Brexit?
I have been a supporter of "the European project" since at least my late teens when (in parallel with my O Level history studies of Europe between the Napoleonic and the Great Wars) I first encountered Robert Schuman's and Jean Monnet's proposals for a United States of Europe -- so I naturally voted in favour of the UK remaining a member of the then EEC in the only previous referendum we've had on the issue, in 1975. Later, during my years of political activism in the 1980s, I supported the vision of a similarly integrated Europe "beyond the blocs" advanced by European Nuclear Disarmament, stretching from the Azores to the Urals (an idea which was of course anathema to the Soviet leadership but which also attracted some rather strange right-wing cold warriors). The end of the post-WW2 division of Europe in 1989 promised much -- but the European Union which has emerged from that period has lately rather lost its way. Where we once had the idea of a "social Europe" -- promoted by Jacques Delors to engage the support of the European trades unions -- we now have a Commission which has been captured by the corporate lobbyists of the European Round Table of Industrialists; which wanted to gut the EU's existing environmental directives on the claimed grounds that they impede business competitiveness; which subjected Greece and other states at the European periphery to what Yanis Varoufakis described as fiscal waterboarding (Wolfgang Schauble's retort that democratic elections could not be allowed to trump the bankers is worthy of Cold War era Henry Kissinger); which continues to negotiate in secret with the USA on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and its widely criticised Investor-State Dispute Settlement procedure which would allow transnational corporations to strike down regulations they believe could interfere with their ability to loot the global commons for private gain (it's a fine irony that the Commission doesn't seem to understand that ISDS would sideline it: the corporations will simply strike down any laws it makes).
Despite which, I remain a supporter of the European project, and intend to vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU on 23 June. There's much that is currently wrong with the EU; but without it -- especially outside it, under a government so ideologically in thrall to the neoliberal agenda -- we could kiss goodbye (perhaps forever) to the various rights and protections won since the Second World War: employment rights, maternity rights, healthcare, environmental safeguards, remaining controls on media ownership, politically neutral public broadcasting, on and on -- even (if Theresa May wins the support of the Tory backwoodsmen) human rights. Indeed, a what-has-the-EU-ever-done-for-us list could fill several pages, from lower mobile roaming charges and cleaner beaches to food labelling rules and air pollution controls -- but there have been very few references to these positive points by the remain campaign. Instead, their arguments have focused on the economic and econometric: the effect of withdrawal on interest rates and tax receipts, the costs to business of new tariff barriers, the possible relocation of parts of London's finance sector -- the sort of thing which doubtless excites a Whitehall policy wonk, but to everyone else is turgid, technocratic, unengaging, and in some respects utterly impenetrable, such as last week's report from the Treasury containing several pages of pseudo-algebraic equations: that nonsense is supposed to urge people towards the polling booths? (As Paul Merton remarked on Have I Got News For You, the equations appear to contain the word "eejit" -- see page 171 of the report.) Interventions in the debate by third parties such as the IMF and Barack Obama have been just as dull and beside the point (and of course run the risk of all third party interventions of having the opposite outcome to that intended, of persuading people to vote for withdrawal just to put two fingers up to an establishment telling them that they don't know what they're doing and which they no longer trust or respect anyway).
By contrast, all the positive arguments seem to be coming from the Brexiteers, and have punchily resonant messages which are easy to understand. Controls on immigration! Spending the money we send to Brussels here in the UK! Regulations we make ourselves instead of being dictated to by Brussels! No welfare payments to foreign workers! For all that the Brexit side is led by some of the most barkingly swivel-eyed people to be found in contemporary UK politics -- Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, BoJo, George Galloway, wooden-faced Michael Gove, the reliably robotic John Redwood -- they have what the Remainers don't: name-recognition (even Dominic Cummings, after his appearance before the Treasury Select Committee last week) and enthusiasm. Like it or not, their vision of Britain's future outside the EU is a bright one, and they are promoting it with gusto.
The Remainers, on the other hand, appear to be deploying a version of the Project Fear tactics used by the anti-independence side in 2014's Scottish referendum, but with even less vigour. This is partly attributable to the dryness of their arguments; but is much more attributable to the fact that British politicians of almost all parties have never evinced much public enthusiasm for the EU. For decades, arguably as far back as the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s and certainly by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it has been presented to the British public as a necessary evil, as something to be endured rather than embraced -- with the consequence that it is now too late to persuade people that they should embrace it. Worse: the right-wing news media have been drumming anti-EU arguments into people's heads for the past thirty years, with the result that the Brexiteers have an enormous, inbuilt head-start over the Remainers. One-off set-piece speeches by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn -- especially the likes of residually-Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn -- cannot begin to reverse this. Bluntly, the Remainers cannot expect to win an argument that they have hitherto never bothered to make.
This situation is compounded by the fact that most of the arguments being made for Brexit or Remain are coming from different factions of the Conservative Party, inevitably giving rise to the impression that this is just another phase in the Tories' interminable civil war over Europe and that everyone else should stay well away -- including staying well away from the polling booths -- until the shouting and bloodshed is over. This may explain why non-Tory Remainers are so much less prominent: firstly because they are receiving much less media coverage (BoJo has charisma -- Corbyn does not), and secondly because they are keeping their distance in order to avoid being damaged by the fallout. (The latter would be especially so for the Labour Party, destroyed in Scotland precisely because it lined up alongside the Tories in the anti-independence campaign.) Never mind a possible contradiction about the whole business: if the government believes that the UK should remain a member of the EU, why (asked Victoria Coren Mitchell, again on Have I Got News For You) are we being asked to vote on it? (Yes, yes -- because a referendum was a Tory manifesto commitment. But that promise was made for the purposes of internal party management, and normal people don't read election manifestos anyway.)
The observant will have noticed that I've now mentioned Have I Got News For You twice -- not just because it's so very good at skewering politicians' vanity and stupidity, but because it's perhaps the main source of most people's political news. Who but those us of who actively follow UK politics (undoubtedly not a significant percentage of the electorate) had heard of John Whittingdale, DCMS Secretary of State, before HIGNFY featured him two programmes in a row for dating a dominatrix and then making an undeclared "research" visit to a lap-dancing club? Against this, sober suggestions by (say) Mark Carney that Brexit might negatively impact GDP and economic growth must appear simply yawn-inducing. (I was in Australia when I read them, and what I mostly remember of them is the bad-tempered exchange between him and Jacob Rees-Mogg. All heat, no light, more tedious squabbling about the EU, why can't these people just go away, let's turn the page and look for the latest movie news instead.)
I won't attempt to guess the outcome of the referendum. What I will note is that it will depend strongly on the balance of demographics, with the older cohorts more likely to vote than the younger (there are many reasons for the declining electoral turn-out amongst younger cohorts, but that's a different subject) and the older being notionally more eurosceptic than the younger. (The opinion polls can be largely disregarded. Having so comprehensively failed to forecast the outcome of last year's general election, pollsters have a long way to go before they can be rehabilitated.) I will also note that since his unexpected victory last summer, Cameron seems to have deliberately alienated those non-Tory forces on which he now relies to help him to a Remain victory -- in particular, by cutting the Short Money for Parliamentary opposition parties and by making it more difficult for the trade unions to collect the political levy to fund the Labour Party. Given that, it's not altogether surprising that they appear disinclined to help him out of the hole he's dug for himself (he could have ignored the europhobes in his own party; instead, by pandering to their demands, he has given them more than enough rope with which to hang him). I suspect that in the concluding phases of the referendum campaign Cameron will realise this, but also realise that he cannot undo in a few weeks his previous negative treatment of all other political forces -- marginalising and belittling them, across many years -- that his upbringing and background have inculcated in him. At who and what will he then lash out?
Despite which, I remain a supporter of the European project, and intend to vote for the UK to remain a member of the EU on 23 June. There's much that is currently wrong with the EU; but without it -- especially outside it, under a government so ideologically in thrall to the neoliberal agenda -- we could kiss goodbye (perhaps forever) to the various rights and protections won since the Second World War: employment rights, maternity rights, healthcare, environmental safeguards, remaining controls on media ownership, politically neutral public broadcasting, on and on -- even (if Theresa May wins the support of the Tory backwoodsmen) human rights. Indeed, a what-has-the-EU-ever-done-for-us list could fill several pages, from lower mobile roaming charges and cleaner beaches to food labelling rules and air pollution controls -- but there have been very few references to these positive points by the remain campaign. Instead, their arguments have focused on the economic and econometric: the effect of withdrawal on interest rates and tax receipts, the costs to business of new tariff barriers, the possible relocation of parts of London's finance sector -- the sort of thing which doubtless excites a Whitehall policy wonk, but to everyone else is turgid, technocratic, unengaging, and in some respects utterly impenetrable, such as last week's report from the Treasury containing several pages of pseudo-algebraic equations: that nonsense is supposed to urge people towards the polling booths? (As Paul Merton remarked on Have I Got News For You, the equations appear to contain the word "eejit" -- see page 171 of the report.) Interventions in the debate by third parties such as the IMF and Barack Obama have been just as dull and beside the point (and of course run the risk of all third party interventions of having the opposite outcome to that intended, of persuading people to vote for withdrawal just to put two fingers up to an establishment telling them that they don't know what they're doing and which they no longer trust or respect anyway).
By contrast, all the positive arguments seem to be coming from the Brexiteers, and have punchily resonant messages which are easy to understand. Controls on immigration! Spending the money we send to Brussels here in the UK! Regulations we make ourselves instead of being dictated to by Brussels! No welfare payments to foreign workers! For all that the Brexit side is led by some of the most barkingly swivel-eyed people to be found in contemporary UK politics -- Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, BoJo, George Galloway, wooden-faced Michael Gove, the reliably robotic John Redwood -- they have what the Remainers don't: name-recognition (even Dominic Cummings, after his appearance before the Treasury Select Committee last week) and enthusiasm. Like it or not, their vision of Britain's future outside the EU is a bright one, and they are promoting it with gusto.
The Remainers, on the other hand, appear to be deploying a version of the Project Fear tactics used by the anti-independence side in 2014's Scottish referendum, but with even less vigour. This is partly attributable to the dryness of their arguments; but is much more attributable to the fact that British politicians of almost all parties have never evinced much public enthusiasm for the EU. For decades, arguably as far back as the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s and certainly by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it has been presented to the British public as a necessary evil, as something to be endured rather than embraced -- with the consequence that it is now too late to persuade people that they should embrace it. Worse: the right-wing news media have been drumming anti-EU arguments into people's heads for the past thirty years, with the result that the Brexiteers have an enormous, inbuilt head-start over the Remainers. One-off set-piece speeches by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn -- especially the likes of residually-Eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn -- cannot begin to reverse this. Bluntly, the Remainers cannot expect to win an argument that they have hitherto never bothered to make.
This situation is compounded by the fact that most of the arguments being made for Brexit or Remain are coming from different factions of the Conservative Party, inevitably giving rise to the impression that this is just another phase in the Tories' interminable civil war over Europe and that everyone else should stay well away -- including staying well away from the polling booths -- until the shouting and bloodshed is over. This may explain why non-Tory Remainers are so much less prominent: firstly because they are receiving much less media coverage (BoJo has charisma -- Corbyn does not), and secondly because they are keeping their distance in order to avoid being damaged by the fallout. (The latter would be especially so for the Labour Party, destroyed in Scotland precisely because it lined up alongside the Tories in the anti-independence campaign.) Never mind a possible contradiction about the whole business: if the government believes that the UK should remain a member of the EU, why (asked Victoria Coren Mitchell, again on Have I Got News For You) are we being asked to vote on it? (Yes, yes -- because a referendum was a Tory manifesto commitment. But that promise was made for the purposes of internal party management, and normal people don't read election manifestos anyway.)
The observant will have noticed that I've now mentioned Have I Got News For You twice -- not just because it's so very good at skewering politicians' vanity and stupidity, but because it's perhaps the main source of most people's political news. Who but those us of who actively follow UK politics (undoubtedly not a significant percentage of the electorate) had heard of John Whittingdale, DCMS Secretary of State, before HIGNFY featured him two programmes in a row for dating a dominatrix and then making an undeclared "research" visit to a lap-dancing club? Against this, sober suggestions by (say) Mark Carney that Brexit might negatively impact GDP and economic growth must appear simply yawn-inducing. (I was in Australia when I read them, and what I mostly remember of them is the bad-tempered exchange between him and Jacob Rees-Mogg. All heat, no light, more tedious squabbling about the EU, why can't these people just go away, let's turn the page and look for the latest movie news instead.)
I won't attempt to guess the outcome of the referendum. What I will note is that it will depend strongly on the balance of demographics, with the older cohorts more likely to vote than the younger (there are many reasons for the declining electoral turn-out amongst younger cohorts, but that's a different subject) and the older being notionally more eurosceptic than the younger. (The opinion polls can be largely disregarded. Having so comprehensively failed to forecast the outcome of last year's general election, pollsters have a long way to go before they can be rehabilitated.) I will also note that since his unexpected victory last summer, Cameron seems to have deliberately alienated those non-Tory forces on which he now relies to help him to a Remain victory -- in particular, by cutting the Short Money for Parliamentary opposition parties and by making it more difficult for the trade unions to collect the political levy to fund the Labour Party. Given that, it's not altogether surprising that they appear disinclined to help him out of the hole he's dug for himself (he could have ignored the europhobes in his own party; instead, by pandering to their demands, he has given them more than enough rope with which to hang him). I suspect that in the concluding phases of the referendum campaign Cameron will realise this, but also realise that he cannot undo in a few weeks his previous negative treatment of all other political forces -- marginalising and belittling them, across many years -- that his upbringing and background have inculcated in him. At who and what will he then lash out?