Yesterday I voted for the first time since moving to Italy. I've never bothered registering to vote in the council elections and, as an immigrant, I'm ineligible to vote in national elections. However, given the rise of anti-EU sentiment, fomented by the far right in order to deflect people's attention from the real source of our economic problems, I felt it was a moral duty to vote in the European election. My reason for doing so can be summarised by the columnist Sergio Romano's succinct reply to a reader's letter in yesterday's Corriere della Sera about why he felt it was important to vote in the European election:
Aggiungo una sola considerazione. Se gli Stati nazionali europei affrontassero in ordine sparso i problemi dell'economia e della sicurezza in un mondo ormai «globalizzato», saremmo tutti condannati a subire la volontà degli Stati Uniti e della Cina oggi, del Brasile e dell'India domani.
[I'd add one further consideration. If the nation states of Europe were to try to tackle the economic and security problems they face in a 'globalised' world in an uncoordinated way , we would all be condemned to submit to the will of the United States and China today, and Brasil and India's tomorrow.]
[I'd add one further consideration. If the nation states of Europe were to try to tackle the economic and security problems they face in a 'globalised' world in an uncoordinated way , we would all be condemned to submit to the will of the United States and China today, and Brasil and India's tomorrow.]
A simple and basic truth which is never offered for consideration to those poor souls who naively believe that withdrawing from the EU would restore national independence.
This morning David Cameron was interviewed by Evan Davis on the Today programme about Ukip's challenge to the Tories. His comment that people were protesting against the financial hardship they were suffering as a result of Gordon Brown and the last Labour government's mismanagement of the economy was left unchallenged. To have countered this by stating that the crisis was in fact caused by unregulated banks would not have been politically biased but a plain statement of fact. That Davis failed to do so was a gross dereliction of duty, although perhaps understandable in the light of Conservative claims that the BBC is biased against them.
The anti-European parties made significant gains throughout the EU, but their triumph wasn't quite as sweeping as the headline to Martin Kettle's article in today's Guardian would have us believe:
True, his article does include the adjective 'most' to qualify his statement that:
.... as they voted against Europe, British voters have never seemed more part of the European mainstream than they do this morning. Across Europe, in one way or another, voters in most countries did very much the same thing
but it scarcely impacts on the message his readers will take away: the whole of Europe is against the EU.
For there is another EU state with only slightly fewer inhabitants than the UK, and occupying a similarly sized territory, which produced very different results:
The governing party, the pro-European left of centre Partito Democratico, got its best election result ever - over 40% of the votes cast - whilst Beppe Grillo, Nigel Farage's potty-mouthed Italian twin, saw his party's share of the vote fall. If the result was surprising - Grillo had been boasting that his party would thrash the PD and as a consequence the government would have to resign - the irrelevance of the twitterati was less so. Only yesterday, 13,000 of Grillo's supporters were tweeting the hashtag 'vinciamonoi' [we're winning] whilst the PD's hashtag 'unoxuno' was tweeted by little more than 3,000. Clearly while fewer self-obsessed users of the 'social media' support the PD, it attracts more adults who interact with the real rather than the virtual world and actually make their way to the polling station.
