The
UK and the EU:
further reflections on the
Brexit vote
by
Malcolm Potter Brown
Contents
The
will of the people
Economics
Politics
Academic
and scientific research
Culture
Immigration
Past
relations between the UK and the
EU
Conclusion
The will of
the people
Following a sustained campaign of
xenophobic
prejudice from the press, 36.86% of the British people voted to leave
the EU, 34.71% voted to remain, and 27.85% of registered voters did not
vote. The allegedly decisively commanding majority was just
2.15%. Of the non-voters we know that some who favoured the
EU
did not bother to vote because they thought victory was a foregone
conclusion. It would be reasonable to suppose that some who
supported leaving did not bother because they thought that their vote
would make no difference, and that there were probably others who
either could not decide, did not care or thought that those in power
would ignore the vote and do what they wanted.
We know too that the Remain side put up
a totally
incompetent case, concentrating entirely on the alleged probable
immediate collapse of the British economy, an unconvincing scenario,
and failing to mention any of the advantages of European integration,
while the Leave side, assisted by the gutter press, presented an unreal
picture of a Britain enjoying all the advantages of the single market
without having to follow any of the rules on freedom of movement, in
full and absolute control of immigration, and saving an alleged but
illusory £350,000,000 per week which could be spent over and
over
again.
It soon became apparent that the Leave
side had
lied. The vast sums of money to be spent on the NHS and other
projects has not materialised because it was never there.
Various
sectors of the British economy have protested that their futures depend
on immigrants, and the EU has made it clear that it will not permit
access to the single market except on its own terms.
It is clear that many of those who voted
leave
hadn’t the faintest idea of what the conditions for leaving
would
be, and that, when these are negotiated, Parliament and, if necessary,
the people, should have the opportunity of scrutinising them and
deciding whether or not they are acceptable and, if they are not
acceptable, of considering whether we would be better off remaining
within the European Community. To say that making this
request is
an attempt to overthrow the “will of the people” is
absurd. The majority in favour of leaving was only 2.15%
despite
the incompetence of the Remain case, the lies of Brexit politicians and
the xenophobic campaign of the press. To deny a request for
parliamentary scrutiny of the negotiated settlement is a denial of free
speech, and to say that it would weaken the Prime Minister’s
negotiating position a total falsehood. It would, if
anything,
strengthen it.
Economics
During the campaign the Leavers
presented an
illusory picture of the UK in full control of immigration, with an
advantageous agreement with the European Single Market and engaging in
untrammelled trade with America and the rest of the world.
Remain
warned that Britain was simply not big enough to act independently and
forecast immediate and irrecoverable doom.
Neither side’s predictions
came true.
We cannot have full access to the single
market
without accepting freedom of movement. Even if we stay
outside
the single market, there is no way we can reduce immigration to the
promised levels. Any trade agreements with America are likely
to
be very much in the stronger partner’s favour, and President
Trump has made it clear that his policy will always be
“America
first”
On the other hand, the economy has not
collapsed,
shares are high, but the pound has gone down in value against the
dollar and the euro, British companies are now in effect available at a
bargain price to predatory American companies as we saw in the
attempted takeover of Unilever by Kraft, several major international
companies are waiting to see what the outcome of the Brexit
negotiations will be before deciding whether to move out of Britain,
and even a British bank like Barclays has made it clear that it will
move its headquarters to Frankfurt if Britain does not have freedom of
access to the single market. One long-term result of Brexit
will
therefore be the dethroning of London from its dominant position as the
financial capital of Europe and its replacement by Frankfurt.
World trade
is now increasingly
dominated by major economies: the United States (324 million), China
(1,382 million), India (1,327 million), and the European Union (510
million, or 445 million without Britain). The following
diagram
illustrates the positions of the seven largest economies which account
for 75% of world trade, and it will be seen that, while the United
States is the world’s leading economy, the EU comes
second.
China, shown as third in the diagram, is rapidly expanding.
Using
other measurements China and the EU are sometimes listed in top position
Admittedly the economic integration of Europe
has not been successful, with economies ranging from the highly
successful, Germany (population 80.6 million) and the UK (65.5
million), down to near basket-cases like Greece (10.9
million).
The over-rapid introduction of the single currency has probably
exacerbated these differences, but prosperity for all members lies
within the union rather than in attempting to go it alone.
Even
within the United Kingdom itself there are wide variations in the
prosperity of different areas, but this is not seen as a reason to
break up the country.
An economy the size of
Britain’s may not be
strong enough to act independently in a world dominated by predatory
larger units. India, for example is so wealthy, despite wide
variations across its population, that a single Indian billionaire owns
the whole of the British steel industry and can threaten to close it
down when he is discontented with conditions here. China has
long
been a ruthlessly predatory economic imperialist power, giving palaces
to African dictators in return for the right to exploit their
country’s natural resources, and, thanks to George
Osborne’s policy, we may find China gaining a measure of
control
over our electricity supply.
As for the United States, the source of
the 2008
crash, it now has the audacity to fine British and European banks for
their part in selling on the toxic loans American banks created, and to
charge them higher fines than its own banks. RBS has made
further
colossal losses because of these fines, and, given that the Government
was obliged to nationalise RBS in order to save it, the USA is charging
the British people fines for its own wrong-doing. The USA
has, of
course, form for this sort of thing: following the 1929 Wall Street
crash it called in all the loans it had made to Germany, precipitating
hyperinflation, the fall of the Weimar Republic, the election of Adolf
Hitler, and the Second World War.
A more sensible reaction to the Wall
Street Crash
was the Glass-Steagall Act, which established a separation between the
activities of commercial banks and investment banks. It was
Bill
Clinton’s government that repealed this measure in 1999,
leading
directly to the financial crisis of 2007-08. America created
the
crisis, and now America wants to profit by punishing others for its own
sins. It is time for Europe to take a united stand and to say
firmly that this is unacceptable. Unfortunately such a stand
is
impossible while the nations of Europe are bickering over Brexit.
Politics
The first half of the 20th century saw
two world
wars, both of which started in Europe. The European Union
began
as a means to ensure the gradual coalescence of Europe and to prevent
any further European conflicts. In this it has been very
successful.
The British vote to leave the community,
narrow
though it was, is a symptom of the wave of nationalist and
particularist populism spreading across the west. The
anti-European and xenophobic mood among many of the brexiteers, whipped
up irresponsibly by newspapers that see profit in pandering to the
worst excesses of popular prejudice, has led to attacks on innocent
people and even murders. The exultation in the tone adopted
by
the brexiteers is very like the triumphalist tone adopted by many of
the British when war was declared in 1914, before they realised what a
catastrophic disaster this was.
In America a similar discontented
populism has
elected the highly unstable Donald Trump to the presidency, a man whose
campaign-style rallies, continuing even after he took office, are
reminiscent of the self-aggrandising rallies held by Hitler.
In France the same sort of nationalistic
prejudice
has brought Marine Le Pen within striking distance of the presidency,
while far-right parties and anti-European movements are gaining ground
in Germany and elsewhere. It should not be forgotten that
Trump’s
victory is alleged to have been aided by Russian interference and that
Marine Le Pen receives funding from Vladimir Putin.
Mainstream politicians have cause to
fear that the
British withdrawal may lead to the disintegration of the European
Community and a return to individual nation-states competing with each
other and with little chance of economic success or political influence
in a world now dominated by much larger entities, a disintegration that
would be very welcome to Putin’s resurgent Russian
imperialism.
It is not just the EU that is in danger
of
disintegration. Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted
Remain. Mrs May’s apparent policy of going for a
hard
Brexit, leaving the single market entirely has already provoked the SNP
into demanding a second independence referendum, and Northern Ireland,
faced with the reestablishment of a customs barrier along the hitherto
open border with Eire is also likely to demand a referendum to decide
whether to leave the UK and join the Republic of Ireland.
We are now in a situation in which the
European
Parliament and the parliaments of the 27 member states will be able to
vote on the deal made between the EU and the UK but, if Mrs May has her
way, the British Parliament will not. In addition both
Scotland
and Northern Ireland will demand referenda to approve or reject the
agreement, but the English and Welsh will be denied a voice.
In
other words, Theresa May has decided that as leader she and she alone
will decide what is to be agreed, which puts her in the same class as
leaders like Presidents Trump, Putin and Erdogan. It is to be
hoped that the snap election she has called will recall her to a more
democratic frame of mind.
Academic and
scientific
research
Until the Second World War Britain and
Germany were
the leading scientific nations in the world. During
the war
Churchill gave the USA all our scientific know-how as an inducement to
help us. In 1945 America grabbed the leading German
scientists,
thereby becoming one of the only two powers to profit from the carnage
and establishing itself as the leading scientific and industrial power
of the late 20th century.
Britain’s record since then
has been
unsatisfactory to say the least. Our research has been of the
highest order, but time and time again there has been no political or
economic support. We once led in nuclear power, now we have
to
ask the French and Chinese to build our reactors. With Blue
Streak and Black Knight we were leaders in the creation of rockets and
in the forefront of the race for space, but the expense was too great
and the project cancelled. Once we had the most advanced
vertical
take-off and landing plane, but again it was cancelled and inferior
American aircraft bought.
More recently our government ordered two
new
aircraft carriers, then backed out, then discovered it would cost a
considerable sum to cancel them, and is now paying to store
these
much needed but currently useless craft, while relying on co-operation
with the French for permitted use of their carriers, an arrangement
that is hardly likely to continue after Brexit.
Even our possession of one of the
world’s
greatest libraries is afflicted by government indecision. A
site
was acquired in St Pancras in the 1970s, and plans devised, but in 1988
the Government indicated that it would provide funding for a building
only two thirds the size of the original plan. Much of the
site
appears to have been sold off, and by 2016 the British Library, the
second largest in the world, was reduced to appealing for a commercial
sponsor to help it develop the last two remaining acres.
As a member of the EU Britain is a full
member of
CERN, with access to the Large Hadron Collider, and thereby a leading
power in nuclear research. Our own research facility at
Harwell
depends on recruiting leading experts from all over Europe.
The
University of Oxford, currently rated number one in the world also
relies on recruiting the best brains, and the heads of its colleges
have recently pointed out that a hard Brexit will threaten this
position and has already made the status of Europeans on its staff
uncertain. The message is: co-operation across national
boundaries leads to faster advances in research, nationalistic
obstruction of the free movement of academics hinders it.
Culture
Just as academic and scientific research
cross the
national boundaries of Europe, so too does European culture.
Unlike the culture of the Middle East, the Far East or Africa, European
culture, whether in England, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, or Poland,
is based on the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition and on classical
Graeco-Roman traditions, modified by our medieval, Renaissance,
neo-classical and romantic periods, all of which are pan-European.
Literature, depending as it does on the
use of
language, is the most likely to be restricted to particular nations,
yet even here literary tradition crosses boundaries. The
classical authors of Greece and Rome, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Virgil, Cicero et al. are and remain the foundation of European
literature along with the Bible. Dante is not just an Italian
author but read across Europe and both he and Boccaccio influenced
writers in other European lands. Could we have had the Canterbury Tales
without the Decameron?
Shakespeare is not
just England’s greatest poet and dramatist but revered across
all
of Europe, especially perhaps in Germany, where the translation by the
Romantic poets Schlegel and Tieck has integrated his work so
successfully into German literature that Germans regard him as one of
their own. The plays of Molière and Racine are
produced in
London, the novels of Dumas and Hugo read throughout Britain.
In
the late 18th century Goethe’s Werther
was a sensation across all of Europe, while his Faust
remains one of the peaks of
European literature.
European Music remains distinct from the
Asiatic
traditions, and, just as in literature we find the succession of
pan-European periods, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical,
Romantic, Symbolist, etc., so these movements occur too in
music.
Opera and its modern popular successor the musical both draw on
European literature. The Italian Rossini and the Austrian
Mozart
both drew on the Frenchman Beaumarchais’ plays: The Barber of Seville
and The
Marriage of Figaro.
Brecht and Weill adapted John Gay’s Beggars’ Opera
as Die
Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera).
Hugo’s Les
Misérables
became a best-selling musical in French then English. The
German
baroque composer Handel spent most of his career in London, and no-one
would ban the music of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven because they are not
British. They are part of our culture.
Painting and sculpture are also
pan-European
traditions, separate from the Chinese or African cultures, and
following much the same periods as the other European art
forms.
Titian, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Rembrandt Velazquez,
Van
Dyke, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Picasso all belong to the
European tradition of art, not to any one nation.
Of course, none of this would mean
anything to the
barely-conscious denizens of Peterborough that I mentioned in my essay
on Brexit, but even the popular sub-cultures draw on and are influenced
by the background of high European culture whether their practitioners
are aware of it or not.
Immigration
One of the principal reasons for leaving
the EU
alleged by the Brexiteers is that we will have full control over
immigration if free movement of workers within the EU no longer
applies. However more than half the foreign immigrants who
come
here come from outside the EU, and it is these non-Europeans who
challenge our native culture and traditions, for many of them have
completely different views on what constitutes acceptable behaviour.
It is not Europeans who use the
on-demand postal
voting system, introduced by the Blair government, to dominate
elections by handing votes over to be used in a block-voting
system. It is not Europeans who take on jobs and then refuse
to
carry out instructions because they offend their extreme religious
view, who refuse to stack alcohol in supermarkets, or to turn up their
sleeves and wash their forearms while carrying out surgical procedures.
It is not Europeans who beat children to death to exorcise demons that
they believe have possessed them, it is not Europeans who mutilate the
genitalia of young girls or who would kill their daughters rather than
see them marry someone from outside their closed community, and it is
not Europeans who take over whole areas of cities and make them feel
alien to the native population, or who demand the right to replace
British law with an early medieval code of their own.
It is not Europeans who insist on
keeping their
women ignorant even of the English language, thereby preventing their
ever achieving integration, and covering even their faces, contrary to
our cultural tradition in which only malefactors hide their
identities. Various European countries have objected to this
practice, and UKIP has now made it part of its policy believing that
British people who prize their national culture will approve.
UKIP may be right, for the niqab and the
burka are
not only alien to the British and European way of life but deeply
insulting to both men and women. They imply that British men
would be inflamed by lust at the sight of a woman’s face and
commit some form of sexual assault, and they also seem to permit some
Muslim men to regard British women who do not envelop themselves in
black concealment as fair game. Not only is the burka
insulting
to the native European population, it is not even Islamic. In most
Muslim countries women do not muffle themselves up and conceal their
identities. Moreover, the teaching of the Prophet is that
both
men and women should be modest in both dress and conduct, while the
burka screams “Look at me, I’m different,
I’m holier
than you!”
Why then should people who
object to the
influx of immigrants with alien traditions think that it will come to
an end if we leave the EU? We are told by the Brexiteers that
outside the EU we shall be able to trade more easily with wealthy
nations like India, but the Indian government has already made it clear
that trade deals will only be available if Indian citizens have free
access to the UK, in other words that instead of free access to the UK
being available to 445 million Europeans it will be thrown open to
1,340 million Indians, 196 million Pakistanis, and 164 million
Bangladeshis, almost four times as many potential immigrants just from
the Indian subcontinent.
Past relations
between the
UK and
the EU
Relations between the EU and the UK have
never been
easy, and, while the UK has proved to be an awkward member, the EU must
take its fair share of the blame.
The initial negotiations for British
membership of
what was then the Common Market were bedevilled by French
intransigence. Negotiations which had apparently proceeded in
a
friendly manner and reached a successful conclusion were scuppered by a
veto from the appalling General De Gaulle, a man so arrogant that he
insisted on marching into Paris ahead of everyone else in 1945 as if he
and his tiny Free French force, who had spent the war in London, had
been responsible for the liberation of the city rather than the
Anglo-American armies, and so lacking in diplomatic courtesy that on a
state visit to Canada, as President of France, he encouraged the
Province of Quebec to seek independence. His motive for the
veto
was obviously that he feared the UK would be a more influential member
than France.
The same fears appear to have dominated
the next
round of negotiations for British entry because some of the conditions
appeared to be designed to ensure the continued prosperity and
influence of France at the expense of the UK. Britain was
obliged
to be a net-importer of some agricultural produce, Commonwealth
preference, on which our food supply had hitherto depended was ended at
a stroke, even though it might well have been to the advantage of
Europe as a whole to retain such links and even though France kept a
special status for those few of its former colonies with which it had
managed to retain contact by calling them “overseas
departments”.
The final stroke was to demand EU
control of fishing
in British territorial waters, described at the time as a final demand
intended to discourage the British application. Whether or
not
this was true, Prime Minister Heath had staked his whole reputation on
gaining entry to the Common Market, so that even this extortionate
demand was accepted. The result was that French and Spanish
trawlers, which had been banned from Canadian waters for overfishing,
now set about the ruthless exploitation of Britain’s coastal
waters, and much of the UK’s own fishing industry was ruined.
Despite these built-in disadvantages the
UK rapidly
became one of the most influential members of the European project,
with the second largest economy and, incidentally, with the most
dominant language.
There are however still many other
reasons for
British dislike of the EU administration. Its regulations
have
been immensely useful in banning practices harmful to nature and human
beings, but often they just go too far. Banning
energy-inefficient light-bulbs is useful, but to specify that they
should be replaced by mercury-vapour bulbs shows an obsession with
detail but no understanding of environmental issues.
The obligation on the European
Parliament to hold
monthly sessions in Strasbourg is inefficient and wasteful.
Strasbourg was the first seat of the Parliament, but it became obvious
that if it were to exercise any control over the Commission and the
civil service it would have to be in Brussels with the rest of the EU
government machine. The continuance of the migration to
Strasbourg is a sop to the French Government, which, if it had the best
interests of Europe at heart, would immediately agree to end this
unnecessary travelling circus.
There is, of course, a massive
democratic deficit at
the heart of the EU with its indirectly elected Commission appointed by
the individual states, giving the impression almost of a soviet
system. The only way to form a truly democratic system would
be
to replace the Commission with a cabinet elected from the majority
parties in the European Parliament and to introduce a second, revising,
chamber or senate, with members appointed by the state governments,
i.e. more progress towards a unified confederation. It is
obvious
that the state government that would most strenuously object to any
such move would be the British. Nonetheless there are many
less
drastic ways of reforming the EU, some of them requested by Prime
Minister Cameron. It is time for the EU to stop making vague
promises and really get down to necessary reform, even if it may harm
the vested interests of those who resist it.
Conclusion
Britain’s exit from the EU
will harm both the
UK and Europe. The original majority in favour of Brexit was
just
2.15% despite the determinedly anti-European campaign waged by the
popular press. Theresa May’s version of a hard
Brexit,
reflecting the wishes of the extreme right wing of the Tory party and
the rabid xenophobia of the press, needs to be subjected to
parliamentary scrutiny at the close of negotiations, and very probably
to a second referendum, with the possibilities of accepting the deal,
sending her back to try again, or choosing to remain within the Union,
for the promises made by the Brexit campaign were that we should retain
all the advantages of the single market without accepting any of its
rules, and these promises have now been shown to be false.
This
means that the Government is now imposing a form of Brexit for which
no-one had voted. If democracy means anything another vote is
not
just desirable but absolutely necessary.
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