Tag Archives: Framing

“The national interest” – the next term to reject in the EU framing fight

“It’s in Britain’s national interest to be in the EU” – it pains me how often we hear that phrase (or words that that effect) in speeches made by UK politicians about the EU. Yet we very seldom question its use.

The need to start to question it, for me at least, has been given new urgency by Douglas Alexander’s EU speech earlier this week (full text here) that mentions ‘national’ 9 times, and ‘democratic’ only once*. Alexander uses phrases like “those of us who see Britain’s national interest as best served within the European Union”.

But what does that actually mean? What is the national interest?

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We need to stop being cheerleaders for the status quo

One of the responses to the Tory rebellion yesterday on the EU referendum vote has – rather predictably – been a call for ‘pro-Europeans’ to be more assertive. Clegg has said Britain should lead and not leave the EU, and over at LabourList Luke Akehurst has a piece entitled “We need to recapture the passionate European voice“.

There are a serious problems with these sorts of responses.

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The Atheist Bus Campaign has re-framed the UK’s ‘debate’ on religion

The Atheist Bus Campaign is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and may prove to be the biggest thing I ever will do. It was more than three years ago that the original campaign started, and it still lives on.

In recent days a new controversy has been brewing in Oxford as Richard Dawkins has declined to debate visiting American theologian William Lane Craig and Craig’s supporters have taken out 30 ads on Stagecoach buses in the city (more from The Oxford Times) with the slogan “There’s Probably No Dawkins”.

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Portugal’s emergency loan – why ‘bailout’ is the wrong word

I was on the BBC World Service programme “World Have Your Say” (programme site, blog) earlier to talk about the implications of the election success of Timo Soini’s True Finns party in yesterday’s parliamentary election. The discussion briefly examined the reasons for the support for this populist party, but the main focus was what the consequences will be for Portugal’s ‘bailout’ from the EU, as all 17 Eurozone members have to agree to assistance for Portugal. The BBC has a Q&A about it here, Gavin Hewitt is talking about political earthquakes here, and YLA has a summary of the main parties’ positions here.

But what is this ‘bailout’ actually?

What – importantly – does the image of ‘bailout’ conjure up in your mind? It’s the picture of water being thrown overboard from a leaking ship and – once the water is out – it’s subsumed into the rest of the ocean, lost.

Hence – in political terms – the very image of ‘bailout’ is wrong. It implies that the money (from the Finns in the case of Soini’s argument) will never be returned. But that is not so, as eloquently argued in this blog post by Henning Meyer at Social Europe Journal. Money is being lent, not given, and is being lent at rates at which lending countries will make a profit.

So this is not a bailout for Portugal. It is an emergency loan. That’s an important difference.

Photo: Amir Jina “Bailing”
December 22, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
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‘Now is not the time to put the environment in the back seat’ – some framing lessons for Janez Potočnik

Yet more EU politics reflections via Twitter today – I saw this from Janez Potočnik, Environment Commissioner:

'Now is not the time to put the environment in the back seat'. My speech to Greek parliamentary committees today http://tinyurl.com/3gjm5cl
07.04.2011 13:51 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@JanezPotocnikEU
Janez Potočnik

The link leads through to a speech he gave in Athens today – full text here.

The key message – that the worst of the financial crisis is over for Greece and now is the time to focus once more on environmental matters – is fair enough, but my problem is with the framing of the title of the speech. I had to read it a couple of times before I understood the point. Not for the first time in an EU comms matter, the framing is all wrong – it’s the words ‘put the environment in the back seat’ that stick in mind, while Potočnik actually wants us to do the opposite.

Anyway, to give Potočnik his due he (or one of his staff) replied to my tweet to him, and as a result I’m going to send him a copy of George Lakoff’s excellent Don’t Think of an Elephant.

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Britain national interest in the EU, or citizens’ interests in the EU?

It’s so easy for non-EU-phobic politicians in the UK to slip into it: a discourse that membership of the European Union is ‘in Britain’s national interest’. Wayne David’s recent piece for Labour List uses the term three times. Ben Fox, writing for the same site, says:

But an In/Out referendum might at least deliver one thing – an honest debate about the EU, its role in global politics and Britain’s role

Now here’s a radical idea. If a referendum is about the voice of the individual voter, how about giving some emphasis to the individual’s representation in the European Union? Fox should have added the words ‘and citizens’ role within it’ to the end of his sentence.

In other words, the phrasing should not be that I am a citizen of Britain, and that Britain is in the EU, but rather a simpler notion that as a Brit I am citizen of the European Union. That I have certain rights and responsibilities, and wield some power and influence, directly as a citizen of the EU.

If we cannot work out what Britishness means, even internally, why do we always bang on about membership of the EU being in our national interest? Strikes me it’s another broken frame in the UK-EU debate.

Photo: Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier “EU Flags”
August 29, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
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Britain and Europe: In, out or somewhere in between? – well, that’s the wrong question for a start

The Fabians are running an event tomorrow entitled “Britain and Europe: In, out or somewhere in between?” I can’t attend the event as I’m in Austria at the moment, so I’ll raise a few points here instead.

Frankly, the very title of the event makes me annoyed.

Why can we simply never move on beyond discussions about in or out of the European Union in the UK? OK, if you’re UKIP or Bill Cash then maybe you have the incentive to talk about this, but where is the incentive for an organisation linked to the Labour Party to pose a question this way?

For Labour, Britain’s membership of the EU has been a reasonably undisputed fact for a long time, and it’s about time the discourse caught up.

The old pro-European vs. eurosceptic frame is broken (as I’ve previously argued) and while debate is stuck on that issue there’s no way to discuss what those on the left – in the UK and elsewhere – should really be talking about, namely what a more social EU would actually look like, and how the UK can play a role in that.

A related discussion would be about how parties on the left – in the PES at EU level, and nationally – find a compelling message to get themselves back into power.

The two people I know in the UK in Labour circles who could give some compelling answers to these questions – Henning Meyer (of Social Europe Journal) and David Schoibl (chair of Labour Movement for Europe) are not even on the programme…

It is also vital that the debate does not start at the event about whether Labour should advocate a referendum on in-or-out of the EU, a matter I raised earlier this week. Yet with Wayne David on one of the panels, and Sunder Katwala chairing a panel, I fear this issue will raise its ugly head.

On balance I’m happy that the event tomorrow is taking place, and that the Fabians are starting to talk about EU matters. But it’s going to be a long and slow process before that debate in any way becomes meaningful.

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Framing the debate: Future of the BBC

BBC - CC / Flickr

BBC - CC / Flickr

There’s something deeply wrong with the ‘debate’ currently going on about the future of the BBC, and I think it boils down to the essential question: what is the value of public service broadcasting?

Two themes dominate the debate at the moment. The first is a kind of cost-benefit analysis, do license fee payers get value for money from the BBC, and should the license fee even be cut? The second is a kind of backward looking analysis, getting the BBC back to some halcyon days that probably never actually existed, all evoked by the oft-cited phrase “Putting quality first” (implying that at the moment this has not been done).

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