Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Every pro-EU argument boils down to not being able to trust the ‘plebs’

We all know that the Remain camp has peddled the politics of fear. But what is the object of their fear? What’s the thing that makes them so scared, so convinced that a litany of social and political horrors will befall Blighty if we pull out of Brussels?

It’s you, and me; all ordinary people. It’s the public. It’s our unpredictable passions. When the pro-EU lobby frets about a post-EU Britain having Boris as a PM, becoming a right-wing cesspool, getting rid of workers’ rights, becoming less eco-friendly, and / or becoming vulnerable to neo-fascistic forces, what they’re saying is: ‘You can’t trust the public. You can’t leave politics to ordinary people alone. Some politics must be done in the cooler forum of the EU.’ For them, the EU is a bulwark against the blob, tamer of the throng, mercifully keeping in check our extremism.

Whichever way you slice it, every panicked declaration of the Remain lot comes down to saying, ‘Who knows what the mob will get up to once they’re freed from the rights-protecting, environment-respecting directives of the EU?’ And the closer the referendum gets, the clearer this disdain for the demos is becoming.

Some Remainers now openly say the referendum is a terrible idea because voters are fundamentally stupid. Former comedian turned Observer columnist David Mitchell (like Samson when he had his hair cut, every comic who becomes a broadsheet regular loses his funniness) thinks this referendum is ‘the worst thing Cameron has done to Britain’; it’s a ‘crime’, in fact. Why? Because ‘the issues… are complicated’ and it’s mad to make them the subject of a ‘random vote’ after ‘a frenzied few months’ of discussion. We’re ‘flattering the public’s estimation of its collective wisdom’, he says, when we should simply welcome ‘the intercession of a greater power: not God, but government’.

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