Brexit
Would Mean the End of the UK, not the EU
Brexit is really about Britain, not Europe
Ever
since Charles De Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community
in 1967, Britain’s attempt to integrate with the continent has been
fraught. Constant calls for leaving, or
renegotiating, have been the leitmotif of British politics for the past half
century. Brexit won for four reasons: immigration,
uneven distribution of the benefits of EU membership, to get rid of David
Cameron, and to educate the voters of Britain about the benefits of membership
because only by trying to leave will people come to appreciate that it is
impossible.
The major change in the form of the British government,
introducing the fixed five-year term in
the 2010 election, almost dictated a Brexit win.
There have been 53 prime ministers in the past 300 years, an average of about six years per term. Cameron cowardly dodged the EU issue during
the election campaign in 2015 by promising a referendum on the E.U.. His reward was a surprising, solid Conservative
majority. Cameron is the 22nd longest serving prime minister. Was he really good for ten years? Is he one of the great ones? That’s what an In win would have meant.
David Cameron is a solid, decent man, but six or seven years is the most that can be expected in modern times, absent
extraordinary individuals or events. Sometimes people elect the solution, and
sometimes they elect the problem and force it to govern. The Brexit win is the latter. Now, a pro-exit prime minister
must be the person who shows that leaving is impossible.
Historical
Perspective
I was saddened, but not so shocked
by the Out victory in the Brexit referendum. The
global astonishment was caused by the
fact that the Exit win was so stupid and self-destructive. I recently read in English scholar of Poland Norman Davies’ No Simple Victory that the British stood alone against Hitler, not because of bravery, but because the
British see themselves as innately superior and were simply obstinate.
By coincidence, I had just finished The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875
– 1890 by George F. Kennan, if not the architect of the containment theory
that won the Cold War, then at least its’ intellectual midwife. In his search for the causes of World War I, Kennan
concludes: “It appears reasonably clear that in essence the nationalism in
question was the expression of a crisis of identity on the part of great masses
of people displaced by the over-rapid social and economic changes of the
nineteenth century – displaced from those positions in the structure of society
to which they and their families had long been accustomed. It was from these
traditional vantage points that they had learned to relate themselves to the
national community – to establish their rights, their duties, their claims to respect. The Russia of the decades with
which this book deals held millions of people for whom, sometimes because of
upward social movement, sometimes because of downward, sometimes because of
educational experience, sometimes because of the change from country to city, these familiar and reassuring points of
orientation had been lost. Yet the great
mobility of wealth and the prevailing love for ostentation wherever wealth
existed, raised false standards, set up painful contrasts, heightened
differences, inflamed sensitivities, and created artificial sources of
snobbery. Particularly among those who had little
education (but not quite enough) and a little money (but again, not quite
enough), there were great underlying uncertainties. And these uncertainties
could be relieved, if not removed, by
identification with one’s people as a whole, identification with them on the basis of the most obvious – and probably
the most primitive – of criteria; that of speech.
In this cultivation of the myth of collective glory – the glory of the national
society to which one belonged – one could lend to the individual experience a meaning, or an appearance of meaning, that
the artificiality and insecurity of the individual predicament was unable to supply. Thus, millions of people,
not only in Russia but almost everywhere else in Europe as well, found in the
flag-waving, the brave rhetoric, the sentimentalities and exaltations of
nationalistic fervor, the impressive image of themselves which individual
experience could not convincingly provide.” (p. 418 – 419)
Kennan
wrote this in 1978, about the Russia of 1890, yet changing a few nouns is all
that is necessary to make it applicable to Brexit,
or the nomination of Donald Trump. Polls show that the Brexit
voter is over 65 with less education and income. The Remain voters were young, educated and
better off. So the elderly, those who
will be dead in twenty years, are threatening the economic future of the young,
those who will be voting in the next
twenty years but were not allowed to cast ballots because of their age.
Sacrificing the future of the young to the fantasies of the old is a formula
for disaster. The million and a half British dead from World Wars I and II,
buried in graveyards abroad prove that. Brexit is
almost an insult to their memory and sacrifice; but unfortunately, today’s
voters are ignorant of history. When surveying the carnage at the end of World
War II, Europe’s leaders asked themselves what could they
do to stop the fratricidal wars that had killed millions over the previous
thirty years. The answer was for former
enemies to integrate into a supranational unit to thwart future appeals to
belligerent nationalism as cited above by Kennan. Starting with the European Coal and Steel
Community of France and Germany, the European Union is the result.
Should England seriously pursue leaving the EU, Scotland and Ireland will leave the UK.
Since 1885, the period of Kennan’s book,
there had been a movement for Irish Home Rule within the British Empire. The thirty-year
struggle was on the point of success when
World War I intervened. As a stop-gap measure, bowing to political necessity,
the six Protestant-majority counties of Northern Ireland were split off from
the 26 largely Catholic counties of the
rest of the island which was promised
independence (to prevent the mutinying of Irish troops fighting with Britain in
France) which was eventually granted in
1922. Since that time, Ireland has been
split between an independent south and a north
that is part of the UK. The six counties
of Northern Ireland voted to Remain in the EU by 4:3, so Brexit
is a fillip for the irredentists.
Lack of Leadership
One reason Brexit
won is that of a lack of leadership.
Months before the vote, I wrote to David Cameron, when the pro-EU campaign was
being called Stay, suggesting that Maurice Williams and the Zodiac’s Doo-Wop hit
“Stay” be the theme song of the In campaign. The lyrics of this 1 minute 36 second 1960 hit, the
shortest record ever to become #1, are: Stay-ay-ay-ay-ay just a little bit
long-ger,/ Please please please please please tell me that you’re gonna/ …Stay-ay
come on come on come on Stay-ay/(Come on come on come on)/Stay-ay come on come
on come on stay-ay.” Stay, familiar to blue collar baby boomers throughout the
English speaking world, might have responded positively.
Ironically, although Maurice
Williams and the singing group were black men from Tennessee, the Zodiac came
from the British-built luxury version of
the Ford Zephyr, a car they came across when their station wagon broke down in Bluefield, West Virginia. “Stay” would have appealed to just the voters
who supported Brexit while simultaneously making a
positive statement about the benefits of internationalism. The Remain campaign should have been a love
song. Instead, it was a balance sheet.
However, my larger point is that I never even received an
acknowledgement, and I was doing more for the In
campaign than my British neighbors in New Jersey. I know the mindset. I
couldn’t vote so I didn’t count.
Furthermore, distance from the
generations who fought in World Wars I and II have created a type of
opportunistic politician who cares only about career advancement regardless of
the consequences for the people they represent. Donald Trump, George W. Bush,
Boris Johnson and Chris Christie are poster boys for this kind of person. This opportunism also applies to the mainstream
media, now that it is losing the competition with the internet and social
media. It perforce must become more and more outrageous and entertaining to retain its viewers and protect its profits.
Rupert Murdoch and Les Moonves are prime examples of
media moguls whose power comes not from informing the public, but from
manipulating and keeping them in ignorance.
Moonves, the head of CBS, even said about
Trump that “It may not be good for America, but it’s
damn good for CBS.” He said this, as his
network continued to give hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free air
time to The Donald’s outrageous and racist remarks. And CBS uses airwaves that
are owned by the government and supposed to be used
in the public interest. Government and entertainment are almost opposites, and
the consequences of confusing the two can be catastrophic. But of course, in a
culture where news has become synonymous with entertainment, it is no wonder
that the young and old are ignorant of their history.
In 1969, I worked on the re-election campaign of New York
Mayor John V. Lindsay doing polling. The wife of my boss had been a prep school
friend of the wife of Dr. David Owen, then Foreign Minister in Harold Wilson’s government.
After the campaign, I went to Europe and reconnected with my boss in London
where he was trying to sell his polling services to Labour,
which was contemplating holding a snap election sometime in the spring of
1970. As part of the sales pitch,
because I was the most knowledgeable about the details of polling seeing as I
had been doing the actual work while everyone else was supervising, my boss
asked if I would join him for dinner at Dr. Owen’s
house on Narrow Street.
It was a pleasant evening discussing the technical details
of political campaigns. Dr. Owen said
that Labour was ahead in the polls and that Wilson was thinking of calling an election. I
answered that, based on my recent experience in New York, polls could not be
trusted. Most people do not give serious
thought even to their political opinions until there is some way to act on
them. Voters procrastinate, often for
good reason in the interest of gathering as much information as possible before
deciding, even in the United States where the date of the election is known in advance. In parliamentary systems, where the date of
the election is unknown, people pay even less attention to politics in the
off-season. Owen seemed unconvinced.
Dr. Owen did regale us with one wonderful story. He said
that he had been invited to dinner at 10
Downing Street by the Prime Minister and, after having been gotten terribly
drunk, found himself agreeing to run the election
campaign against and then taking the country into the Common Market six months
later. Dr. Owen also volunteered that he did not take the underground.
After the dinner, I resumed my peregrinations, and feeling
the need to relieve myself near Windsor Castle, entered a public bathroom. On the wall was
written, “If you want a Niggerian
for your neighbor, Vote Labour.” Assuming that
someone who did not use the underground also did not use public toilets, I
wrote a note to Narrow Street stating that here was the real hidden issue of
the political campaign and that it was not going to show up on any poll. Labour called the
election and lost to the Edward Heath’s Conservatives, who then took Britain
into the European Economic Community.
Britain’s History and the Failure of
the Intellectuals
The reason that a victory for Brexit seemed inconceivable is that repudiating Europe is so contrary to Britain’s history. I became worried when I heard on election
night that Oxford had voted less for Remain than the polls predicted. .
Then I read a column by Edward Chancellor, who
holds a Masters of Philosophy in Modern History from Oxford, who reluctantly cast his mail ballot for Out
because of his sympathy for the Greeks and Spanish,
who were suffering so egregiously under EU-imposed
austerity, in contravention of David Hume’s theories of self-government. Perhaps
Mr. Chancellor considers it ancient history that Greece was traditionally
considered part of Britain’s sphere of influence and, in the person of Harold
Macmillan, a fellow Oxford graduate like David Cameron, virtually ruled the
country in the wake of World War II to prevent the triumph of communism. Now,
it is with a heavy heart that these intellectuals, who haven’t had the
discipline of a bottom line in generations, are disappointed in their handiwork
and are throwing in the towel. At this moment, Britain is engaged in bombing
Syria. It supported the war in Iraq. It
has been waging war around the world for centuries to promote its brand of
government and economic development.
Within my lifetime, Britain has helped to overthrow the government of
Iran, invaded Egypt, fought in Malaya, Korea, Kenya, Brunei, Kosovo,
Afghanistan and fought Argentina in defense of the Falkland Islands. Even in
those areas that Britain has relinquished, India and Palestine, it has left a
situation in its wake that has cost millions of innocent lives.
When I was a child, and the
Middle East was in conflict, my father told me that the reason was that, “The
British left it such a mess because if they couldn’t have it, they wanted to
make sure that no one else could have it, either.”
Now, by voting to pull out of the EU, Britain has made
another mess, if not just of Europe, then of the entire world. Britain is
acting like a spoiled child in a game where, if it can’t have its way, it’s
going to take its ball and go home. It would be nice to have a sanguine or
phlegmatic reaction to Brexit except, we’ve been down
this road before. Hopefully, when the
actual details of the divorce are examined
in the light of day, the British will come to their senses and rejoin the human
race as equals.
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