This Peter Hitchens post is fascinating. First of all, there’s the massive degree of psychological projection on show. He spends hundreds of words berating literally the whole of the nation for lacking the courage to leap out of the European Union in favour of….whatever it is the Outs are in favour of.
And then he announces that he’s going to abstain, because he doesn’t really think we could do it. In a word, he’s just as scared as he thinks everyone else is. Dare we conclude that when he talks about “so many people, even the ‘Eurosceptics’ in law, business, politics and the media” he actually means “me”? Tous les mêmes. Tous pourris. Même moi!
Secondly, it is of course true that in all the long years of Eurosceptic whining, nobody has ever articulated anything like a coherent policy. Ideas there have been, usually several at a time contradicting each other, never worked out beyond glib cliché. Are we meant to be a libertarian tax-haven, subsidise farmers even more, turn into a big Norway, or somehow revive imperial preference? Why not all four at once, and introduce a uniform for taxi drivers, as the UKIP manifesto once memorably promised? What could be more consistently conservative than to turn down the option of risking everything on this collection of ramshackle utopias?
Thirdly, Hitchens seems to think that the Outs aren’t going to win, and that Euroscepticism is going to disappoint at the polls yet again. He makes the good point that for a movement that constantly claims to be hugely popular, they can’t get elected dogcatcher. This also tells us something about Hitchens, though. Rather than put his back into it, he’s going to slink off and dodge any responsibility for failure that might be floating about.
Fourthly, he complains…well, he never fucking stops, but he specifically complains that after the Ins win the referendum, the issue will be considered closed for years. Well, yes. Elections have consequences. The upshot of this is that he’s going to do nothing at all to help his side win, and when they lose, keep on whining about the EU and pretending the revolution is coming real soon now like nothing happened.
The question, in the end, is whether he ever really believed in it, or whether it was always just a pose. People say this about Boris Johnson, and when you read things like this interview it does look like he’s preparing some sort of face-saving formula to line up behind the prime minister.
It may be stretching things to suggest Johnson has coherent thoughts about policy, but I think he’s caught between his instincts (Little Englander, Posh Version, anti-EU) and his backers (City types, lots of money to lose from a Brexit followed by migration of various trades to somewhere else.)
Hitchens. If you watch his interview with Owen Jones on youtube, you see PH has realised that virtually no-one agrees with him in depth. And indeed, that his critiques of power have more in common with Corbyn than modern conservatism. So, he’s taking his ball home.
Here he goes! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3435500/It-s-great-Tory-EU-panic-PM-roasted-team-IDS-lashes-Cameron-Boris-blurts-ve-NEVER-wanted-quit-EU.html
Actually I’m with Sonia Purnell; he’s never actually been a eurosceptic, he did it for the money (remember where his main income comes from) and a lot of his public statements on it take the classic Boris form of a heavily telegraphed “controversial” headline plus a lot of other stuff that rows back the other way.
There is a lot of overblown rhetoric in Tory/UKIP Euro-scepticism but not much depth. If the EU is a prison, Hitchens should be able to tell us how we wandered into it (led by the Tories) and why we don’t walk out of the open gate. If the EU is bad at negotiating trade agreements (as suggested in that Daily Mail article) then someone should be able to say what a good trade agreement would look like and why the EU is incapable of negotiating one. They are uncomfortable with analyses that involve power or vested interests or collective action problems or accountability, so the implied reason for any EU absurdity is that Brussels is full of foreigners (as if the UK does not have its own civil servants and commissioners there).
Should I take it on trust that Bernard Jenkin or IDS would negotiate a better fishing agreement or trade agreement (and do it more transparently)?
Not exactly relevant, but your “raw input” claims that Johnston press is good at newspapers and cares about them. Apart from a steadily declining share price, which suggests they aren’t very good at them, Johnston press is well known for currently running the Scotsman into the ground by cheapening every factor possible whilst still charging the same cover price. This means sales are plummeting, as you would expect. Eventually the newspaper will have to shut or be sold for a pittance, but that doesn’t exactly match good with newspapers or caring about them.
My own experience of them is the Yorkshire Post. True, it’s a pity they sold the Hatherleycore head office building, but I’d rather have the paper and lose the building than vice versa.
So how has the Yorkshire Post been then? The evidence of the local papers in Scotland is that they’re basically cross-pollinating everything, so if you want to know about stuff that happened in other parts of the country it’s the same extruded pap by underpaid interns.
Unfortunately I can’t find the article that laid out clearly what has been happening to the Scotsman. It seems to have vanished into the internet.