Brexit and Kipling; and, Cameron’s Doing It Wrong

Two short essays about Britain’s vote on Thursday:

I

Like many Americans, I wasted some perfectly good time and brain cells trying to decide how I would vote if I could in the British referendum. I decided firmly that I would vote Remain, and I still think I was right. No one has any clear idea about what will happen to the British economy after Britain leaves, and it’s not a good idea to take a leap in the dark. There is a certainty of short-term disruption, and a real possibility of outcomes ranging from bad to disastrous. And leaving produces big subsidiary headaches — among them what happens to Scotland and Northern Ireland. And on top of that, the Leave campaign became very much an anti-immigration campaign. There are good arguments for a moderately restrictive immigration policy; Ross Douthat has recently made them very well. But restrictionism quickly shades into just hating people who are different from you, and there’s no good argument for that.

So I was for Remain. My rational self was anyway. My irrational self (the one who hopes both Trump and Clinton lose in November, by a landslide) was gleeful at Leave’s victory. What was I, or part of me, cheering at?

I was cheering at seeing the arrogant, complacent European Union get a kick in the ass. Its leaders have been sure for decades that they know what is good for the people of Europe. Quite often they’ve been wrong, but they have always done what they wanted, and they never give the people any choice about going along. These leaders are chosen by a theoretically legitimate process, or rather by a number of processes so complicated that no one understands them. They are in practice unaccountable to anything but their own refined consciences. Some of them are bureaucrats whose names no one even knows. Some of them are members of the European Parliament, theoretically elected, but no one knows their names either. And some of them are the political leaders of nation-states — but they practice continental European politics, where the people who get in, from whatever party, all went to the right schools and think the right thoughts and know how to gang up on the voters. If the voters get uppity and vote something down in a referendum, their leaders tell them to vote again. Or if it doesn’t look like that will work, the leaders do what they want anyway and forget about letting the people vote.

Continental Europeans are used to this sort of treatment. They figure all their governments are full of manipulators and liars and crooks, and they curse and complain and put up with them. Britain’s a little different, as the great and good of Europe have just found out.

Maybe they should have consulted the Norman baron Kipling wrote about. The baron fought with William the Conqueror, and was rewarded with some English land, and the Saxon tenants who lived on it, and he found that the continental ways of handling the lesser orders didn’t work so well in England. He warned his son on his deathbed:

“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears;
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.”

II

Cameron came out the next morning and said in substance: “The people of the United Kingdom have voted to screw themselves. Their will must be respected, so I’m out of here.”

Not the right thing to say. He’s still Prime Minister, and he has a job to do. Here’s what I would have told him to say if he had asked my advice:

“The people have spoken and the decision is made. Yesterday we were 52% for Leave and 48% for Remain, but we are all Leavers now. We are going to leave the European Union and we are going to make it work.

“No one knows better than I that the path we have chosen contains many risks and some inevitable hardships. It also offers an opportunity for a more independent, more prosperous and prouder Britain, one still bound by commerce and friendship to our neighbors on the continent.

“While I remain Prime Minister, I will devote my every effort to assuring that we avoid the risks, relieve the hardships and seize the opportunity. So should we all. We are all British, and we are going to pull through this together.”