Newspeak and the politics of fear

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four concerns a dystopian society in a state of perpetual war.  The society is manipulated into supporting the war by an establishment that controls the minds of its population through a central propaganda machine, distorting the truth and rewriting history.  This is a suitable metaphor for the internecine war far being fought in a as yet very civilised manner across the Conservative Party over the matter of British membership of the European Union.

The rift in the Conservative Party over Europe stretches back twenty five years to the early nineteen nineties, when Prime Minister, John Major, negotiated his way through the Maastricht Treaty.  The squabbling within the party saw John Major’s slender Parliamentary majority whittled away to nothing as first John Smith and then Tony Blair lead a resurgent and united Labour Party through by-election after by-election win.  The Conservative’s squabbling over Europe lead them to thirteen years of opposition and it was only when they admitted this to themselves that they were able to mount a serious challenge to Gordon Brown.

Having done enough to topple Gordon Brown, but not enough to get their man through the front door of Number Ten without the assistance of Liberal Democrats, they found themselves only 75% in Government and tied to a very Europhile partner.  The Eurosceptic wing of the party started shearing away to a resurgent UKIP.  The party leadership struggled to find a way to placate both its Eurosceptical wing and its Europhile Government partner.  The referendum was David Cameron’s chosen tightrope, giving the Eurosceptics a glimmer of hope and persuading the Liberal Democrats that any possible referendum would be after a General Election, that the Conservatives did not seem likely to win. But by unexpectedly winning the election, David Cameron got what he wanted, but also what he dreaded.

While the date of the referendum remained firmly in David Cameron’s gift, the two camps of the Conservative party maintained an uneasy truce, even when it led to spectacular farces such as Theresa Villiers, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, appearing on the BBC’s Question Time from Belfast, declining to express an opinion on whether it would be better for Northern Ireland if the United Kingdom were to remain in the European Union. But once the date was set, the old enmities resurfaced like ethnic tensions in a Balkan war.

The battle lines have been clearly drawn and the leading players have decided on which side of the line they stand.  The Eurosceptic side are a baffling mixture of the oddball, the earnest and the blatantly ambitious.  Their stance is one of blind optimism.  The EU is holding Britain back and once freed from their shackles, the United Kingdom will blossom and bloom.  Quite how this will happen has not been explained and as each possible existing model as to how the United Kingdom might look after Brexit is shown to be flawed to some degree the optimism seems even more blind than it did previously.

The latest suggestion made by Boris Johnson is that after Brexit the United Kingdom will negotiate a trade deal with the European Union along the lines of the deal it negotiated with Canada.  The deal with Canada removes 98% of the tariffs on goods, but without applying the freedom of movement requirements with which the other European nations outside the Union are required to comply if they wish to have trade agreement with the EU. This sounds quite promising, except that the deal between the EU and Canada took seven years to negotiate.  Once the UK formally requests to leave the EU, it will have two years to negotiate its exit.  Alongside this negotiation it will be difficult to seek to achieve as well what it took the Canadians seven years to achieve.  The Canadian deal only covers trade in goods and excludes trade in services.  Given the extent of the United Kingdom’s reliance upon the export of services, an equivalent deal to the one achieved by Canada would be wholly inadequate to safeguard the interests of the Square Mile.

David Cameron is treating the referendum as a personal crusade, touring factories, removing his jacket to show his willingness to roll up his sleeves and get involved in a fight.  He has negotiated his revised deal with the EU, but this has failed to inspire the electorate and so his only weapon is to suggest that the risks of leaving outweigh the possible benefits that might accrue.  This though makes the case against Brexit overtly negative.  All they can offer is that if we leave the EU things will get worse.  It offers his opponents the opportunity to cry “scaremongering”.

It is a strange coincidence that the senior Conservative politicians in the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union were all opposed to the Scottish bid for independence in 2014.  That campaign was characterised by the Scottish National Party and Alex Salmond dreaming about how great Scotland could become if it were no longer tied to the regulations and financial constraints imposed by an English Westminster.  His claims for a currency union and for immediate Scottish accession to the European Union seemed unduly optimistic and he was unable to provide any evidence in support of them, other than blind faith.

Those wanting out of the EU find themselves in the same boat in which Alex Salmond floundered two years ago.  They can make predictions about the possible future of the United Kingdom outside the European Union, but when challenged there is little substance that they can offer in their defence other than to make their knee jerk allegation of scaremongering.

When David Cameron argues that the suggestion that taking control of our borders will allow us to reduce immigration would result in the end of the Le Touquet Treaty and the immigrants in the camps in Northern France boarding ferries to the United Kingdom, that is scaremongering.  When the French Government indicates that they are of the same opinion, then that too is scaremongering.  When in response to Boris Johnson suggesting that the UK could negotiate a Canadian style agreement, it is pointed out that such a deal would not go far enough and would take considerably more than two years to negotiate, that too is scaremongering.

When David Cameron suggested last week that the Out campaign knew that leaving the EU would result in British job losses, he was accused by Chris Grayling of scaremongering.  Chris Grayling stated on the Radio 4 Today programme that the removal of EU red tape and bureaucracy would promote job growth and not losses.  To an extent he is correct.  Regulation certainly curtails the growth and expansion of businesses.  It offers workers and consumers rights that are to the detriment of the businesses themselves. Regulations around Health and Safety, holiday entitlement, maternity allowances, these all reduce the efficiency of business and removing them would undoubtedly improve some of the impediments to job creation that they cause.  Except that as Mr Grayling is fully aware, the bureaucracy and red tape which he wishes to remove is the price that we pay for access to the single market and will continue to be a requirement even should we leave the EU. It is a completely false argument, akin to suggesting that households could save money by not paying their utility bills.  The words are true, but the imputed consequences are not.  And neither can they be considered scaremongering.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia and in other less democratic nations, criticism of the Government constitutes a criminal offence.  Accusing everyone who disagrees with you of scaremongering is not quite in the same league, but in George Orwell’s parlance it is probably a thought-crime.  When Winston Smith read the three slogans WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY and IGNORANCE is STRENGTH, perhaps the slogan writer should have added CRITICISM is SCAREMONGERING.