Splitting the anti-EU vote

March 19, 2009

Splitting the anti-EU vote

Members of the imploding UKIP are becoming fixated on the activities of the splinter UK First Party, which will contest the European elections. They will not be UKIP's main opponents.

Also on the ballots will be Libertas. They will no doubt set out to attract the eurosceptic vote, even though they're not actually anti-EU - they advocate an EU which would be (more) democratic, though so far they are refusing to say what they mean by this or how it could be achieved. The effect, though, of strengthening the EU's democratic credentials would be to increase its legitimacy and therefore possibly EU integration. It's hard to see what sectors of UK voters this proposition would attract, with its vague theme offering ambiguity in outcomes.

This week's Daily politics poll shows more support for the EU among ABs than among lower "social grades".

In answer to the proposition "Britain benefits overall from membership of the European Union in terms of jobs and trade", 50% of ABs agreed against 47% who didn't, while among DEs only 35% agreed, while 58% didn't.

Among the social grades, only ABs disagreed that "Britain should leave the EU but maintain close trading links".

On a regional basis the majority for leaving the EU was highest in Wales and the South West (62% v. 35%), and lowest in Nigel Farage's South East, where the margin was 51% v. 45%.

Of course the anti-EU BNP has its greatest appeal among the lower social grades. They will also be targeted by union leader Bob Crow, who is launching a new political party today. No2EU - Yes to Democracy will only fight the European elections. If this anti European party win, candidates will refuse to take up a seat in the European parliament, take a salary or claim any expenses.

This doesn't suggest they would be influential, but it does suggest a certain purity, and may well attract anti-EU voters disenchanted by tales of UKIP on the gravy train, which we will doubtless hear much more of as the European election approaches.

Perhaps preference votes will turn out to be important.

March 16, 2009

The Heartland amateurs

Booker and North are keen to tell us that the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change on the theme "Global Warming: was it ever a crisis?" was a conference of proper scientists. Indeed. And there were hommes d'affaires, among them the redoubtable Booker himself.

Both men lament the paucity of press coverage. One can only say that the conference organisers do not seem to have made it easy for the media to report them - or indeed for the rest of us to find out what went on.

North refers us to "the proceedings of the New York conference ... admirably summed up in American Thinker blog". Marc Sheppard's dense summary is interesting, but his gobbets have very little context and there is no attempt to tease out themes of any of the four tracks - palaeoclimatology, climatology, climate change impacts, and economics and politics. As the tracks ran in parallel, this would naturally have been beyond one man.

We can see the conference agenda here, offering us powerpoints of many of the contributions, and recordings, html or PDFs of a few. Accessible, huh? We learn for instance, that Piers Corbyn spoke on "What Does and Does Not Cause Climate Change". Clicking the powerpoint link for this one talk produces 36 slides. While the concluding slide is interesting (if overcrowded), others rapidly lost this layman.

Nothing wrong with that in itself. Corbyn was a scientist talking to scientists. But where is the two paragraph summary telling me in layman's terms the key point he had to make and why it was significant? At least Corbyn provides the powerpoint summary, while for Booker's talk - and he is a professional communicator - we are offered no summary at all.

I think it was Sununu who urged speakers to provide the media with soundbites. Well, in those terms the conference was a spectacular failure.

One Bob Carter blogged from the conference, and his introductory piece is here, while his daily summaries are here, here and here. He gives a good flavour of the plenary sessions, but again he could not attend all four parallel tracks.

Carter also provides a link to Joanne Nova's Skeptic's Handbook, which seems to be a work in progress. This gives a helicopter view of a few main points of the debate, and is a good place for new readers to start. One speech certainly worth enjoying is Monckton's crowd pleasing closing address - one may imagine that delegates left fortified and fulfilled.

But if the conference was about speaking to the wider world, it was a failure. There was evidently no systematic effort to get digestible versions of the main points out day by day. Am I just being lazy? No. I have spent quite some time clicking and reading and reading and clicking and puzzling.

The organisers should not judge their conference a success. The messages were important, and many of the truths imparted could have been understood by laymen.

If this conference is repeated in 2010 - and I hope it will be - the organisers should assume right at the start that mainstream media coverage will be minimal. Write the press summaries of each track and day before the conference starts, and get them out promptly in digestible formats.

If they cannot think of anyone who can do that, an email to Sununu would doubtless produce the names of several expert communicators.

This light is too important to be hidden under a bushel.

P.S. They messed up last year too on the Manhatten Declaration.