Brussels
is in Brexit denial
Leave
is not as unthinkable as people in EU institutions might think:
British politics is unforgiving.
By TIM KING
6/16/16, 5:39 AM CET
Much of Brussels
underestimates the likelihood of the United Kingdom leaving the
European Union. For most people working in or around the EU
institutions, the merits of the Union are obvious. And because they
perceive Britain’s membership of the EU as good for Britain (and
mostly good for the rest of the EU), they cannot believe that the
British electorate would be so daft as to vote to leave. It will be
all right on the night, they are hoping.
For me, it’s all
reminiscent of the spring of 1997 when I was working in the election
newsroom of the Daily Telegraph, which in those days was widely
respected for the breadth and thoroughness of its news coverage. Its
comment pages were dominated by Conservative opinion and in theory
the newspaper was, according to its long-established tradition,
backing the Conservative Party led by John Major, the prime minister.
In practice, Charles
Moore, the Daily Telegraph’s editor, was encouraging a civil war
within the party over Britain’s relationship with the EU — a war
that continues to this day. Despite that, many of those around the
offices of the Telegraph were still dreaming of a Conservative
victory. They thought that just as Major had won against expectations
in the 1992 election, he might pull off a miracle. Wishful thinking
distorted their judgment. The office sweepstake predictions of the
result of the election, written on a whiteboard on the election
newsroom wall, bore witness to their deluded optimism.
They
underestimate the brutality of the British political set-up
One Telegraph
journalist who did not succumb to this group-think was Boris Johnson,
who nowadays is a leading figure in the campaign for Britain to leave
the EU. Perhaps he was more realistic about Conservative chances
because he wasn’t in the office: He was out on the campaign trail,
standing as a Conservative candidate in a no-hope constituency in
north Wales. He phoned in to the election newsroom bunker one day and
I took the call — because more important people were out to lunch.
In the course of our conversation, Boris delivered a forecast that
the scale of defeat was going to be huge. And so it proved: Tony
Blair’s New Labour swept to power, winning 43 percent of the vote
and 418 seats in the 659-seat parliament. The Conservatives took 165
seats on 31 percent of the vote.
Tony Blair, is
greeted by fans upon arriving at No 10 Downing Street, after Britain
returned a Labour government in 1997
Some of the people
in Brussels who discount the possibility of Britain leaving the EU
are kidding themselves that even if the vote on June 23 is in favor
of a Brexit, it still will not happen. They imagine that the British
government, or the EU, will find some way of revisiting the question
and averting the consequences. This is another form of delusion. They
underestimate the brutality of the British political set-up, whose
parliamentary elections give no compensation to losers: They are
winner-takes-all. In the constituencies of roughly 100,000 voters,
the candidate who wins a plurality of votes — i.e. more votes than
each of the other candidates, but not necessarily more votes than the
other candidates combined — wins the seat. Votes are not
transferable and there is no proportional representation, so no
list-system of candidates. Hence what happens in an individual
constituency can make or break a political career, independently of
the fortunes of the candidate’s political party.
At the 1992
election, as a local newspaper reporter I was in the count at Bath
town hall when Chris Patten, the Conservative Party chairman,
admitted to me that he was “a few thousand short.” Despite being
the architect of the campaign that sneaked a Conservative victory
that night for Major, Patten lost his seat because Labour voters in
Bath defected en masse to vote tactically with Liberals. That was the
end of his career in domestic politics. In similar fashion, Michael
Portillo, the then defense minister, was turned out in 1997. Last
year, Ed Balls, Labour’s shadow finance minister and a former
education minister (2007-2010), was also despatched to the ranks of
the unelected.
* * *
British voters have
been indoctrinated with the idea that their country gave
parliamentary democracy to the rest of the world, and that therefore
the British version is by definition better than any others. In this
referendum campaign, Brexit supporters are mostly inarticulate about
what they mean by “sovereignty” or by “taking back control” —
a favorite slogan of the Leave campaign. But they occasionally allude
to their inability to vote out the powers that be in Brussels.
If pressed to define
what makes British parliamentary democracy special, many would
express attachment to this idea that the voter can get rid of his or
her member of parliament or the ruling party. In reality, very few
voters have such power — they do not live in marginal
constituencies (the British small-scale equivalent of swing states),
and the ruling party usually has a majority much greater than its
share of the popular vote might warrant. But the brutality of British
politics — Balls, Portillo and Patten doing the electoral
equivalent of the perp walk before the television cameras; a defeated
prime minister being turfed out of Number 10, Downing Street, the day
after the election — all these reinforce an illusion of
accountability in British politics.
This
is not a political system that sets much store by checks and
balances, or the separation of powers
That is why it is
unthinkable that the referendum result can be countermanded. Whatever
the margin — whether 65 percent or 50.5 percent — then, if Leave
is in the majority, no government of whatever political hue will be
able to do anything other than take Britain out of the EU. And, given
the viciousness of the in-fighting between Conservatives, I would not
expect David Cameron to survive as prime minister.
What people in
Brussels are often slow to appreciate is that this is not a political
system that sets much store by checks and balances, or the separation
of powers. Its simplicity — power concentrated in the hands of the
parliamentary majority — in turn makes it harder for British voters
to understand the complexities of European politics. In Britain,
coalition governments — despite the experience of 2010-2015 — are
a rarity, almost an electoral freak. The upper house of parliament,
the House of Lords, has had only minimal reform and without a
democratic mandate cannot challenge the lower house.
Regional government
does not exist in England, though considerable power has been
devolved to Scotland and some to Wales and Northern Ireland. Local
government has been steadily stripped of its powers — a process
that began in 1974 and accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. Local
authorities have lost their control of public services partly through
privatization (notably housing and public utilities), partly, as with
schools and hospitals, through centralization. This disemboweling of
local government has hollowed out the space between the central state
and the citizens, many of whom feel disconnected from a professional
political class. Euroskeptics campaigning for Britain to leave the EU
are channeling this sense of frustration with the political
establishment, though directing it at Brussels rather than
Westminster.
At the same time,
the Remain camp is struggling to counter fears stoked by the Leave
campaign that high levels of immigration into the U.K. threaten the
provision of school places, health care and housing. That migration
has become such a big feature of the campaign is not explained by
racism alone (though there is a streak): it is because the referendum
has been turned into a vote on the provision of public services.
The argument of the
Leave campaign — arguably, their biggest lie — is that by leaving
the EU Britain will have more money to spend on public services. The
Remain campaign is divided: with Cameron and George Osborne unable to
own up to having damaged public services through their austerity
policies and Labour curiously obsessed with TTIP and workers’
rights. If people in Brussels were to understand that for most people
this will not, primarily, be a vote about the EU, they would be
better prepared for Britain’s eventual exit.
Tim King writes
POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.
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