Liberal Brexiters’ cognitive dissonance
This week we heard Prime Minister Theresa May tell people struggling to get by that they are right to identify low-wage migrants as the source of all their problems while Home Secretary Amber Rudd floated the idea of forcing firms to list the number of foreign nationals they employ. Meanwhile, it has emerged that the government has barred non-UK academics from taking part in a publicly-funded Brexit project at the LSE.
This in turn has prompted some prominent Brexit backers to publicly lament that such illiberal, anti-foreigner policies are ‘not what Brexit is supposed to look like’. They assert that the noble, open-to-the-world Brexit campaign fought by Vote Leave has been perverted by over-zealous Remainers such as May and Rudd for the purposes of delivering a caricature Brexit that they wrongly believe most Leave voters want (Note how everything that goes wrong is — and will for ever continue to be — the fault of Remainers).
Fraser Nelson’s piece for the Telegraph is a good example of this genre:
“ The Tories who campaigned to leave the EU were very keen to portray it as a internationalist endeavour — not a nativist yawp… And the unachievable pledge to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands?” The Brexiteers did not repeat it.”
In this alternative rendering of history, there was a clear distinction between the Tory-driven Vote Leave, which campaigned on a platform of exciting trade opportunities with the likes Malaysia and Mozambique, and the UKIP-driven Leave.EU/Grassroots Out with its unpalatable ‘Breaking Point’ poster. This is complete nonsense. Vote Leave may have been marginally more subtle, but it put the house on inflaming (in many cases entirely legitimate and understandable) concerns about immigration, as epitomised by the poster warning of 80 million Turks’ supposedly imminent entry into the EU.
Now, credit where it is due, this tactic proved more effective than many had anticipated, but let’s not pretend it was anything other than cynical. Of course many voters were attracted to the idea of freer trade with the Commonwealth or striking a more optimal trade-off between sovereignty and international co-operation, but the notion that it was these factors that drove record high turnout in places like Stoke-on-Trent, Hartlepool or Merthyr Tydfil is fanciful to put it mildly.
Nelson is not only airbrushing the more nationalistic rhetoric of other prominent Vote Leave supporters such as IDS or Stewart Jackson, he is also simply factually incorrect when he claims Brexiteers did not commit themselves to the government’s ‘tens of thousands’ net migration target. Both Michael Gove and Boris Johnson did exactly this — they explicitly claimed that eventually, once the UK had left the EU, the target would be met. Boris even had the gall to claim non-EU migration could go up as a result even though he must have known that on its own it is already well over the 100,000 mark.
To my mind it seems as though ‘liberal Brexiteers’ are having trouble aligning their romantic visions of Brexit with the views and motivations of many ordinary Leave voters. The post-referendum Lord Ashcroft poll was very telling — 69% of people who thought globalisation was a force for ill voted to leave as did 80% of people who said the same of immigration.
There is a now climate that is relatively more hostile to migrants and foreigners because overall, that was the tenor of the campaign, it is not a coincidence. The same issue arises with the post-referendum spike in hate crimes which many leavers are in complete denial about (It is possible to make the connection without accusing all Leave voters of being racist). Having incited such strong passions, Boris et al are now finding it is not simply a matter of flicking the off switch now that the campaign is formally over.
I have consistently believed that a Britain that is genuinely open to the world, including when it comes to future immigration policy, can be economically successful post-Brexit. However, the climate we are in now both domestically and internationally is not exactly favourable to that end, as was already clear ahead of the vote. Liberal-minded people across the Remain-Leave spectrum will have to work together, but that in turn necessitates an honest as opposed to a Panglossian appraisal of how and why we are where we are.