Ann Widdecombe: what a star performer

Steve Bell: Guardian: 5th July 2019

Just when you thought that Nigel 'Dad's Army' Farage had won the trophy for British political clown of the decade, along comes Ann Widdecombe saying “hold my coat”. During her first speech to the European Parliament, Ann compared the EU to slave owners. That’s not hyperbole at all, oh no. That’s just an embarrassment. That’s just an affront to all those millions of people who suffered and died at the hands of the slave trade. It’s an insult to them and an insult to their descendants. And, on a relatively trivial level, it's actually an insult to her constituents in the South West, of which I am one. Not in my name, Ann. Certainly not in my name.

The only thing that Ann Widdecombe is a slave to is her ego and her overweening English nationalist entitlement. When an old Tory who supports austerity, who backs homophobia, who once defended putting women prisoners who were actually in the process of giving birth in chains, claims to speak for the oppressed, satire hasn’t just died. It’s been crushed to its atoms and those atoms split into their subatomic particles.

The gist of her speech was to liken the UK within the EU to a colony rebelling against an undemocratic empire. English nationalists like Ann are incapable of conceptualising any relationship between nations that isn’t one predicated on power and domination. The notion of independent states cooperating as equals is alien to them. They view everything through the prism of the relationship between the nations of the UK. You’re either the ruler or the ruled. A partnership of equals is just a lullaby sung to Scottish Unionists to stop them from crying themselves to sleep at night.

The English nationalism that drives Brexit still hankers for the days when Britannia ruled the waves and waived the rules, when Greater England and its hangers-on dominated the world and enforced its wishes with gunboats. Ann thinks that oppression is going to a restaurant in England and being served a meal by someone from Krakow.

British politics is broken and it can’t be fixed. Scotland may have lost faith in the Labour party a long time ago, but now that loss of faith has been replicated across the rest of the UK. According to an opinion poll from YouGov this week, 24% would vote Tory, 23% would vote for Nigel Farage Ltd. 20% for the Lib Dems, and 9% for the Greens. Just 18% of UK voters say that they’d back the Labour party in a General Election. The Labour party has fallen to fourth place in Westminster voting intentions over the UK as a whole. It is likely that, if there’s an early General Election, parties in favour of crashing out of the EU with no deal would take a majority of seats in England and Wales. This Conservative government is the worst in living memory, the most inept, the most venal, the most incompetent. Yet Labour is still behind them in the polls. Just think on that and despair.

Those Labour voters still remaining can now be under no illusions that the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn is going to save them from a Tory Brexit, even in the unlikely event that Jezza does finally get off the fence and comes out in support of a second EU referendum. It's a crying shame that this single issue is clouding all of the good policies that Jezza stands for. His heart is in the right place, most of the time, but on Brexit, he's really misjudged the mood of the country. And we are all losing out because of it.

Steve Bell: Guardian: 3rd July 2019