A Brexit myth of Brussels (mis)rule
Britain is (mis)ruled by Brussels. European federalists have demoted the Westminster parliament to the status of a parish council. Everything bad that happens can be blamed on the Eurocrats who make British law. To restore its liberties — and England, after all, is the mother of parliaments — the nation must vote to quit the EU.
No one would accuse the Leave campaign of subtlety. Much of the time its staff are fighting the internal battles of the Tory party — if we cannot get Britain out, at least we can destroy David Cameron’s premiership. For the rest it seeks to convert legitimate public concern about immigration into ugly xenophobia. Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, was once a champion of Turkey’s application to join the EU. Now he says that Britain will soon be swamped by hordes of Turkish migrants.
The Leavers have no grasp of irony. Mr Cameron, they say, is a liar. His government (from which several of the Outs still draw handsome ministerial salaries) is populated by crooks and charlatans. Parliament can no longer be trusted to speak for the people. As for the institutions of the British state — the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and the Bank of England among them — they are part of the great conspiracy of the elites. But wait a moment. Surely the purpose of quitting the EU is to restore power to these very national institutions?
All this said, “Take Back Control”, the Outs’ marketing meme, has something of a ring to it even as it speaks to the populists’ contempt for reason. The slogan is a trademark of demagogues across advanced democracies, including Donald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France. The Republican contender for the White House and the National Front candidate for the Elysée back the Leave campaign. What was it someone said about politicians taking care about the company they keep?
Effective advertising pitches, however, are grounded in a basic truth. To reclaim control you first have to lose it. Yet look back at the big choices that Britain has made during more than 40 years of EU membership and, curiously, the hand of Brussels is invisible. Imaginative or dull, the important decisions have been taken at home.
Start with the economy. The story of the 1980s was Britain’s transition from a statist to a liberal market economy via privatisation, deregulation and an assault on trade union power. It was never obvious that the EU was the organising force, and history records that the Thatcher revolution was, well, Margaret Thatcher’s doing. If there was any connection with Brussels, it was the prime minister’s enthusiastic espousal of a European single market.
Boom soon turned to inflationary bust. Thatcher blamed Nigel Lawson, then her chancellor of the exchequer. No one, as I recall, claimed that the economic levers had been operated by the EU, although the chancellor was widely criticised for shadowing the Deutschmark. Nor did anyone in Brussels push Lord Lawson into the Big Bang reform of the City of London, a shift to light-touch regulation in which steady and secure building societies were swallowed up by marauding banks and the financial system was left peculiarly vulnerable to the global financial crash.
On the other side of the balance sheet, neither can the EU claim credit for the good times. The long period of non-inflationary growth from the mid-1990s rewarded the tough British pragmatism of Kenneth Clarke, another Tory chancellor. That Mr Clarke is an ardent pro-European concedes no credit to Brussels. Elsewhere on the home front, devolution in Scotland and Wales was the work of UK politicians. So, too, was the tolerant liberalism of gay marriage and stronger protections for minorities.
Britain has fought half-a-dozen wars, from the Falklands to Iraq, since it joined the EU. The Royal Air Force is now bombing the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. There are arguments to be had about the merits of these conflicts. Plenty of people have concluded that Britain has done more than its fair share of fighting. But even those on the wildest shores of Euroscepticism cannot claim these were battles joined at the direction of Brussels.
As for immigration from the new democracies of eastern and central Europe, it is too easily forgotten that no one pressed harder than the British for EU enlargement eastward. And it was the government at Westminster, led by Labour’s Tony Blair, that disavowed any transitional limits on the flow of workers from the new entrants.
There are significant areas of British life in which EU laws take precedence. Most of these set the business norms and standards that all nations must observe to prosper in a globalised economy. Some establish levels of protection for workers; others, environmental controls. Elsewhere, Britain has opted out — from the euro, open borders and some elements of legal and judicial affairs.
This is not a nation that has surrendered democracy or self-government. On the things that really count — taxes and welfare, war and peace, national security — the shape and direction of policy has been set by Westminster politicians. Some choices have been bad, some good, but all have been British.
Pro-Europeans can be charged with sometimes exaggerating the consequences of Brexit. A Leave vote would not visit Britain with war and pestilence. But the important difference in this debate is the one that separates amplifying truth from peddling falsehood.
Comments