Patriotic

I've largely stayed out of debate on the EU lately, as the whole thing is just too depressing to even attempt to engage with. Chief amongst my disappointments is the fact that millions of people are still stupid enough to believe that any one politician is different from the rest simply because he says he is. Didn't we already see the folly of that one with Nick Clegg? Politicians are fundamentally all the same: they are looking for your approval and they will go to pretty much any lengths to get it. Saying that they are not really a politician is clearly just another thing that politicians say; it would only be accurate if they weren't on the TV or radio telling you that you should vote for them. 

My last post was about the hope that we can finally move away from the politics of oversimplified broad agendas of the past and on to voting for issues that we actually care about. I see UKIP as the last gasp of that old fashioned politics: people aren't voting for UKIP because Nigel Farage has presented a series of well reasoned solutions to the myriad issues this country faces, but because he's told them that the source of all their problems is the EU and leaving it will solve all their problems. Somehow he has managed to present this action as policy, which is something that even Alex Salmond has been unable to achieve: not even the most ferverent supporter of Scottish independence believes that that action of leaving the UK will suddenly, magically solve all their country's problems. It is a shame therefore that so many (mainly English people) seem to see Farage's playground politics as some sort of ideology that they can broadly agree with. This is, of course, because it isn't an ideology at all; it is single issue politics disguised as ideology. Hopefully it is just a transitional anomaly caused by the transition from the party-based system to an issues-based representational one, resulting in the worst of both worlds. Voting for UKIP is voting on a single issue that they will have no power to affect, whilst they actually absent themselves from representing you on every other issue that actually might affect you. In many ways, voting for UKIP is equivalent to not voting at all, but then it is likely that a lot of people are voting UKIP as they wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so perhaps they will get the level of representation that they crave. 

This is rapidly turning into the rant that I hoped it wouldn't, so I should probably wrap it up, but before I do, I'd like to quickly look language surrounding this election. For some strange reason, the right-wing press has allocated sole rights to the claim of patriotism to those of the Euroskeptic persuasion. It's as if being patriotic is the same thing as being myopic. I thought being a patriot meant you were willing to go abroad and fight for your country; certainly that's what our grandparents thought. For some reason, the understanding of patriotism has been redefined to mean that you are willng to stay at home and ignore what is happening abroad regardless of the cost to your country of this course of action. As the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I think I'll stick with the old definition of patriotism and engage with Europe in a way that will help my country.