The
Brexiteers claim
that to put to public vote the outcome of the Brexit negotiations is
tantamount to overthrowing “the will of the
people”.
This is totally illogical. How can asking the people what
they
want be ignoring their wishes? Behind it is a fear that the
vote
to leave the EU, passed by a tiny majority of those who took the
trouble to vote, a minority of those entitled to vote, would be
overwhelmingly rejected by the public when the terms are known, for
many of those who lead the Brexit movement, for example Boris Johnson,
see in the achievement of withdrawal from the EU, no matter at what
cost to the country as a whole, a means of furthering their own
interests.
The choice now faced by the UK is between a hard
Brexit
and a soft one. A soft Brexit “would be the worst
of both
worlds with the UK turned into a vassal state – taking
directions
from the EU, but with no power to influence the EU’s
decisions.” So says Boris Johnson in his article
published
in the Daily
Telegraph on 16
September 2017. To quote from my own essay The UK and the EU,
“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.” As
I have
said before, the EU can dictate its own terms for it is the UK that is
in the weaker position, and the EU will demand in return for continued
access to the single market, that the UK should continue to follow EU
regulations and accept freedom of movement, probably adding compulsory
acceptance of the Schengen agreement.
The alternative is a hard Brexit, in which we cut
ties
with the EU to enter on what the hard Brexiteers describe as a glorious
and golden future trading with the big boys of the global economy,
notably China and the United States.
President Trump has heralded a similar glorious
and
golden future for the USA, and the foundation of that future is his oft
repeated slogan “America first!” Is
America likely to
grant favourable trading terms to the United Kingdom? Look at
the
American Government’s response to the request from Boeing for
protection from the rival aircraft builder Bombardier, based in Canada
but with work also carried out in Belfast. The USA promptly
imposed a 300% import tariff, (yes that’s right: three
hundred
percent), which would make it impossible for any American company to
buy any Bombardier aircraft. The company then handed over
half of
its shares to Airbus so that its aircraft could be assembled in the
Airbus factory in Alabama. At the time of writing it is not
yet
clear whether this move will circumvent the US protectionist policy as
Boeing will obviously appeal. If the move is successful, jobs
in
Northern Ireland will be saved, though not necessarily all of them, but
it should also be noted that the saviour is a European aerospace
company, with its headquarters in France and factories across the EU.
As for China, it has a long history of using
trade for
political purposes and turning every trade opportunity into a means of
exploiting its partner. Science has now disproved the
long-held
Chinese belief that the Chinese are descended from a different species
of hominid from the rest of humanity, but science does not always
change attitudes, and there may well still be a tendency among Chinese
entrepreneurs to regard other races as ripe for exploitation.
Certainly promises to African countries, that exploitation of their
mineral wealth by the Chinese would lead to employment opportunities
for locals and rich rewards for the population in general, have proved
illusory.
So this is the choice offered by the Brexiteers,
which
they claim is “the will of the people”: a soft
Brexit in
which we obey EU regulations without any voting rights, or a hard
Brexit in which we become dependent on the good-will of, and ripe for
exploitation by, the dominant global economies. How on earth
did
we get into such a situation?
For a start the Remain campaign was
over-confidant:
Britain was part of one of the world’s greatest trading
blocs,
our economy was strong, and strengthened by that membership, we were
involved in collaborative research and development projects with our
European partners, able to draw on the intelligence and expertise of
scientists from all over Europe, our influence in the EU was strong
even if not strong enough to force through the necessary reforms,
London was well-established as the financial capital, and English was
one of the dominant languages and likely to become the
dominant language in
Europe. David Cameron assumed that there would be an
overwhelming
Remain vote that would shut the right-wing Eurosceptics of the
Conservative Party up, and many thousands of Europhiles appear to have
assumed that the result was a foregone conclusion. The
Remainers
signally failed to campaign on the advantages of the European Union and
were reduced, when it became apparent that the result might be
close-run, to a last-minute negative campaign of dire warnings which
played into the hands of the Brexiteers.
The Brexiteers campaigned strongly and put
forward a
fantasy of a strong and prosperous Britain outside the EU, stressing
words like “independence” and phrases like
“taking
back control”, they played on fears of immigration,
concealing
that most immigration comes from outside Europe, they told lies about
the amount of money that would be saved by leaving the EU, exaggerating
the savings and failing to mention either the money that comes back in
grants or the increased prosperity that comes from membership, and they
harped on the restrictive nature of EU regulations, ignoring the
effects of “the way we have chosen legally to apply these
obligations” as Boris puts it, admitting thereby that it is
our
own government and civil service that makes these regulations more
restrictive than they need be. Above all the Leave campaign
had
the support of the gutter press and also, sadly, of the right-wing
broadsheet, The Daily
Telegraph.
The press has one aim in life: to maximise
profits by
selling more newspapers, and the methods it has always used involve
campaigns against abuses, sometimes genuine as in that against the
abuse by MPs of their housing allowance, sometimes factitious, and it
is to this latter category that most attacks on the EU
belong.
The EU has been set up as the enemy bent on the destruction of the
British way of life, much as Hitler picked, without any rational basis,
on the Jews as the enemies of Germany. It was the press that
stirred up a storm of hatred against our fellow Europeans, with whom we
share a common culture, that resulted in many of the less intelligent
of our citizens voting Leave, examples being those denizens of
Peterborough described in my essay Brexit:
the people have spoken, or have they?
It was the press
that stirred up the irrational hatred that sent violent yobs out
attacking Poles and other Europeans in an access of ecstatic joy at the
(narrow) result for Leave. It was the press that stirred up
the
insane hatred that led a madman to stab to death a promising MP.
A free press is an essential part of
democracy. Its
function is to speak truth to power and to alert the public to
abuses. How sad then to find it adopting the tactics of the
school bully who psychs up his gang against the unpopular swot or the
disabled pupil. How sad to find it adopting the tactics of
the
third-rate politician who, knowing that 99% of the population have not
attended either Oxford or Cambridge, feels that attacking
Britain’s premier universities as bastions of privilege,
however
inaccurate that accusation may be, is a safe way to get himself some
free publicity. How sad to find it adopting what are
basically
Nazi methods: find an enemy, blame everything that has gone wrong on
that enemy, and then seek to destroy that enemy – all to
secure
and extend your own influence, power and profits.
The result of all this manipulation of the
prejudices of
the population for the profit of the press has been the present
situation, in which, far from having vast amounts of extra money
available for the NHS, the UK will have to pay a massive divorce bill
and agree to its size before any further negotiation can take place.
The Brexiteers would have us believe that the
negotiations would be symmetrical between two equally powerful
sides. They neglect to say that 46% of British trade is with
the
EU while only 15% of the trade of continental Europe is with
Britain. Most of what we import from Europe is goods, most of
what we export is services, which works beautifully for the UK while it
is a member of the EU and while London is the continent’s
principal financial sector. It will be considerably less
advantageous for us when we are outside the Union and Frankfurt has
assumed financial leadership. The United Kingdom is the state
with the third largest population in the EU after Germany and France,
and it is one of the most influential members yet our population makes
up only 12% of the total, and when 12% is in direct opposition to 88%
as we are in the Brexit negotiations, it does not take exceptional
intelligence to realise that this is far from a contest of equals.
The referendum, through the over-confidant
incompetence
of the Remain campaigners, the deliberate lies of the Leave campaign,
the manipulation of ignorant prejudice by the press for its own profit,
and the preference of politicians for the interests of their parties
rather than the good of the country, has brought about a
situation in which we appear to be faced with a choice between a soft
Brexit in which we are obliged to follow the rules of the EU without
any voting rights, or a hard Brexit, in which we become a small
independent unit trying to make agreements with ruthless economic
giants like America and China.
Neither is likely to fill our hearts with the
unbounded
joy promised by Boris and his like, and that is why Remainers continue
to say that the results of the negotiations should be placed before the
people again, in a poll offering the options
“Accept” or
“Reject” and, if “Reject” is
chosen, a choice
between “Try for a better deal” or
“Abandon Brexit
and press for EU reform” – for it is not impossible
that
now that we have shown that we are prepared to withdraw we may have
more success in at last achieving the necessary reforms, modernisations
and re-balancings that the EU so desperately needs.
The EU gives form to a magnificent aspiration,
that the
peoples of Europe, who share a common culture, and who, despite the
existence of separate nations, are one people, interbred and sharing a
genetic as well as a cultural inheritance, and who together dominated
the whole world’s scientific, technological and economic
development, may one day come together as one people and again take a
pre-eminent position in the world, able to compete alongside the
current giants like America and China. The refusal of the
backwoodsmen to participate is the equivalent of an objection of the
Saxons of Mercia to join with Wessex on the grounds that one day they
would be swamped in a huge impersonal conglomerate covering the whole
of England.
If the EU goes on from strength to strength, what
will
happen to the UK? It may disintegrate. Northern
Ireland may
elect to join the Republic and stay within the EU. Scotland
may
hold another referendum, break away and join the EU, possibly followed
by Wales, leaving just England as the forlorn offshore economy, with a
population of 53 million, trying to compete with the EU (457 million),
the USA (323 million), and China (1,379 million).
The referendum has also created a situation in
which we
may in the near future have to choose, in electing a Prime Minister,
between Boris the Liar, who is prepared to see the United Kingdom split
apart if he can only be Prime Minister of the English rump, and Jeremy
Corbyn, a student revolutionary who has never grown up and whose
friendship for anti-British terrorists, from the IRA to Hamas, reveals
how delighted he would be to see the United Kingdom disintegrate and
lose every scrap of international influence.
Is there a way out of this mess? It
would seem that
only the Liberal-Democrats have consistently supported the European
project, so that perhaps the only way to gain for the British people
the right to decide whether Theresa May’s Brexit is
appropriate
or not, is to vote Lib-Dem at every opportunity, in both local and
Parliamentary elections, to abandon the widespread habit of always
voting Labour or Conservative because you have in the past always voted
Labour or Conservative, or because your family for as many generations
back as you can remember has always voted Labour or Conservative, and
to consider the issues presently before us. Who would make
the
best Prime Minister: Boris the Liar, Jeremy the friend of anti-British
terrorists, or Vince Cable?
Please
remember that this essay is
copyright. See Copyright and concessions
for
permitted uses.
Index
to the
Essays of Malcolm Potter-Brown
Auksford
Index
Contact Malcolm Potter-Brown at mpb.auksford@gmail.com
