09 June 2016

Remain!

The muddle after Brexit.

By John Watson

Personally I enjoy a little lowbrow family comedy and the excellent series “My Family”, starring Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker, is always good for a laugh.  A lot of the jokes, of course, are old ones and a recent episode centred on the contrast between the behaviour of the generations in relation to a teenage party. The teenagers, needless to say, behaved highly responsibly. The parents, of course, behaved like idiots.

It was while I was watching it that it occurred to me that it was not merely a comedy but also an allegory for the EU referendum debate. There, there are two groups of people: the politicians who are supposed to be wise and balanced and give a lead; and the public who are supposed to be more swayed by their emotions and in need of sensible guidance. As in the comedy, it has all turned topsy-turvy. The politicians get more abusive and less rational by the minute: meanwhile the public, in a serious-minded and perfectly civilised way, listen to the arguments and try to strike the right balance between the various risks.

Not all the politicians have behaved like idiots, of course. An honourable mention must go to Andrew Tyrie, Chairman of the Commons Liaison Committee, for his attempts to rein back some of the more extravagant mis-statements, but as the end of the campaign looms there is little prospect of the standard of debate rising.  So it seems likely to remain: public – rational and reflective; politicians – hysterical and decidedly over the top.

This curious inversion is something new. In the past, an elector would typically decide to support a particular party and then, not uncritically but most of the time, espouse the policies which the party leader followed. That left party machines and elected representatives in an intermediary position. It was they who carried the public’s trust and it was they who had to make responsible decisions on the public’s behalf. Now, however, it is different. Unable to get sensible honest answers from the party machines, the public has simply gone past them and is looking at the issues for itself. There are plenty of sources of information. The newspapers all have views, as do the bloggers (the views of the Shaw Sheet editors are split). Social media is packed with commentary and every organisation from the IMF to the WTO has come out with an opinion. So too have the leaders of other countries. Voters are now looking at myriad sources and, as they do so, what the various politicians think becomes ever more academic.

Why has this happened?  Perhaps the easy availability of online information made it inevitable that the deferential relationship between the public and the political leadership would begin to break down.  Perhaps the splits within the political parties have disrupted the relationship they previously enjoyed with their supporters.  However it be, the result is striking and will become more so if the decision is to leave. In that case the public will have comprehensively rejected the advice of almost all its political leaders.

It is against this background that you have to judge the suggestion that, following a Leave vote, the pro-EU majority in Parliament could assert themselves by forcing the country to stay with the market as members of the EEA. Even if that is practical internationally, it would sit oddly with a Leave decision as the price paid for membership would include free movement of people between the UK and the EU and that is precisely the issue fuelling the Brexit campaign.

The oddest thing about the proposal, however, is that the pro-EU MPs, majority though they be, should think that following a Leave vote they would have any sort of mandate to try to claw the position back. The country, for better or for worse, will have spoken and its leaders going forward will have to be people who understand and are ready to deliver the choice that it has made. That doesn’t mean that they need to be Brexit supporters but at least they should be comfortable working with the direction in which the referendum has taken Britain.

They will need to be strong, too. The excitement which will greet a vote to Leave will inevitably be followed by a period in which the public worries about whether it has got the decision right.  It is then that the public will look for confident leaders able to take realistic decisions, coldly and wisely, in very difficult circumstances. They will not include Mr Cameron, who will just have seen his huge political gamble misfire. I don’t think they will include Boris Johnson or Michael Gove either. As things get difficult, the public will be asking questions about whether they misled it.  That leaves Teresa May as a possibility and no doubt other will emerge as well.

The other novelty of a post Leave world is that what will then be the main  issue in the British politics, the rebalancing of the U.K.’s external relations, will be a cross party one. Up to now, the Labour Party has distanced its own pro EU campaign from that of the government by focusing on the way the EU achieves its social objectives. In a Brexit world there would be no room for face-saving niceties of this sort. The question will be one of survival, and those of similar minds in the two parties will end up working together, much as they did in the war.

No one can tell how this will pan out and I certainly do not propose to try. Clearly, however, a Brexited vote will mean a major political realignment and it will also have the effect that individual members of Parliament will have outgrown their mandates.  They will have been elected on the issues as they stood in 2015, not on the issues as they stand after the vote. That means that, after taking a few months to get our bearings, we must have a general election. Then at least members of Parliament will have the opportunity of explaining their views on the new relationships to the electors who can make a fresh choice on the basis of what they hear.

It is when you look at the confusion which would follow a Brexit decision that you realise what a very large risk it is to vote for Leave. If we go for Remain, of course, the risks are different. There is no dislocation of our economy but there is the danger of being dragged into a more and more oppressive European superstate.  That isn’t a particular pleasant prospect either but, as you look round Europe, the idea of the superstate seems to be becoming more and more restricted to the political elite.  Do we really think that it is viable in the face of challenges by the anti-Europeans on the far right and the far left?

The balance is difficult to strike, but I think that there is this to be said. The risks of remaining in are better understood that the risks of leaving, and there is nothing as destructive in politics as uncertainty.  If we remain in Europe we will be able to fight the things which we dislike and to form alliances with those other members of the EU who dislike them equally.

In this week’s paper there were two comments on the referendum from overseas which are particularly interesting. One was from Angela Merkel stressing the importance she placed on working with the UK.  That is what you might have expected. The second, however, was in the French left-wing journal “Libération”, whose Brussels correspondent, Jean Quatremer, wrote:

“if you stay, you will ruin our lives like never before. David Cameron will be the only European leader capable of winning a referendum on Europe and will therefore gain a central role in the EU game.”

He also said that British leaders would “negotiate concession upon concession in order to completely bury the federal dream of the fathers of Europe.”

I have no idea whether Mr Quatremer was being ironic or not.  Either way, though, he makes it sound worth a go!

 

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