Noise and Empty Vessels



'Empty vessels make most noise' as the say and in the wake of the Newark by-election David Aaronovitch hit the nail on its head when he said: "Unshackle me from the madman on the edge of the cliff" while imploring fellow moderates to be noisier and more courageous.

Indeed!  

Let’s calm down. Ukip’s popularity won’t last


By David Aaronovitch - The Times

Far from the party’s noisy, negative agenda taking root, British people are becoming more inclined to stay in the EU

If a person is absolutely determined to jump off a cliff believing that they can fly, then after a while it may seem officious to attempt to stop them. Unless your leg is tied to theirs, in which case you will want to try a lot harder. This column is about what to do when you find yourself tied to a lunatic.

Let’s begin at the weekend. “The people’s army of Ukip have spoken and delivered just about the most extraordinary result that has been seen in British politics for 100 years!” claimed Nigel Farage. And since then a significant proportion of the political classes seems to have accepted his claim. The metaphors run from revolutions to earthquakes. The old order has been shaken to its very core. Nothing will be the same. The people have spoken. And so on.

To believe this requires you to have a sort of attention deficit disorder view of history and mathematics. If Mr Farage meant something very approximately like 100 years when he said “100 years”, then British politics has seen many more extraordinary and historic results. In 1922 the Labour Party first (and finally) superseded the Liberals in a general election. In 1931 Stanley Baldwin won 470 seats to destroy the secondLabour government. In 1945 . . . This is too easy.

Perhaps the people’s general was just referring to new or recent parties. If so, the Social Democratic Party, created in 1981, vastly out-performed Ukip. Between 1981 and 1983 Woy and Shirl’s boys and girls won a series of by-elections in ultra-safe Labour and Conservative seats, and — in alliance with the Liberals — were polling at 50 per cent in opinion polls. In the 1983 general election, on a turnout of 73 per cent, the Alliance got 25.4 per cent of the vote. On Thursday in the council elections Ukip polled 17 per cent on a turnout of 34 per cent.

In the European elections, with roughly the same turnout, they polled a 27 per cent share and 4.3 million votes. And that, I think, probably represents their high-water mark. It was, after all, an election in which supporting Ukip had the minimum possible negative consequences for an electorate that is almost wholly uninformed about the European Parliament. We probably know more about the State Great Hural of Mongolia.

So, 27 per cent of 34 per cent. Nine per cent of the electorate. This is important, of course. Four million fellow citizens deserve to be listened to. And, indeed, for some time now they have been the only Britons (outside Scotland) anyone has been listening to. Their anger. Their resentment. Their feelings of alienation. Their genuine concerns.

But what about the 73 per cent who did not, despite everything, vote Ukip? You’d hardly believe, in the days since last Thursday, that they even existed. They are to be entirely taken for granted while the agendas of the panicking parties are trimmed and fashioned to appeal to the vocal minority that gets its rocks off by pretending that it is the silent majority.

We do not have brave politicians at the moment (with the possible and surprising exception of Nick Clegg). They bend to the most raucous winds, vibrate to the loudest blasts. It is not in Ukip’s ability to win elections that its threat to the rest of us lies. No more than 17 per cent of people — and probably far less — will ever vote for the bizarre mish-mash of spend-high, tax-nothing policies that Mr Farage is likely to come up with for 2015. No, the peril lies in the main parties creating their policy programmes, their promises, around the key prejudices of the Ukip-minded minority. In which case they will promise the impossible or, if possible, promise something harmful.

It is a remarkable thing that no Ukip voters are ever allowed to be among the 30 per cent of Britons who currently admit to harbouring some race prejudice. It is, of course, impertinent to suggest otherwise. But it certainly seems to be true that the party draws far more heavily on negative feelings than on positive ones. It is in a perpetual descriptive frenzy of defining who is to blame for the world’s dreadfulness. The Big Three are the elite, the EU and the immigrants. And don’t start me on the humourless feminists.

The elite can look after itself but Ukip-influenced policies on the EU and immigration would be a disaster for most of us. If Faragisme helped to lever us out of Europe and tried to close the country to questing migrants, then we’d be poorer, less influential and saddled without the means to cater for an ageing population.

I think many of us know or intuit this. And we may also wonder what happened to our “genuine concerns”. While we listen, endlessly, to the fixations of others on Europe and immigration and witness their almost erotic enjoyment of their own anger (if I were disabled and unemployed I might be entitled to be angry, but a retired stockbroker from Sevenoaks?), we seem to speak less and less about whether the NHS model is sustainable, about long-term energy planning, about housing programmes, about social care, about the crisis of investment, about future skills, about the world our children must make their ways in.

Here, this column turns into an appeal to the main parties and to my own scribbling and broadcasting class. You have nothing to gain from indulging this spasm. The more you say that you feel their pain, the more pain they will say they have.

Note instead the signs that they are not capturers of the public mood but rather are the polarisers of it. Since Ukip — the anti-EU party above all — began its recent two-year rise, the British people have become more inclined to want to stay in the EU. Two years ago all polls showed majorities for withdrawal. Now they show majorities for staying in. Perhaps (and I believe this to be true) people look at the Faragian tonsils and, after a while, quietly think: “Nah.”

But quiet isn’t good enough. Ukip and its partisans are the furious folk who always lay militant claim to represent the rest of us. In that sense they are like the Donetsk separatists: guys out on the streets preening about with bazookas in front of the cameras, blathering about the people’s will and bamboozling the foreign journalists. They make all the noise and suck up all the air. Meanwhile the majority of people are sitting tight indoors silently hoping that they’ll go away.

Lord, in these days of trial, help my fellow moderates to be noisier and their representatives to be more courageous. Unshackle me from the madman on the edge of the cliff.

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