Politics: a breath of fresh air

By Richard North - February 15, 2025

When US vice-president J D Vance took to the stage at the Munich Security Conference yesterday, the magazine Foreign Policy reports that most people were expecting him to hold forth on the topics that had animated the huddles and discussions around the venue leading up to his speech: European defence spending and the fate of Ukraine.

Clearly, Vance had anticipated that. After his preamble, when he expressed his “thoughts and prayers” over the car-ramming in the city the previous day, he acknowledged that the gathering was there to discuss “security”, by which was normally meant “threats to our external security”.

From all accounts, few could have expected the direction that the vice-president was about to take when he declared that the Trump administration was “very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine”, adding that the administration also believed that it was “important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

But, from there, he departed from expectations to state that, “the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America”.

Some may dispute the accuracy of details that Vance offered, which may amount to nit-picking, but the thrust of his complaint was, in part, the erosion of democracy, instanced by the cancellation of the results of the Romanian presidential election.

This had been followed by former EU commissioner Thierry Breton’s warning that if the European Commission decided that the election in Germany had been in some way influenced by foreign interference, they would seek to annul the result, just as they had done with Romania.

With the caution that “We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them”, he then went on to tackle the attacks on freedom of speech, noting that, in Brussels, the EU Commission commissars had warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest, requiring providers to delete “hateful content”.

He then instanced Germany where the police had conducted raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny” on the internet.

With that, he looked to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government had convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder.

The judge in his case, Vance observed, chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant a “free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief”.

Taking in examples from the UK, where Army veteran Adam Smith-Connor had been convicted for praying silently outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic, and Scottish government action in respect of so-called “safe access zones”, he had also noted that in Munich, the organisers of the very conference at which he was speaking had banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating.

As to the UK, Vance might have been better off referring to the scourge of the non-crime hate incidents, and the locking up of social media commentators after the summer riots, but he did what he did.

Nevertheless, the case stands firm enough to justify Vance’s concerns that free speech is in retreat. However, he conceded that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship had come from within his own country.

He instanced how the Biden administration had threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation – misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government, he said, encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

But, in Washington, he declared, there is a new sheriff in town. “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views”, he said, “but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square”. Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration would do precisely the opposite.

Talking then of increasing defence spending, Vance then posed the question of how Europeans could think through the budgeting questions if they didn’t know what it is they were defending in the first place. It was not clear to him, and certainly not to many citizens of Europe, what exactly it was that they were defending themselves for. What was the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

Making a crucial point that was central to the speech, the vice-president went on to assert his deep belief that “there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people”.

Europe faced many challenges but the crisis this continent faced right now was “one of our own making”. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, he said, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American. “You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years”.

You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail and nor, he said, can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.

This brought Vance to the vexed question of mass immigration, noting that no voter on the continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. People don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate questions such as immigration at the ballot box.

Thus, Vance declared, “I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy”.

What no democracy, American, German or European will survive, he warned, “is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered”.

Democracy, he added, rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. “There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future”.

Needless to say, the speech hasn’t gone down so well with the European “progressives”.

Foreign Policy notes that most of the speech was met with stunned silence. “Gobsmacked” was a word used repeatedly in the aftermath, and one attendee walking out of the Bayerischer Hof venue described the speech as “utterly, utterly frightening”.

One senior European official said Vance “did something whilst being in Germany that Germans are pretty good at: Teaching lessons to others”. Another official had far stronger words. “It was total bullshit. We don’t know what planet he is on”, adding, “At least when we met Keith Kellogg, we could talk geopolitics,” they added, referring to Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine. “With Vance, we can’t even agree what a democracy is.”

For all the indignation, though, in his substantive points, Vance is right. Speaking personally, I do not regard Putin as an enemy of the UK, and I believe that the idea that a Russian leader, victorious in Ukraine, will then go storming into Europe proper, is vastly over-cooked.

I myself have written previously about the enemy within and believe that we, in the UK, have far more to fear from the Starmer regime than we do Putin, with the British prime minister already having effectively declared war against his own people.

Says Vance in his conclusion, “We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership”, but to disagree is increasingly becoming outlawed, as our leaders retreat to their bunkers. The vice-president is a breath of fresh air, but I suspect he will be ignored.

Yet, for once, the Telegraph has got it right. Our reactionary order does not understand that nations that have betrayed their own people are not worth defending, it says.

Expecting Europeans to fight against Putin’s tyrannical regime as our own civil liberties are wantonly cut away is as delusional as demanding that America continue to play the role of global policeman against the wishes of its voters. J D Vance has given our leaders a brutal wake-up call: change now or be replaced.