Wensleydale, Yorkshire.
6 May. This is England red in tooth and
claw. High up in the majestic Yorkshire hills I am but a flat-cap stone’s throw
from my native Sheffield. The sheep
stand fast protecting their new-born lambs from the scything, sheeting and
predatory rain. This is a place of unforgiving
beauty. It was much the same back in 1381 when Wat Tyler and Jack Straw led the
Peasant’s Revolt. Although the revolt
failed disastrously it served as a stark warning to England’s ruling
aristocracy that the feudal age must end.
With David Cameron surrounding himself with his Old Etonian ‘chums’ and
Downing Street resembling ever more Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year
sketch (“Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith has an O-Level in Camel-Hygiene”) last
week’s English local elections saw the peasant’s rise again as the United
Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) took an historic 25% of the vote.
Speaking with locals in
a Yorkshire pub (the Yorkshire National Security Council) the prevailing mood
was one of anger. Anger with an
out-of-touch Westminster political elite deemed to have failed them and their
country. ‘Europe’ and immigration have
become the twin metaphors for the out-of-touchness of this increasingly despised
Westminster political class. Indeed,
immigration and ‘Europe’ are now hopelessly and irrevocably entangled in the
English popular mind with both seen as politically toxic. And yet listening to Conservative,
Labour and Liberal Democrat spin doctors it is as though nothing has happened.
The three ‘established
parties’ like to pretend that UKIP’s rise is merely a temporary political
phenomenon, a protest driven by economic insecurity. That is not the message I got. The EU is now seen by much of England as a
hostile force with Brussels the hated metaphor for foreign interference and
Westminster its obedient poodle. There is
a profound and widespread sense that EU membership was an historic mistake for
England that has generated huge cost for little benefit. One suggested that the Scots would not be
contemplating independence from the UK were it not for the undermining of the
British state by ‘Brussels’. Indeed, people
see the EU creeping ever further into their lives and object to the false
choice on offer from the elite between staying in an undemocratic EU and
reforming it (which has over years proved impossible for the British) or
leaving and facing more decline. It is a
choice seen as typical of the declinism inherent to the political class.
With limits on
immigration from Bulgaria and Romania about to be lifted the fears of another
surge from Eastern Europe is also very real so soon after the post-2004 immigration
shock (as it is seen). It would be easy
to say this fear is closet racism and there is no doubt that some of the UKIP
vote reflects that but by no means all. A
recent book, ‘The British Dream: Successes and Failure of Post-War Immigration”
by David Goodhart, grandson of a former master of my Oxford college and fully
paid-up member of the liberal London elite, reveals the extent to which that
same elite ‘experimented’ on the English through immigration and their search
for ‘diversity’…and the damage it has done to the social fabric of the country.
None of my
interlocutors I would describe as racist and all were willing to accept a
reasonable level of immigration.
However, if my Yorkshire pub is any measure mass immigration is a source
of social and cultural friction of such potency that it is changing England in particular
in ways to which millions of ordinary English object. They people I spoke to simply feel like so
many English people – used, abused and ignored.
It is not the job of
politicians to react to every populist urge.
However, Europe and EU immigration both speak to something much deeper;
who governs Britain? London or Brussels? Equally, whether Britain remains in the EU or
not balanced immigration is and will be a key to Britain’s competitiveness in
the twenty-first century. For the
record, my pub friends all understood that.
The tortured metaphors
and double-speak of political correctness that have hitherto marked ‘the elite narrative’
(whatever that is) on both immigration and Europe must now end. A sensible debate is urgently needed on both
issues. Indeed, the forthcoming and now
unavoidable British referendum on EU membership will by definition pose the
most fundamental question of all; do you want to scrap the British state? For that is what more Europe will really mean
and one cannot be part of the EU without accepting more Europe.
The political genie is
out of the Westminster bottle and until the Establishment parties face up to
the mess they have created UKIP will set the political agenda.
The peasants are indeed
revolting…and long may it continue.
Julian Lindley-French-Smith-Smythe
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