See You, EU?

Britain has been the most “Euroskeptic” member of the EU ever since it joined. But the country’s mumbled complaints about “Europe” have lately grown to a roar. The EU is a plot hatched by international capitalists and their bureaucratic enablers, some Britons say. It seeks to undermine Britain’s constitution and replace it with the sort of arrangements that twice in the 20th century turned continental Europe into a killing field. It overregulates Britain’s businesses and is quickly extinguishing its 800-year-old tradition of popular sovereignty.

None of these complaints is without evidence. One result of them has been the growth since the 1990s of the U.K. Independence party. UKIP urges withdrawal from the EU, in order that Britain might better secure its borders and keep its distance from the euro, the EU’s flighty currency. For more than a decade UKIP threatened to run away with the votes of the most conservative third of the Tory party. In 2013, with his own parliamentary majority dependent on a coalition with the upper-crust, antiwar Liberal Democrat party, Tory prime minister David Cameron resorted to a desperate measure to hold on to voters tempted by UKIP. He promised, should he be reelected, an in-or-out referendum on EU membership before 2017. It didn’t help Cameron in European elections—UKIP is now the largest British party in the European parliament at Strasbourg, with 24 seats. But the promised referendum may be responsible for the majority the Tories won in Westminster last year. UKIP, too, has broken into the Parliament at Westminster, with 4 million votes, although under Britain’s system these have been enough to win it only one seat.

Cameron himself is for Remain—he wants to stay in the EU. His whole identity is bound up in it. Tories of Cameron’s stripe usually paint UKIP as a bunch of backward-looking “Little Englanders”—xenophobes and bigots, to use our terminology. UKIP’s position can be compared to that of Buchananites in the Republican party 20 years ago, Tea Partiers 6 years ago, Trumpites a year ago. Their call for leaving the EU is backed by a solid majority of English people in the countryside. Support for staying comes from the Scots, who see in the EU umbrella a protection for their own nationalism, and from London, with its population of immigrants and multimillionaires. That left Boris Johnson on the fence.

A classical scholar by avocation and a journalist by trade, Johnson spent decades writing harrumphing, curmudgeonly, and rollickingly funny columns for the Telegraph, a newspaper by and for people who think England was better in the old days. A big part of making himself presentable to the demographic mosaic of London came from displaying his love of Indian food, bike trails, and double-decker buses and stressing his own multiethnic background as the great-grandson of a Muslim immigrant from Turkey. That’s why, as Vote Leave launched its campaign in a South London skyscraper in early May, Johnson sang Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in German, boasted that he liked to read books in French, and described himself as a “liberal cosmopolitan.” He is one. “Freude, schöner Götterfunken,” Johnson sang.

Johnson’s announcement at the end of last winter that he would join the Leave forces was still a shock. It also convinced Cameron, his Eton contemporary and rival, that Johnson was challenging him for the party’s leadership—not without reason. A YouGov poll taken May 23-24 puts “Remain” and “Leave” neck-and-neck. Should Leave win, Cameron would have to resign. There is nonetheless a general belief that Remain will pull it out. The bookmaker Ladbrokes gives Leave only a one-in-five chance.

Project Fear

The Tory party under Cameron has become what the Republican party would have become had anybody followed the recommendations laid out by the RNC elders who convened the “Growth and Opportunity Project” after Mitt Romney’s drubbing in the 2012 election. Cameron came of age in the Tory wilderness decades that began with the rise of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” in the mid-1990s. Redemption through wussification is his motto. He has learned to talk about global warming and quality of life. Although something of a Euroskeptic in his youth, he is now on a positive crusade against Little Englandism and xenophobia, and has convinced himself that the Brexit campaign is a symptom of both.

Cameron has always been one of those politicians (somewhat like Hillary Clinton) who uses organization and preparation to compensate for a lack of charisma, and the campaign he is running against the referendum he himself called is something to marvel at. It is a masterpiece of political choreography. Investment banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup) and bigfoot British political donors (Lord David Sainsbury, Roland Rudd) have bankrolled a mighty organization—Britain Stronger in Europe—to campaign for Remain. It uses top politicians from both the Labour and Tory parties. The group’s gloriously designed website would be the envy of an Italian art magazine. On top of that, Cameron has converted almost every government agency within his reach into a full-time EU propaganda machine. He has used $13 million from the government budget to print leaflets urging a vote for Remain. He has used government websites to lay out the case against leaving. The Bank of England has warned there will be a recession. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has calculated that home prices will fall—by up to 18 percent—and interest rates will rise. The Treasury issued a report tallying the probable job losses at 800,000. Cameron himself says running its own affairs would leave Britain at risk of war. These predictions have been accompanied by others from a raft of executives beholden to government regulators. Carolyn McCall of EasyJet has been banging the drum for Remain since February. This rebranding of vested interests as “experts”—which, of course, vested interests always are in their way—is a hallmark of pro-Remain lobbying.

Cameron has solicited foreigners, many of whom are indifferent to or ignorant of the trajectory of Europe in our time, to offer testimonials to the catastrophe that awaits Britain should it reclaim the sovereignty to which it clung so shabbily and unimpressively at Runnymede, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, and Dunkirk. These warnings are released daily. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe warns that a vote to leave would scare off Japanese investors. Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund has predicted that the consequences of Brexit range from “pretty bad” to “very, very bad” and has helpfully scheduled a report to that effect for June 17, six days before the vote. Cameron roped together 13 U.S. secretaries of defense and state and national security advisers, led by George Shultz, who signed a letter scolding Britons for embarking on what Cameron called an “act of supreme irresponsibility.” Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, warns Britain, “We’re not particularly in the market for free-trade agreements with individual countries.” (Apparently, Britain cannot aspire to the grandeur, in Obama administration eyes, of Chile or Morocco, each of which has such an agreement.) President Obama himself said on a visit to London that, should Britain leave the EU, it would have to get to the “back of the queue” on trade deals.

Of course, it can come to the front of the queue the next time we need its young men to die in one of our wars. Johnson speculated that Obama had inherited an anti-British animus from his Kenyan father. After Obama’s remarks against leaving the EU, a poll taken for the Times of London showed a rise in Leave sentiment.

BoJo on the trail

The problem for the Remain forces is that testimonials are all they have. Two days after his South London speech, Johnson boarded a bus and went on tour, not to sing Beethoven but to fire up the people of Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset for the Leave side. The people in the crowd who were unconvinced tended to mouth the slogans that Cameron’s lobbies had focus-grouped. “I just think we’re stronger together,” one of the last harborfront workers in Charlestown, on the Cornish coast, told me.

But Johnson’s Leave forces don’t particularly know what to talk about either. They are in a trap. The case for Brexit is sovereignty, self-rule, independence. Those are abstractions. The best politicians of the last generation—very much including the 51-year-old Johnson—have prospered by avoiding abstractions like the plague. They assume the only thing voters care about is paying less and getting more. Johnson may have learned to “manage diversity” as a London mayor. But his stump talking points all come out of the Thatcher era. They tend to involve silly regulations. “The EU tells us how powerful our vacuums are supposed to be,” he says. “The EU requires that packets of smoked salmon tell consumers they contain fish.” And “Ten billion pounds we never see goes to Greek bailouts and Spanish bullfights.” It’s funny. It’s true. It’s also true that the half-billion dollars (£350 million) earmarked for Brussels every week could pay for a new hospital. But having had the bejeezus scared out of them by Cameron’s ads, voters may decide that more sensible salmon-packaging is hardly worth the risk of Armageddon, however small that risk may be.

The Leave case is about self-rule or it is about nothing. The people who have laid it out most logically are the two young Tory policy thinkers who run the Vote Leave organ-ization, Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott. Cummings spent three hours this spring parrying the hostile questions of a parliamentary “treasury select committee.” (Why such a committee has any business interrogating a political campaign is a constitutional mystery.) When a member of Parliament asked Cummings to explain what his economic policy for an independent Britain would be, he explained that such questions were off the topic:

Cummings puts forward another reason for getting out while the getting is good. The European Union is not stable, although it has been a triumph of the Remain forces to portray it as such. It is constantly sucking in new resources to avoid collapse. There will be an “inevitable next wave” of centralization to which Britain will be subject. The European Court of Justice has been overriding national laws in a way that Cummings compares to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although Britain, not being a member of the euro, has avoided most responsibility for resolving its exchange-rate crisis, the EU’s “Five Presidents’ Report” envisions new responsibilities for EU members.

But the Leave camp are divided. Most of the rank and file in the Vote Leave movement are schooled in the Cameron-style Toryism that views any claims for the cultural specificity of Britain as “xenophobic” and bigoted. They would be mortified to have it said that they were fighting on the same side, and for the same principles, as the proles at UKIP. And UKIP members, almost without exception, sense that political operators are trying to muscle them out of a role in the movement that they alone were brave enough to fight for over the last quarter-century. Most UKIPpers look at Vote Leave as primarily a vehicle for making Boris Johnson the next prime minister, only secondarily about getting Britain out of the EU. They have joined a separate organization, Leave.eu, bankrolled by the brash investor Arron Banks.

Non-Tories who have come to the Leave campaign have tended to find Leave.eu more congenial and better at getting down to constitutional brass tacks. This includes that longtime scourge of the Iraq war George Galloway, who described in February the moment when his own passions for Britain’s sovereignty were rekindled. Galloway discovered that an Englishwoman he had never heard of, Catherine Ashton (Baroness Ashton of Upholland), had become, under the terms of the constitution rejected by European voters but imposed by the European leadership, “High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and First Vice President of the European Commission.” In Brussels they refer to her as the European foreign minister. Galloway does not. “Who are you?” he asked. “Who elected you? Who can remove you?”

Immigration and consent

As the campaign has worn on, it has become evident that one issue is capable of uniting the disparate strands of the Leave movement: immigration. At every stop in Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset, it was the first thing people wanted to talk about—to reporters and to Johnson himself. You can sense, however, that voters feel constrained by political correctness from speaking about the elements of immigration that really bother them.

The thing voters feel they are allowed to talk about is the management of migrants from within the EU, who are permitted to settle in Britain. When Polish citizens got the right to free movement as new EU members in 2004, Britain’s economic forecasters—including many of the same ones now predicting recession and plague—told the country to brace for between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants. It got 627,000. As an old mayor of multicultural London, Johnson is good at herding questioners onto the safe territory of efficient provision of government services. Net migration into the U.K. runs well over 300,000 a year, a multiple of the “tens of thousands” Cameron has set as his target. When journalists ask Johnson whether that is too high, he pauses before answering. “Put it this way: To add a city the size of Newcastle every year to the U.K.—” he says. “It’s too high to do without consent.”

It is a good answer, but it does not address voters’ real anxiety. A lot of them look at Europe and see a future of racial strife and right-wing government. Waves of Muslim immigrants—some of them refugees from Syria, most of them economic migrants—are now pouring across the Mediterranean to accept an offer of welcome, delivered on the EU’s behalf but without its consent, from German chancellor Angela Merkel. In order to help stem the flow of migrants she unleashed, Merkel has in recent weeks accelerated negotiations to admit massive, Muslim, increasingly theocratic Turkey to the European Union. This would give Turks the same right to become Londoners that Poles now have. As former cabinet member Iain Duncan Smith says, “Turkey is on the ballot paper.”

It also didn’t calm matters when the race to succeed Johnson as London mayor was won by Sadiq Khan, a Muslim human-rights lawyer and community organizer from South London. The Tories never quite realized what a special politician they had in Johnson. All the rich, multi-ethnic cities in the world, with the possible exceptions of Madrid and Moscow, are naturally run by limousine liberals. The Tories did their best to nominate a modern, multicultural candidate—Zac Goldsmith, an outspoken environmentalist whose former brother-in-law is the Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan (no relation to Sadiq). But Goldsmith could not finesse issues of Islam and race. His supporters mentioned that Khan was an ex-brother-in-law of the “hate preacher” Makbool Javaid, that Khan had “shared a platform” with al Qaeda-supporting radicals (never a fair criticism, as sharing a platform with ideological adversaries is what responsible citizens do), and that Khan had referred to moderate Muslims as “Uncle Toms.” Now the papers are deploring the “ugly” and “shameful” campaign Goldsmith ran in even alluding to such things. Cameron’s adviser Steve Hilton warned that Tories were showing themselves to be the “nasty party” that he and Cameron had fought so hard to “detoxify.”

But this is mere scapegoating. Goldsmith was not such a poor candidate. Conservatives did not fail to get their message out, as excuse-making politicians often claim. Their problem is that London has become a Muslim city. It is not majority Muslim demographically, certainly. But it is at least an eighth Muslim and growing. This means that if Muslims vote en bloc, as they did for Khan, they can control the city even if nearly 60 percent vote against them. That was the formula 19th-century Irish immigrants to the United States used for controlling certain northeastern cities in perpetuity. It helped Khan that he was able to rally business interests by cheerleading for the information economy. His tenure appears likely to resemble that of Bill de Blasio in New York—a simultaneous drumming up of ethnic consciousness and business.

After his election Khan spoke in Southwark Cathedral, introduced by Doreen Lawrence, the mother of a boy killed in a racist attack in 1993. There was lots of talk about uniting and not dividing. The week after his election it was announced that Islamic Relief, a big, government-backed charity, would be putting posters on city buses in London, Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham, and Bradford reading “Subhan Allah” (Glory to Allah) and urging Muslims to fulfill their charitable duties by giving to Syrian refugees during Ramadan. The Daily Mail noted that last year, the country’s leading cinema chains—Odeon, CineWorld, and Vue—had refused to show an advertisement that featured the Archbishop of Canterbury reciting the Lord’s Prayer. None of this is making Britons happier about being in the European Union.

Sick of being lied to

Khan’s election has revealed a power vacuum at the heart of the Labour party. The Iraq war wound up changing the course of British history. Tony Blair, who dominated the party for a quarter-century, has been repudiated in the wake of it. In a late May poll by YouGov, a majority of Britons (53 percent) say they can “never forgive” him for taking the country to war, and only 8 percent agree with the statement that he “did nothing wrong.”

One consequence is that Labour was last summer taken over by a Cold War-era leftist—specifically, a protégé of the 1970s Labour politician Tony Benn. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is a sort of Bernie Sanders avant la lettre. Naturally Khan can’t stand Corbyn, because Corbyn, like Sanders, does not see the new leftism (built on organizable minorities claiming rights) as an improvement on the old (built on forging consensus for national programs). Khan is Labour’s most full-throated defender of EU membership. Most of his colleagues believe Corbyn, in his heart of hearts, opposes it. But Corbyn, having the loyalty of neither the Blairites nor the Khanites, is dependent on Britain’s now-vestigial trade unions, and Cameron has done a masterful job of exploiting that dependency. By watering down anti-union legislation, passing a “living wage” of $13 an hour, and considering a plan to open an inquiry into how Margaret Thatcher policed the miners’ strike of 1984, Cameron has won the unions over to Remain. That has sufficed to win Corbyn—or at least to silence him. Cameron has a chance of hobbling the national Labour party.

But he has a slightly better chance of hobbling his own. Half of Tory members of Parliament favor leaving the EU. So do most of the party rank and file. The longtime fear of the party establishment has been that, if the referendum is even close, the Leave camp will find reason to make common cause with UKIP, hoping to reconstitute the British right around a new pole. In recent weeks the establishment has become more pessimistic still: They believe the party may break up no matter what happens. Reports are that dozens of Tory members have agreed to challenge Cameron’s leadership as soon as the referendum is over.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer and a prominent conservative editor and columnist, considers himself a member of the establishment. He nonetheless admits to being taken aback by the anti-Brexit testimonials being drawn up for Obama and other foreign leaders in Downing Street. Politicians are scheming against the people, he wrote in early May: “I am learning from this referendum just how frightened many of them are that the voters now have a choice.” UKIP leader Nigel Farage put it more colorfully. Cameron, he told the Guardian, “hasn’t played with a straight bat.”

In the second week of May the Office of National Statistics revealed that, although the official number of EU migrants to the U.K. between 2010 and 2014 was under a million, the number of national insurance cards issued to EU migrants was 2.2 million. So the ONS revised its estimate upward to 2.4 million. One is left with a government that is positively virtuosic when it comes to organizing, scripting, synchronizing, and deploying hundreds of the busiest organizations and celebrities of the world into a carousel of propaganda running nonstop for six weeks—but it cannot keep statistics on the single issue of most concern to its citizens. When Cameron’s armed forces minister Penny Mordaunt said that Turkish accession to EU membership would allow Turkey’s citizens to settle in Britain, she was only citing EU law. But Cameron scoffed. “At the current rate of progress they will probably get round to joining in about the year 3000,” he said. Anyway, Britain has a veto on Turkish membership, he stressed. True, but as the most steadfast advocate among European leaders of Turkish membership, he would not, in the event, use it.

It may not matter how Britain votes on June 23. For British reasons and European reasons, it is difficult to see Britain anchored in a viable European Union five years from now. All of Cornwall’s members of Parliament are Conservative, but it was there, in early May, in the rapidly gentrifying port town of St. Ives, that voters passed an ordinance banning the sale of houses as second homes. House prices in St. Ives average £400,000 ($600,000), about 20 times the average annual salary. Government lawyers in London are trying to block the measure. But on the campaign trail you can hear even conservative politicians talk about how “mainlining” cheap labor from abroad has sapped Britain’s industrial base, about Britain’s trade deficits, about the looting of the pension plans at the failed department store BHS and elsewhere, about how the austerity being imposed on Greece is a “disgrace.” This campaign is starting to look like what, in retrospect, the 2012 election in the United States was—a referendum on whether the public is sick enough of being taken for fools or whether they can stand it for one election more.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.