London
From the start of the current battle over Britain’s EU membership—which culminates Thursday in the vote on the Brexit referendum—advocates of a British exit have half-joked and half-worried that the Remain campaign would get its gas from what they called Project Fear, a relentless barrage of fear, uncertainty, and doubt aimed at wavering voters. How right they were.
Being in Britain in the week before the vote has been an object lesson in the power of fear. It works, which is why Remain has used it. For example, Remain’s YouTube ads feature white text on a black ground, a military-style font, and a voiceover proclaiming that, if Britain leaves Europe, it’ll never get another chance—that this is too big a risk to take. It’s not impossible to find a Remain campaigner who unambiguously talks up the EU, but it’s hard.
Of course, if you want to get persnickety with facts, Britain’s not voting on leaving Europe—it’s the EU’s future that’s at stake. As far as I’m aware, no one in Vote Leave is proposing to tow Britain off Europe’s northern coast and deposit it somewhere near North Korea. Whether it’s in the EU or not, Britain—like Norway, another non-EU member—is going to remain part of Europe. But the way Remain conflates Europe and the EU isn’t a coincidence. It’s part of their effort to make voting Leave the equivalent of exile from the civilized world.
But rather than pick on details, consider Project Fear as a whole. It’s obvious why the Remain campaign doesn’t focus much on the EU’s supposed merits. Over the past 20 years, according to regular large-scale surveying by the British Social Attitudes project, no more than 40 percent of the British public has wanted the EU to become a federal state, increase the EU’s powers, or even leave things as they are. In 2015, that figure was 31 percent. By contrast, last year, 65 percent of the public wanted either to leave the EU (22 percent) or to reduce its powers (43 percent). That group has been the plurality in the UK every year but two since 1992.
So the essence of winning the referendum is clear: Remain has to either convince that plurality that the EU’s powers have been reduced, or that the risks of leaving are so large that staying in an unreformed EU are too great to accept. Vote Leave—which, to be fair, hasn’t been adverse to using a spot of fear itself—has tried to counter this argument by pointing out that there are also risks to remaining: The EU combines the worst aspects of an undynamic status quo (as illustrated by the economies of much of the continent) and a very dynamic set of political ambitions. In other words, staying in the EU threatens the worst of both worlds: economic stagnation and political absorption, coupled with high levels of uncontrolled migration from within the EU.
For its part, Remain took a stab at making the “the EU has changed” argument. That was the point of Prime Minister David Cameron’s renegotiation project. But this was never serious, and, after spending a week in Britain, I have heard almost nothing about it. As Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, helpfully reminded British voters today, “British voters have to know there will be no kind of any negotiation. . . . [Cameron] got the maximum he could receive, and we gave the maximum we could give.” In short, the EU is just not interested in the kind of reforms needed to win over that voting plurality.
The alternative, then, was fear, three types of which have predominated. First, and least significant, has been fear of the other—in other words, fear of Europe. It’s strange, yet true, that one of the major arguments for staying in the EU, supposedly among friends, is that those friends will do all sorts of nasty things to Britain, or each other, if Britain leaves. David Cameron’s argument that Brexit risks causing war in Europe obviously falls into this camp, as does French President Hollande’s comment that if Britain leaves the EU, it will “no longer be able to access the common market,” which makes you wonder how the U.S. manages to trade with Europe. This kind of thing apparently works: a survey by a travel firm found that one of six Britons believe that, if they exit the EU, they’ll no longer be allowed to holiday in Europe.
The curious thing with this argument, apart from the fact that large chunks of it are clearly wrong (the bit about holidays is laughable) is that if the EU is such a nasty and vengeful place, the idea of being in the EU, where Britain will always be a minority player, is a lot less attractive.
Certainly, there are aspects of being in the EU—no passport lines, for example—that are genuinely appealing. But if the EU wants to negotiate these things, it can, and yet the Remain campaign focuses not on how good they are, but on the supposed impossibility of negotiating them with the EU. (Perhaps, given U.K. opinion about the EU, that is actually the right approach.) In short, part of the pro-EU argument rests on the argument that good things can’t or won’t happen in Europe unless the EU enables or forces them to, and that the EU has no intention of negotiating anything mutually beneficial And that, in turn, should make you wonder (if you haven’t already) just how democratic and friendly the EU actually is.
Second, and more important, has been fear of Britain itself—in other words, fear that Britain isn’t nice enough, or capable enough, to manage on its own. J.K. Rowling’s defense of the EU belongs in this bucket, with its cringe-worthy assertion that Britain needs to Remain because:
Apparently, then, anyone who gets a divorce, leaves a job, changes political parties, or resigns from a government is a terrible monster, an example of what Rowling calls the “racists and bigots” flocking to Remain, or, as Cameron put it, one of the “quitters.” The idea that joining and leaving organizations is part of life, and that memberships that seem sensible at one point can lose their appeal or their rationale later, is apparently entirely beyond the pale.
At bottom, this is a cosmopolitan-elite-versus-the-masses argument, which is why London is strongly pro-Remain, and why a lot of traditional Labour voters are pro-Leave. To them, leaving the EU is a way to take back some control in a world that seems increasingly stacked against them. To the Remain side, though, a Brexit vote would mean the proles, the racists, and the “little England” lovers who they fear lurk not far beneath the surface in Britain have won.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, this elite consensus in favor of the EU is, from a strategic point of view, one of the most dangerous things about it. It’s also terribly unappealing, because if Britain can’t govern itself in a reasonable and decent sort of way, then no place can. But of course, it is also a matter of money, because the kind of person who tends to favor the EU has also tended to do extremely well out of the current economic and political order, and naturally wants to see it perpetuated. None of us are immune from this kind of argument, wherein self-interest is equated with morality or the natural order of the universe, and we shouldn’t be too hard on people who practice it, because we all do.
But that doesn’t make it right. As I’ve noted in my academic work, pro-EU arguments in Britain have tended to focus very heavily on the economic advantages of being “in Europe,” and to say as little as possible about the political side, or even the potential economic advantages of other arrangements. That divide has been perpetuated in spades in this round of the Brexit debate, where the basic appeal of the Remain side has been that leaving the EU will be bad for the U.K.’s economy. And while the Leave economists generally have a better track record than the much larger Remain faction—having, for example, been skeptical of the Euro—the Leave side has generally not done a good job of confronting Remain on its home economic turf.
If Leave loses, I will (while awaiting more detailed research) be inclined to say that it was the economic scare stories that won it for Remain. The problem is that there is no ironclad answer to Remain on this front: it is a matter of your basic ideological and personal orientation. My own view is that Britain, like the West as a whole, has more to gain in the long run from a more dynamic and less status-quo approach, that the EU is basically a status-quo organization, and that the U.K. is therefore in a better position to be more dynamic if it exits.
That doesn’t mean Britain will inevitably adopt good policies: indeed, there is a long tradition of British socialists who didn’t like the EU’s predecessors because they believed it inhibited their ability to build socialism in one country. But leaving the EU widens the range of policy options, and since I think these are narrowing undesirably in the West, I’ll take that risk. In any case, I’d rather be governed by Tony Benn’s democratic socialism than neo-liberalism enforced from Brussels, were such a thing on offer, which it assuredly is not.
But there’s the rub. It is easy to portray the EU as a not terribly attractive but fairly safe option—one which may impose some losses and costs, but which is at least known. I don’t believe that, because I think the risks of remaining in are actually quite large. Those risks, though, are in the future, whereas the risks of Brexit are in the here and now. Particularly in a safety-first sort of society such as Britain, the call to accept short-term risks for the possibility of long-term gains is a hard sell.
And that is what worries me. The more like that we all become, the more assiduously we will all seek short-term safety—and the worse off, over time, we will all end up being, because growth requires risk. I entirely understand why today’s winners don’t find that appealing. But I’m more concerned with tomorrow.
Ted R. Bromund is senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
