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| "Drink hearty, Friend" |
Nick Griffin addressed a victory rally not long after his and Andrew Brons' election as MEPs and wiped a tear from his eye, as he thanked the assembled activists for all their hard work in helping to get him elected to the European 'parliament'.
Why do I put that word parliament in inverted commas? Because the European 'parliament' is not a real, not a proper parliament at all. It cannot initiate its own legislation for one thing. Virtually all it can do is to say 'yea' or 'nay' to proposals emanating from the European Commission, which is an international bureaucracy of unelected civil servants that actually drafts proposed legislation.
In fact we, as nationalists, should be glad that the European 'parliament' has as little power as it has. The more like a genuine parliament it becomes, or is allowed to become, the more like a state in its own right becomes the confederation of the European Union (EU).
Now, there is a great deal of ignorance and apathy amongst the electorate regarding the European Union. This can be evidenced by looking at the average turn out in European 'parliament' elections and comparing it with the average turn out in a general election. It's roughly half the general election turn out (which itself is only about two-thirds of the electorate) and similar to that in most local elections.
It's not that the electorate are happy with Britain's membership of the European Union. They're not, as opinion polls and surveys regularly demonstrate. No, it's that, uneducated as they may be about the minutiae of the structure and procedures of the European Union, they do at least understand that electing MEPs to its 'parliament' cannot have any direct influence on whether Britain remains a part of the EU or not.
To put matters bluntly: we cannot leave the EU by winning greater representation within its 'parliament'. When you're in a hole you stop digging. You don't, if you have any sense, try to dig your way to Australia. We can leave the EU only by winning significant representation at Westminster and securing a majority vote of MPs (not MEPs) for the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972, which took us into that association.
It follows from this that British parliamentary elections and by-elections, rather than European 'parliament' elections, should be the main focus of our party's electoral efforts and that local elections should come a close second. Local election campaigns, with the aim of ultimately winning control of local authorities, are the best stepping-stone to winning seats at Westminster. It is no accident that the voting system for elections to the European 'parliament' (viz, proportional representation and party list) has been made easier for small parties than that for elections to either local councils or the national parliament (viz, first past the post).
The vastness of Euro constituencies, the party list and multi-member mode of representation, as well as the fact that the European 'parliament' is rightly perceived by the electorate to be nothing more than a gilded talking shop, all militate against a high rate of voter participation in Euro elections. The same factors also militate against the transferability of a political party's success in Euro elections to success in the more traditional and in the final analysis much more important, council elections and parliamentary elections.
The example of UKIP and its baker's dozen of MEPs should be a warning to us. Has UKIP been able to build on its success in accumulating so many MEPs? Has it been able to transfer that success to council and Westminster elections? It has not.
The European 'parliament' is a political dead end, the graveyard of political careers and of small parties alike. It is surely no accident that the emoluments and allowances of MEPs are so much more lavish than those of MPs, who do at least have something more closely approximating a proper job of work to do, while the regulatory oversight of MEPs' expense claims is so much more lax than the regime for MPs.
Why should MEPs receive, as they do, a much larger allowance for employing staff than MPs receive, when MPs have a much greater workload than MEPs?
I suggest that the answer lies in the latent function of the European 'parliament', as envisaged by those foreign 'statesmen' and senior civil servants who first established it and have overseen its subsequent development.
The European 'parliament' is, in effect, an enormous honey trap. A five star Siberia, it assimilates those who were elected on a platform of secession with practised ease, insidiously encouraging them to 'go native' and to dissipate their precious time and energy where their activity can do least harm to the status quo. The same applies to the MEP's staff. An MEP does not only withdraw himself for much of the time, both physically and mentally, from the scene of the main action, when he is elected 'to Brussels. He also withdraws and preoccupies a number of his closest political allies, when he appoints them to his staff. We have seen the adverse effect of this in the marked decline in the quality of leadership our party has received since the summer of 2009.
All of this is well understood by the Establishment and the enormous salaries and allowances of MEPs are regarded as money well spent, in order to neutralize effective political opposition. The Eurocrats pre-empt real opposition by diverting MEPs from their key national concerns and the problems of their constituents, towards, inter alia, foreign 'fact-finding' junkets, international conferences, overseas speaking engagements and the forging of 'useful' European links.
This process of 'house-training' MEPs obviously takes longer with some individuals than with others. Some take to the life-style more readily than others. But it must surely exercise its influence on every MEP. Its influence is not conducive to the furtherance of the nationalist cause.
I should like to propose that in future, post-Griffin, that is, the European 'parliament' be put back in its box. It has been played with enough. If European 'parliament' elections are to be contested at all, it should be clear to everyone that such an effort takes second place, or rather third place, in our party's order of priorities, behind the effort to elect councillors and MPs and the maintenance of a proper system of support and training for those who are elected.
Furthermore, in the event of MEPs being elected, I suggest that consideration be given to a principled policy of abstentionism. The Euro election having been contested, perhaps in only our two strongest regions, primarily for the purpose of promulgating the party's message, any nationalist candidate elected could choose to boycott sittings of the European 'parliament', as a remonstrance against Britain's continuing membership of the EU. Nationalist MEPs should appreciate that simply by attending sessions of the European 'parliament' and its committees they are, unavoidably, helping to lend the institution and hence the EU as a whole, a credibility and a legitimacy to which it has no right.
A consistent policy of abstentionism would not only make a bold political statement in its own right, but would also enable MEPs and their staff to use their time more productively, in their own country and in their own region.
I do not necessarily expect this analysis and these proposals to be well received by either of our MEPs, or for that matter by their respective staff. But then telling people only what they want to hear has never been my forte.
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