Some of the arguments Brits made to leave the European Union were awful. The best arguments for Brexit, came instead from the Remain crowd.
“With a single vote,” England-born journalist Felix Salmon wrote Friday morning, “England just screwed us all.”
Salmon’s argument was telling in many ways. He fears that he’ll lose the London he loves so much: “the food, the culture, the fact that in one teeming, vibrant city you could find the entire world.”
Much of London mourned with Salmon, probably, as the capital voted 60 percent to remain.
But about 50 miles southeast, in the town of Hastings, church bells rang. “It feels like VE Day here in Hastings,” one local wrote.
Hastings is a fishing town and a tourism town. Both industries are suffering because of the EU, as the locals of many such fishing towns argue. Scottish fisherman Richard Watson told ITV News, that EU quotas on how much they can take from the channel are disastrous. “It just feels like a collar around your neck, and you’re being choked slowly.”
Some in Hastings also thought the EU dragged tourism away from Hastings — which is very beachy by British standards, but poor compared to Spain’s shores.
So if Salmon is correct, the EU gave Felix and his blokes better restaurants and more interesting diner clientele. But if Watson is correct, it hurt the poorer, grittier parts of the country.
Maybe Watson and the fishermen of Hastings — what Salmon calls “Little England, the older, whiter areas outside the big cities” — are wrong about the EU’s economic effects. The quotas will have some long-term positive impact on fish stocks. Free trade definitely helps export-dependent fishermen.
And Salmon may even be wrong about the EU spicing up London. In fact, since EU rules prioritize European immigration over non-European immigration, Brexiting may save the curry houses of London.
But there’s something deeper than economics at play here.
The arguments against Leave were strikingly materialistic. Leaving will tank the Pound! It will hurt stock prices! Those poor rural communities are idiots for leaving an EU which subsidizes them!
But man does not live on euros alone. Man is a political animal. Humans naturally want not only to live their own lives, but to shape the world around them. Self-determination was the impetus behind the American Revolution. It was behind the Magna Carta. Heck, it’s what Occupy Wall Street and the 21st Century Tea Party were about.
The European Union was explicitly against self-determination. The editors of National Review put it well. A new government, based in Brussels, has slowly grown over the Brits, and:
their new government is one they can’t vote out. The European Commission, which has a virtual monopoly on proposing European legislation, never submits itself to elections. It is an appointed body of unknown bureaucrats and failed national politicians. Nor can British, French, or German parliaments reject or amend the Commission’s laws and regulations or the European court’s decisions. Nor can their voters repeal them. European law is superior to what are still quaintly called ‘national laws.’ And if a national referendum (one of the few escape hatches in this panopticon) rejects a European decision, the voters are asked to vote again until they get it right. In short the EU’s defenses against democratic accountability are pretty watertight.
Indeed, removing democratic accountability — stripping people of their role as political animals — was part of the point of the EU. Salmon showed his distaste for the will of the people in his lament:
“The Brexit referendum—the referendum that sealed the fate of an entire continent—should never have happened in the first place,” he wrote Friday morning.
Salmon’s biggest worry seemed to be that Brexit would spur the peasants of other countries to demand a say in their national identity:
Make no mistake, the forces set in motion by this vote will not end here. France and Spain will want their own referendums; so will Scotland. Northern Ireland … will request and probably receive a referendum on whether it should just rejoin the Republic of Ireland, and Europe.
“Tribalism” was one of the epithets hurled at the idea of Brexit. It is so backwards to strengthen your national bonds at the expense of cosmopolitanism!
I’ll grant this point in part. “Tribalism” is a good word for the desire to have a place and a people you call “us” — a place and a people distinct from other places and peoples. A slight majority of Brits wanted to be Brits, we learned. (One reason Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Gibraltar voted to remain: considering themselves Scots, Irish, and Gibraltarians, they don’t really consider themselves Brits at all.)
But it’s all tribalism — the majority that won, and the minority that lost. Felix Salmon swims in his own tribe, but his tribe spans borders, and oceans. One Brit lamenting the Brexit wrote me about the stress this has caused his EU immigrant friends and neighbors.
Everyone lives in a tribe. This is good and necessary. The EU moved political power further away from home. More power, more concentrated, benefited the tribes of cosmopolitan elites — whose tribal bonds were Twitter, Facebook, journalism and education.
The EU took power from the tribes that were more based on place and language and history. These latter tribes had been largely deprived of their ability to shape the world around them. The elite tribes, on the other hand, had actually seen their political capacities multiplied.
Now the elites of the continent have lost some power to change the UK, and the elites of the UK have lost some power to shape the continent. Meanwhile, the populace, by bringing power closer to home, has regained some of the power it naturally ought to have.
As Salmon has worried, the other people of Europe may begin to get ideas.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
