For the three years and seven months since the Brexit referendum, I have been asking two questions which Leavers have failed to answer - namely "in what way has living in the EU these past few decades hurt you in your life?" and "how is the UK going to become wealthier after leaving the EU?"
Not a clue.
When Poland left the Soviet bloc - or rather when the Soviet bloc disintegrated and communism fell - it was a time of joy and triumph of good over evil. Anyone could see the old system was rubbish. Shops were empty, your right to travel abroad was at the discretion of the state, if you were not in the party your career path was limited, the economy was crap, history was distorted and lied about. If I asked anyone (who was not a party member of client of the system) why they wanted to leave the Soviet bloc, the answers came thick and fast and were meaningful and direct.
I only know a handful of intelligent Leavers whom I can take seriously. The rest are of below-average intelligence. They gloss over their poor understanding of how the economy functions, using glaring generalisations that are mainly wrong. Their skim-reading of the headlines in papers owned by egregious tax-avoider non-domiciled billionaires has given them the impression that the EU had been doing them down. "The Brits are a glorious nation, victims of foreign deceit," would rail the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph. Example? "Having to accept European laws!" "Name one." "Straight or bendy bananas! (can't remember which now)".
Brexit cannot end well for the UK. For the next 11 months, while a free trade agreement and a political agreement are being hammered out, the UK will continue to accept the entire corpus of EU law, having no say in it, its MEPs and civil servants having departed Brussels for home. And will continue to pay into the EU coffers. When those agreements are finally in place - let's hope by the end of this year to avoid another no-deal cliffhanger - then what?
If UK business wants frictionless trade, will it get it? Without the UK being in the single European market or the Customs Union, getting this will mean having to swallow EU regulations wholesale, again, with no say in their creation. 'Divergence of standards' says the government. What will that mean? The UK already has some areas such as product safety and food hygiene which differ from EU regulations. But this only imposes costs on UK manufactures and pushes up prices of EU imports.
Imposing friction on trade in goods between the UK and the EU is like imposing sanctions upon oneself - it's a retrograde step that no developed country on earth has ever chosen to take.
The break-up of the UK is only a matter of time - though it's likely to be decades rather than years away. The joke about the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman who walk into a bar and leave because that's what the Englishman wanted carries a weight of truth; 55% of Scots wanted to remain in the United Kingdom but 62% wanted to remain in the EU. Scots will not be happy with being dragged out. And last month's general election saw a historic result in Northern Ireland - for the first time the province voted for more nationalist MPs than unionist ones.
The reason why a small group of people in power with a bee in their bonnet about an issue that has hardly any relevance to most citizens' day-to-day lives - Britain's sovereignty vis-a-vis the EU - got it over the line is because of immigration. Tony Blair's decision to allow citizens of the new EU member states unrestricted access to the UK labour market in 2004 swung it. And the looming prospect of the EU's Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive kicking into force prompted the press barons to ramp up the rhetoric - with success, because registration of offshore money-pots would have started tomorrow, 1 February 2020. In the background, the ever-present barrage of Russian social media trolls, just one part of a massive effort of interference in UK politics. Where is the Russia Report of the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee? Then there's the whole Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. Did you see this ad? Unlikely. It appeared on Facebook pages of the dim, the hard of understanding, the malleable, the easily led community.
For Poland, the loss of the UK from the EU is a blow. The UK was a natural counterweight to the Berlin-Paris axis and to the 'club Med' of weaker southern European economies, a force around which the countries of CEE, Scandinavia and Holland could rally around. Most of all, the lack of the UK from the EU will encourage Putin to become even more aggressive in its divide-and-rule activities aimed at weakening the Western world.
Last year, I took part in two massive pro-EU marches, which attracted over a million (some sources say the October one was nearer to two million) anti-Brexit protesters. We lost. Where were the pro-Brexit marches? They never attracted more than a few hundred rather ill-tempered demonstrators. One mass meeting in Westminster attracted maybe a couple of thousand. There's simply not the groundswell of informed opinion to justify leaving the EU. People banging on about 'unelected bureaucrats in Brussels' (like a bureaucrat was ever elected!) annoy me intensely, as do those who compare the EU to the USSR. (Where are the EU's Gulags, when was its Great Terror, its Holodomor, its Katyń etc.)
It is entirely feasible to think about the UK rejoining the EU, in the timeframe of 10-15 years, maybe sooner if Labour chooses Kier Starmer as its leader and not another useless unelectable Trot. Demographics are on the EU's side. The youngest voters in the referendum voted 73-27 to remain. And no one born this century voted for Brexit. The disappointment and resentment at having their rights to study, live and work across the EU taken away from them by the old will gnaw away at their political consciousness. Don't forget that around a million Leave voters have died since the referendum. (UK mortality runs at around 560,000 a year. Multiply that by three years, seven months and one week, then divide by an 83% turnout among the over-65s, of whom 60% voted Leave).
Talking of death, my father, an ardent Remain voter, who died three months ago, would have faced a hard time had he survived beyond 1 January 2021. Would his two beloved Polish carers been allowed back into the UK? My father was a man who never swore. However, he would only use one word in reference to the UK's looming departure from the EU - 'Brexshit'.
This time last year:
Vintage aerial views of the ground
This time three years ago:
Adventures of a Young Pole in Exile - review
This time four years ago:
Ealing in bloom
This time five years ago:
Keeping warm in January
[This year: tomorrow it will be 11C]
This time six years ago:
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it (health, that is)
This time seven years ago:
Sten guns in Knightsbridge (well, Śródmieście Południowe, actually)
This time nine years ago:
To The Catch - a short story (Part II)
This time ten years ago:
Greed, fear, fight and flight - and the economy
This time 11 years ago:
Is there an economic crisis going on in Poland?
Michael:
ReplyDeleteThank you; thank you; thank you.
Especially the part about the Scots and also the "Where is the EU's Holdomor [and lots of other state-sponsored tragedies - for lack of a better description]".
Saw lots of Scots on France24 before the Macron speech was out live ...
and those last words Macron made.
Having said - your points on the Paris-Berlin axis are timely and on point.
When Leave won the referendum, the Spectator magazine cover featured a butterfly breaking out of a box and fluttering skywards with a legend saying: ‘Out ... and into the world’. This week’s cover is the same butterfly with the legend saying: ‘Done’. I’m not an expert but the longest-living butterflies have just under a year to arrange their earthly affairs before they meet their maker. Once you get over that irony, a corollary suggests itself: leavers have certainly done a great amount of roaring in the last 5 years, with only few roaring louder than Boris Johnson (former editor of the Spectator) - were the editors of this esteemed magazine (the voice of the oppressed) onto something (gnawing doubts perhaps?) by not sticking a roaring lion breaking out of a cage (with a distinctive blond mane) on their cover? A lion would after all be more in keeping with how the country used to think of itself. But has it ever been a lion?
ReplyDeleteI’ve been reading about how the British propaganda machine went into overdrive from 1914 onwards to drag America into the war (read: throw Britain a lifeline). Quote: [British propagandists] used publicity techniques and social influence directed at American opinion leaders to inundate the U.S. with atrocity stories and accounts sympathetic to the brave Allies and helpless Belgium, across which the Germans had tromped. Belgium was sometimes portrayed as a maiden violated by a Kaiser-like gorilla, identifiable by a Prussian military uniform with its ridiculously pointed Pickelhaube helmet. End of quote. Funny how Belgium’s portrayal has changed but not the primal instinct of the portraitist: America to the rescue against - this time - the Brussels rule-giver.
Propaganda aside, I’m torn by the same paradox of feeling as you: I want Britain ever to succeed, with Brexit or without it, while I’m indignant at the ignorance that underlies the choice. The sainted Spectator calls it “righteous indignation of the liberal metropolitan elites”. Time will tell.
I have a better grasp of the undercurrents in Poland than in Britain and not for a moment believe that the in/out battle is being fought on the grounds of the economy. If it was, the out camp’s argument would go up in smoke in an instant. It is a cultural war, and as cultural wars go, those who lack all conviction lose while those who are full of passionate intensity win, to paraphrase an Irishman.
Michael, you've seen through the deception better than most. And, in your following post, you comment about people who 'don't know what good looks like'. That's so true: it shocks me how ordinary British people both accept poor performance and deliver it. 'Not very good' is the norm. Whether it's slack work, flavourless food, crowded trains or the burgeoning homeless population, 'not very good' is the British way.
ReplyDeleteA few days ago, in the sports centre, I listened to two young men boasting about how they'd ripped off customers and gone home early. I'm sure one wouldn't hear that sort of talk in Germany, where productivity is more than a quarter higher.
How do the Leavers think that the UK will do better? Through hard work? Imagination? Entrepreneurial spirit? No, they're imagining that their new fuehrer, sorry, leader will pull a fast one over our brighter, more industrious neighbours!
Anyway, we've had our Brexit dividend in my town: Honda is pulling out and making several thousand redundant. I expect that the EU will be blamed for that too!