The Blame Game
In case you missed it, there was a referendum in Britain on Thursday. There were two choices: Should Britain remain in the EU or leave the EU? By early on Friday morning, the results were in: 52% voted for Leave, 48% voted for Remain; voter turnout was 72%.
Now, the urging of everyone by everyone to vote one way or the other has given way to harsh invective against anyone who voted to leave, a petition to change the rules of what would constitute a referendum win (over 60% of the popular vote from at least 75% turnout), calls for the result of the referendum to be ignored and a stampede of ‘I told you so’ every time the financial markets shift one way or the other.
In short, now that the vote has taken place, those who disagree with the result are blaming those they believe are responsible for making what they consider to be the wrong choice.
David Cameron is being blamed for holding the referendum in the first place. Boris Johnson is being blamed for being cynically manipulative of the electorate to fuel his intended journey to 10 Downing Street. Anyone who voted leave is being pilloried as a racist, a xenophobe, a Little Englander, a baby boomer intent on consigning the younger generations coming up behind them to a harsher world for selfish or ill-conceived reasons, an ideologue choosing supposed principles over real issues that affect real people…the list goes on.
In this clamour, very little blame is being laid where it most belongs: the EU.
The high-handed technocratic attitude of the EU leadership, before and during the referendum, has been a huge contributing factor to the outcome of this referendum. It has been known for some time that Britain would eventually have a referendum on its relationship with the EU — in 2009 David Cameron argued in favour of a referendum (and implicitly for a ’No’ vote), while succinctly outlining real problems with the Lisbon Treaty; one of his motives for calling for the referendum was that a referendum was promised in 2005 but was never held.
It is worth recalling that France, Ireland and the Netherlands held referenda on the Lisbon Treaty and all three countries voted ’No’. The EU’s response was to force those countries to simply ignore the result of the vote; in Ireland’s case, a second referendum was held. In Britain, despite a promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, none was held. While mainland Europeans voted against the treaty and had their choice ignored by the EU leadership, British people concerned by this disdain for the will of the people were watching.
So it has been known, for over ten years, that at some point, a British government would accede to the repeated demands for a referendum. The argument that the timing of the 2016 referendum was arbitrary is only partially true — when it comes to a non-urgent vote (i.e. not a declaration of a state of emergency or war) all timing is arbitrary, because it has to be held some time and could be held at any other time. But arbitrary does not mean unexpected, nor does it mean unwanted. Concern over the contents of the Lisbon Treaty were not partisan, and they ran much deeper than immigration.
After getting re-elected, David Cameron announced that Britain would hold a referendum on its membership of the EU. He declared that he was off to Europe to secure a better deal for the UK, and that once he had the EU’s best offer, he would make that offer the basis of the Remain campaign. From the EU’s perspective, there was no sense in re-negotiating anything with Cameron: If the British people vote Remain, why make concessions when they might agree to remain without them? If they vote Leave, why negotiate at all? The point blank refusal of the EU leadership to even consider the threat of a British exit from the union as serious, and to be unwilling to negotiate on the basis of that threat, meant that David Cameron was left with the unenviable position of going to the British people with a decidedly imbalanced proposition: Vote Remain if you want everything to stay exactly the same (a relationship with people who don’t take your concerns seriously), or vote Leave if you want to stick it to the Man.
Of course, in substance it’s much more complex than that, but the optics (as PR slang would have it) were clear: the EU could either bend to suit British interests or tell them to go screw, and the EU told Britain to go screw. “Go ahead and leave if you want,” they said, “but we won’t negotiate.”
For people who already feel hard done by, who already feel that the system has either failed them or their children, who have watched their standard of living stagnate or decline while their earning power gets eaten away, who are surrounded by a media environment of non-stop fear-mongering and financial gloom, and who have no choice but to view their elected representatives as a bunch of paid PR men and women for business and foreign interests who don’t care about them, how the hell did anyone think they would vote? They voted to stick it to the Man. In many cases, they were in reality sticking it to themselves, but the EU represented the Man even in those circumstances when it actually wasn’t the Man.
Some people voted Leave because they wanted to ‘stop Muslims coming into the country’, which is of course absurd because other than EU citizens who happen to be Muslims, the bulk of EU immigration is from Christian countries. Some wanted to ‘take back our borders’, again, absurd, as the UK is an island and already polices its borders. Some were fed up with what they saw as over-regulation from Brussels interfering with their livelihoods. Some were concerned about the anti-democratic structure of the EU. Some were worried that, given the ‘function creep’ the EU had undergone between 1975 and now, the EU could become something very different to what it is now before another referendum could be held, if ever, on whatever shape it eventually took in the future. Some bristled at the attitude of the EU to the individual needs of its member states, such as the very public gelding of Greece after a referendum to reject bailout conditions insisted upon by the ‘Troika’ of the IMF, ECB and EC; 61.31% of the Greek people voted against the deal and then the prime minister signed it anyway less than a week later. Some simply don’t believe that there should be a ‘United States of Europe’, and that individual nations can trade freely and live peaceably without a supranational apparatus to govern their governments.
Unfortunately, in 2016, immigration became the central argument, and for many voters who chose to leave the EU, it was the main motivation. It is of course true that Britain will have immigration no matter what, if not from the EU then from outside of it. For those who voted because of an antipathy towards Muslims, it will be a bitter irony that capping EU immigration will probably increase immigration from other parts of the world with much higher Muslim populations. It is also true that free movement is a pre-condition of access to the European free trade area, so the so-called ‘Norwegian option’ (in which Britain, like Norway and Switzerland, remains outside of the EU but a part of its free trade area) would still include the immigration to which so many British people voted to put an end.
The heavy reliance of the Leave campaign on resistance to open migration created a very toxic atmosphere, in which those for Remain basically branded any Leave voter a racist (and continue to do so in the aftermath), and in which pretty much the sole representation of Leave campaigners and voters in the media was and continues to be the anti-immigration side of the argument. The media’s blindspot towards its own complicity in making the referendum all about immigration is nowhere clearer than in the Newsnight grilling of MEP Daniel Hannan about what immigration will be like now that a Leave vote has been obtained. In the interview, the host repeatedly interrupts Hannan to rail about Leave campaigning on an anti-immigration platform even while Hannan is telling him that there will still be EU immigration; a brief review of the news coverage of the referendum makes it clear that in both the pro-Leave and the pro-Remain press, the Leave campaign was intentionally portrayed as being specifically anti-migration, in the former case in a crass attempt to garner votes and in the latter case in order to discredit the Leave campaign as a bunch of small-minded insular racists.
In London, a multicultural city of nearly 9 million people, it’s very easy to dismiss parochial concerns about immigration. London has been multicultural for a very long time, and for most of its residents, the presence of people from all over the world is simply unremarkable. It is not uncommon to go for an entire day without hearing English spoken without a foreign accent, or even at all. This is not new to Londoners and, as a result, creates very little in the way of reaction. Also, London is the home of the biggest multinationals, so at the corporate level and within the broader economic context, it stands to lose more than the rest of the country from stricter regulation of immigration. This made it very easy for Londoners to see a Remain vote as not only the sensible or acceptable choice, but the only choice. The bubble this created blotted out the inconvenient fact that there are 55-odd million people in Britain who have not experienced de rigeur multiculturalism in a constantly growing and evolving metropolitan city as a backdrop to their lives.
In some places in the UK, it is normal to have concerns about immigration and voice them without being branded as a racist. It just happens to be that those places are not London. For a city so heavily invested in its international role and promotion of diversity, London proved remarkably indifferent and insensitive to the feelings of the rest of Britain on this issue. Londoners are probably more likely to know someone from France or Italy than they are to know someone from Dudley or Bradford. That doesn’t make Leave campaigners banging on about immigration right, but it does mean that the media and political establishments of the country, based in London, completely miscalculated the mood of the country because of their own experience of living in a city that is nothing like the rest of the country.
Furthermore, the transparent scaremongering of both sides left everyone with a bitter taste in their mouth. Either one was to believe what was being said, that Britain is playing chicken with the EU over its future, or one was to conclude that both sides are wildly overstating the downsides of not choosing their box on the ballot paper.
Now that the votes are counted and the answer is Leave, David Cameron has announced that he will resign, less than two weeks after announcing that he would definitely not resign if there was a Leave vote, which itself came several months after he said that he definitely would resign if the public voted against him, which in a weird way they didn’t do since he recorded a video of himself promoting an anti-EU vote in a referendum in 2009, before he was prime minister and when he was trying to do to Gordon Brown what it seems that Boris Johnson has succeeded in doing to Cameron in 2016.
Cameron also promised that in the event of a Leave vote, Article 50 would be triggered immediately and Britain would have two years to negotiate the terms of its departure from the union. In his resignation speech he announced that he would not trigger Article 50, and that he would leave it to his successor to handle that. Who knows what will happen in the next three months that may prove more pressing than dealing with Article 50? Parliament may choose not to act on the result of the referendum. There are many ways this could play out, and nobody really knows. Most tellingly, with a thin but clear majority of Leave voters in Britain, now would be the perfect time to negotiate with the EU about Britain’s position within it since this time, to quote an Anthrax album title, “the threat is real”. Hardly anybody is clamouring for an immediate withdrawal from the EU on the back of the referendum — the opinion of the people has been accounted for and now a course of action must be plotted rather than taken reactively.
Funnily enough, a few political leaders have been very vocal on the need for Britain to ‘leave [the EU] immediately”: Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, Donald Tusk (another EU president) and Martin Schulz. Juncker’s response to the vote was to demand that Britain starts packing its bags and gets out as quickly as possible. There was nothing in the substance or tone of his response to imply a conciliatory approach, a hint that perhaps now the EU leadership will negotiate with Britain to keep them in but on more acceptable terms. Nothing of the sort. From his perspective, he can’t very well have the other 27 member states all holding referendums and them demanding better deals as well — that would put the EU in a very difficult position. But that in itself is at the heart of the question that very few people have been asking during this entire referendum news cycle: Is the EU there for its members, or are the members there for the EU?
If the EU is there for its members, then it is simply an administrative body that deals with the minutiae of cross-border trade and the other things that the original EEC was meant to enable. In that capacity, it should make room to accommodate the very different cultures and requirements of the various states. If the members are there for the EU, then the EU is a separate thing, apart from and above the member states, whose needs and demands must be served and met because it is more important than the needs and demands of its constituent members.
The truth is that if the EU just wanted free trade and movement between the countries of Europe in order to keep them on congenial terms and acting in their common interest, it could have that by limiting itself to those functions which deliver that service to its members, a service for which those members pay. However, the EU has ambitions that go far beyond that limited remit (a remit which was approved by British voters in 1975 and then far exceeded in the following four decades without public consultation).
The goal of the EU is a federal, centralised United States of Europe, the end goal of ‘ever closer union’. It was the EU’s choice to adopt the euro. It was that choice which created the straitjacket that condemned the so-called ‘periphery’ countries to a damning cycle of structural adjustment and bailouts by removing the sovereign ability to manage the money supply and control interest rates. When the inevitable, and very widely predicted, problems of the euro arose, the EU’s response was to ignore or crush dissent in the troubled countries, to install technocrats without elections, to demand obedience and expect compliance. For example, Italy hasn’t had an elected leader since 2008.
If the British public did not feel inspired by the prospect of staying a part of the EU, it might be at least partially related to the behaviour of the union they were being asked to evaluate.
The tragedy is that nobody has won this referendum. It’s totally apparent that being able to move, live and work freely across 27 other European countries is wonderful. Being able to do business with any other EU country is brilliant. Not having a land war in Europe for seventy years is tip-top. Britain has a clear kinship with Europe, and the idea that nations are able to open to one another for mutual benefit is a powerful and uplifting one. If the EU is offering all of these great things and people still don’t want it, the post-referendum backlash is claiming, what does that say about those people? Another argument could be: What does that say about the EU?
P.S.: It is true that 52% is not a commanding majority, and that the repercussions of leaving the EU will affect the whole population, 48% of whom don’t want it to happen. 72% is also not the highest turnout imaginable. In a democracy, where is the line between what constitutes the will of the people and what constitutes a nearly even split? Is it fair that 48% of voters suffer the consequences of what 52% of voters want? Ideally, nobody should be subjected to the whims of others without their consent. But this also raises a deeper issue about what constitutes society: do we really believe that we are all in this together and that for better or worse what the majority of people believe in is what we should do? There is a petition for London to secede from the UK as a result of the referendum. Or do we actually not believe in democracy at all, but rather that someone else should just tell us what to do because they know better? Many people protested that the referendum was being held at all, saying that this is a matter for Parliament to decide, not the people. If your elected representatives know better than you do about the EU, why do you argue against their decisions when they agree to invade another country, commit British forces to airstrikes, not respond to a refugee crisis or sell off the NHS? Why are Parliamentarians necessary to buffer the nation from the whim of the horde when you agree with them, but a bunch of overpaid careerists with only their selfish financial interests in sight when they decide to close your local maternity ward or rewrite your junior doctors’ contracts?
If there was a referendum on whether or not to privatise the NHS and 52% of people voted against it, would it be reasonable for the 48% that want it privatised to demand that the result of the referendum be ignored, or that the referendum be re-held with tighter rules on what constituted a win?
There are no easy answers to these questions. Is it alright if only 40% of people are very unhappy with the way the country is going, or 30%, or 2%? Should democracy be run by consensus rather than majority?
What if Leave had lost the referendum 52% to 48%? How would you feel if they started a petition with over half a million signatures demanding that the referendum be re-held with different rules? Would it feel extreme if they began campaigning immediately for a second referendum?
Ultimately, where is the line? How do we agree, the millions of us from so many different walks of life and cultures and points of view, to make decisions in the aggregate, decisions that affect us all but that not everyone agrees with?
The EU has a solution to that question: no democracy. From the commissioners to certain representatives of member governments (such as Wolfgang Schauble), it has been made very clear in word and deed that Europe can only be run effectively if the 28 members states agree to ignore the will of their citizens on key issues if they want to remain part of the union. The EU can only function if decisions are made and imposed, regardless of how those on the receiving end feel. Britain already had an arms-length deal with the EU and was not part of the euro and a large swathe of the population feels wary of continuing on that basis. Spare a thought for the people of Greece, of Italy, of Spain, Portugal, France and even Germany. Who knows what tsunami is coming if they decide that it is time for their rulers to listen to them? Will that be a bad thing, with ignorance and bigotry at its root? Or will it be the direct consequence of the way the EU has chosen to comport itself?
Suffice it to say, if you feel that the people of Britain should never have been asked whether they want in or out of the EU in the first place, the way the EU does things probably makes a lot of sense to you. If, however, you really don’t like something that your government is doing and you think that the best way to change it is to create a petition, to protest, to pester your elected representative, to strike, to demand change from a political establishment that is perhaps unresponsive but at least legally accountable to you, the sad truth is that none of these are things you can achieve in the EU under its current constitution. So to those who wish to remain in the EU no matter what, and who want another referendum, or the result of this one to be disregarded, it should be a matter of pride and gratitude that you are still governed by a system that responds to those desires and not by one which, over time, may prove far less amenable to the pesky concerns of the people in matters of broader import.
