our unelected and unaccountable EU bosses are negotiating the TTIP trade deal with Washington to further distance economic life from democratic accountability.
Remain campaigners made little attempt to counter such attacks, either avoiding the issue of democratic accountability, or, as we saw in Chapter 1, conceding the validity of the criticism before the adversative conjunction but followed by a counterbalancing clause stating something positive about the EU. In an article urging left-wing readers to vote Remain, Toby Moses (2016) has no qualms about describing the EU as ‘that bloated, undemocratic bureaucracy’ but asks the rhetorical question ‘What self-respecting lefty wants to line up alongside Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Iain Duncan Smith?’. The choice is between a rock and a hard place.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 7