Today Theresa May finally told EU technocrats that our patience is running out. The EU will have to respect the referendum decision to take control of our borders, laws and money.
A couple of days earlier, no doubt in an attempt to undermine the prime minister, groups that intend to reverse the referendum result had redoubled their efforts. A new organisation called Global Future used the ploy of claiming that the real divide in British politics is no longer between the left and the right but between ‘open versus closed’. It turns out that the three main tests of ‘openness’ are support for uncontrolled immigration, enthusiasm for multiculturalism, and a preference for internationalism over nationalism.
Deploying the contrast between ‘open and closed’ allows them to imply that they are open-minded and their opponents closed-minded. They go on subtly to blend open minds with open borders to give the impression that anyone who wants to control immigration or to pursue our national economic interests has a closed mind. As Global Future puts it: ‘defensive emotion has replaced positivity and reason’. Moreover, young people tend to favour openness and so history is said to be on the side of the opponents of national independence. By this sleight of hand, reactionary opponents of independence are able to portray themselves as progressive and modern.
Mrs May’s Mansion House speech was an emphatic rebuttal of the accusation that Brexit is a defensive strategy. Any agreement, she said, must be consistent with the kind of country we want to be: ‘a modern, open, outward-looking, tolerant, European democracy. A nation of pioneers, innovators, explorers and creators’.
Her critics might have profited from reading a few lines from Keynes when he was discussing how far it was legitimate to go in pursuing the national interest. He thought that one dimension of the freedom of a people was to be able to use the powers of a democratic government to try out different ideas. Each country should be free to experiment. We may not know where we are going, we know only that we will discover our ambitions as we go along.
Keynes did not advocate a purely economic doctrine. He put freedom and democracy first and he remained internationalist in two ways. Keynes wanted freedom of ideas, art, science and travel, which implied openness of mind, a critical outlook, scepticism towards orthodoxy and monopoly power, and celebration of dissent. And he put domestic prosperity first only to equip Britain to be fully engaged internationally, trading with nations that accept the rules of trade, and assisting poorer countries. His rebalancing of the national and the international was in recognition of our common humanity.
According to Global Future, however, we are witnessing a generational divide, with ‘open values’ dominant among those born from the 1970s onwards, and crucially, the number of open voters is set to grow. Younger voters are more likely to be open whereas older voters are more likely to be closed:
‘While over-45s think multiculturalism has weakened Britain, under-45s think, by more than two to one, that it has strengthened Britain. While almost two thirds of over-45s think immigration has changed Britain for the worse, almost two thirds of under-45s think it has changed Britain for the better. Six out of ten under-45s are comfortable with internationalism or globalism, while six out of ten over-45s … choose to identify with nationalism instead’.
Conservative peer Lord Andrew Cooper writes that ‘the age when Open voters are outnumbered by Closed voters – currently around 45 – will rise as the ‘Open Generation’ gets older and the ‘Closed Generation’ dies out, with profound strategic consequences for the Conservative Party.’
Global Future follows the master propagandist Tony Blair in their use of the contrast between closed and open. Two of the people behind Global Future are former directors of strategy at Downing Street: Lord Andrew Cooper worked for David Cameron and Lord Spencer Livermore for Gordon Brown. Blair first contrasted ‘open versus closed’ in a speech as prime minister to the TUC in 2006. As he put it: ‘There is a debate going on which, confusingly for the politicians, often crosses traditional left/right lines and the debate is: open v closed.’ He has repeated the distinction over the years, recently in an interview in 2017 for an online Italian magazine: ‘I don’t think … the answer to the problems and the challenges of globalisation is … to shut the world down’. The ‘basic attitude’ he insists ‘is open minded not closed minded and which is in favour of accepting globalisation as a fact, accepting its benefits but preparing people for its consequences’. If you try and stop globalisation or hinder it, ‘you end up either with protectionism, isolationism or as we can see all over Europe today political battles over immigration’.
Keynes was in favour of open minds but strongly argued that it was possible to be simultaneously open minded and in favour of putting the economic success of our own citizens first. He reveals the difference between a thinker who is genuinely open to persuasion and willing to change his mind in the light of evidence, and a propagandist whose sole concern is to draw others towards a previously determined position.
Let’s look at the three issues that mark the frontier between ‘open and closed’: support for unlimited immigration, multiculturalism and internationalism.
One concern voiced by those who want to limit immigration is that some new arrivals do not share our commitment to liberal and tolerant ideals. Unfettered immigration has led to the arrival of more people with closed minds. Most migrants support British values, but some new arrivals hate democracy and freedom and wish to undermine them, sometimes violently. People genuinely committed to a liberal and tolerant society are right to criticise the arrival of large numbers of individuals opposed to freedom and democracy, but they don’t fit the ‘closed versus open’ dichotomy.
According to Lord Cooper, people who are open support multiculturalism, the doctrine that potentially antagonistic philosophies should co-exist side by side within a nation. But what if one of the cultures is hostile towards openness? Is this not true of Islamism and good deal of Islamic conservatism? If you criticise reactionary religious ideas does that make you closed minded?
One of the primary elements of multiculturalism is the importance of identity, especially racial and religious identity. It is argued that no white person can understand the experience of a member of an ethnic minority and that a non-Muslim cannot understand the experience of a Muslim. Support for such views, according to Global Future, is open minded. But it is in reality to be closed-minded because it denies the possibility of our common humanity. It also rules out the possibility of a common search for knowledge and truth. It denies the possibility of objectivity.
Lord Cooper thinks we will become a more open society as people born before the 1970s die off. He can’t really have thought his argument through. Attributing beliefs to whole generations gets you into a lot of logical difficulties. Taken literally it means that the sooner that campaigners for the rights of women such as Germaine Greer, Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey die off, the sooner we will be an open society. Moreover, the student campaigns of the 1970s were struggles for freedom of speech on campus. Today, students are more likely to demand the denial of speech by no-platforming people they don’t like. Many old people will have manned the barricades in the Paris of 1968 or gone on demos against the Vietnam War. Now they find themselves redefined as reactionaries and being told that the sooner they die off the better it will be for the open society.
Nationalism and internationalism are said to be alternative reactions to economic globalisation. But, the nation state is valuable because it has proved to be the best way of holding power to account. In Britain, it has also been the champion of liberalism, a system of government that relies on continuous refining of the rules of law and the practice of justice to give everyone the best chance of adding their bit to the advance of civilisation.
The vital distinction today is between supporters of liberal-democracy and enthusiasts for concentrated, unchecked power. If we look back over the last few centuries there has been a struggle to prevent power holders from imposing their will on others. Why? Because liberals have believed that releasing the human spirit would improve human life.
Concealed behind a smokescreen of talk about openness, Global Future is planning to take us backwards. It advocates a reactionary doctrine that will leave power in the hands of a self-appointed elite. It speaks for a sect that thinks it has found a pretext for keeping power in a few hands. They define themselves as the clever and righteous ones, who feel entitled to rule because of their superior education. Their main enemy is the nation state because it makes power accountable to the common people of the land. They seek to undermine the solidarity of members of the free political associations we call the nation state by exaggerating divisions. This is the value of multiculturalism. Unfettered immigration has the same effect by weakening the sense of reciprocity on which liberal democracy relies. And they like to transfer power to international institutions because they can easily be dominated by the self-appointed elite.
We are in the middle of a concerted attempt to reverse the result of the 2016 referendum. The reactionaries want to keep control in the hands of self-appointed oligarchs who feel superior to the majority of the population. But the rallying cry of the leave campaign was right: we should take back control and renew our heritage of liberal democracy.
David Green is director of Civitas
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