Echo Two

The LRB seems to me to have done the best in-depth reporting on the referendum and the surrounding issues that I've read. How to grow a Weetabix is a wonderfully wide-ranging piece that looks at the nature of Britain as it actually is and the various issues that have built up to this moment.

It also nailed a point I was struggling to see for myself, that the Leave campaign can do and say anything and be a protean figure that anyone can get behind. I was already wondering about the fact that the money currently going to Europe has been re-spent ten times over during the debate.

This quote from a Brexit-supporting farmer, Stuart Agnew, wonderfully summarises the magical thinking.

As we talked I realised he was treating the referendum as if it were a general election; as if, instead of resolving a single issue, whether or not to stay in the EU, a vote to leave would usher in a new Britain, where farmer-hampering officials, Agnew-unfriendly regulations, scientists whose analysis he disagreed with and popular hostility to genetically modified food would fade away of their own accord.

He blamed the EU for forcing him to bury sheep rather than cremating them. He blamed the EU for stopping him growing GM crops (he was one of England’s trial growers). He blamed the EU for excessively tight control of pesticides and for forcing him to place an electronic tag in the ear of each sheep.

As the writer points out, leaving the EU isn't going to magically convert the British into feeling different about GM food or mad cow disease or foot and mouth disease. Climate change isn't going to depend on whether Britain is a European Union member or not.

But Remain is fighting for the status quo and Leave has the freedom to offer everything to everyone. Since no-one really knows what will happen after handing in notice of Britain's membership there is a chance, no matter how small, that anything might be possible. Farm subsidies might go up, migration might go down, we might be able to deport more people, we might be better off, wage might go up.

Saying yes to every possibility ends up with absurdity though. Some of the things that the Leave campaign are starting to promise are in direct contradiction to one another.

I loved this article, entitled Europe's sullen child, on the London Review of Books.

In recent years countries like Hungary and Poland have started systematically to dismantle democracy and the rule of law within their own borders. They have weakened the judiciary, captured the media, and attacked all opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic. Brussels isn’t the great threat to the rule of law in Europe, it is increasingly authoritarian individual governments that pose a real danger not just to their own citizens, but to anyone holding a European passport; as long as they are represented in the European Council, the decisions they make affect everyone in the EU.

Because the majority of British people don't feel threatened by their own government right now (although certain segments, like the former miners, are rightly suspicious of the benignity of their government's intentions towards them) there is a tendency to forget why the rules and restrictions exist in the first place. Europe, including Britain, has never been a place of steady, untroubled progress. It is not a straight-forwardly good thing to let nation states do what they want without any external restrictions. Look at Yugoslavia, was the right time to intervene after the massacres had started?

The impression that right-wing populists like to give of themselves as defenders of democracy is, needless to say, deceptive. For one thing, the EU states have not ‘lost sovereignty’. That the UK can hold a referendum on whether or not to leave, while at the same time treaties can be amended only by a unanimous decision of all states together, is enough to demonstrate this point (which is not to say that individual states haven’t ceded many powers or that they aren’t, on a day-to-day basis, subject to bureaucratic decision-making in Brussels and rulings by the European Court that can go strongly against their national preferences).

In Britain, prisoners don't have the vote. Judgements by the European Court of Human Rights have been routinely ignored because the popular mood in Britain is that prison is a punishment and loss of voting rights is part of that punishment. When we choose to we happily ignore European rules that contradict our national desires.

The British Parliament exercises sovereign rights frequently, but erratically, making it difficult to differentiate between what is the will of British politicians and what is the result of aligning to the single market and European harmonisation. I personally suspect that that isn't a coincidence. Vote with your conscience in the lobby, blame it on Europe on the doorstep.

Populists always need enemies and conspiracies to explain why they aren’t already in power, or, when they do get to rule, why they aren’t succeeding and why there can’t be such a thing as a legitimate opposition. The EU has served them well in this regard. But it is naive to think that, even after getting rid of the supposed dictatorship of Brussels (and Germany), they would rest content.

If there are illegal migrants crossing the Channel in small boats then it is not because of the EU. The EU has not made Britain reduce its budget for the navy and border protection. That's something we've chosen to do ourselves as it is one of the "invisible" cuts we have made as part of our mania for austerity-lite.

In some ways I actually think a Brexit might be better for the country while worse for me personally. The first step towards recovery is being able to be honest with yourself and while we have the EU to be the bogeyman beyond the Channel, the whipping boy for any unwelcome news or poorly conceived policy the British nation seems incapable of seeing itself and its actions clearly.

The article is also excellent on the British abandonment of its European agenda, as a country it encouraged others to join Europe with a view of creating a new consensus on the kind of Europe we should have. After the ascension of Poland I feel we suffered a complete failure of vision and nerve and have retreated into "sullen" isolation, one that primarily seems aimed at avoiding our own failures than those of Europe and the Euro.