EU backers want us to fear the unknown, but the known is that the EU is a corrupt, undemocratic, declining racket. How is restoring our national independence – the normal condition for an advanced democracy in the modern world – a ‘leap into the unknown’. Is anyone going to be persuaded to stay in the EU by a German MEP telling us we’re too pathetic to go it alone? Exports to the EU DOWN by 5.2% this year. Exports to the rest of the world UP by 5.4%. Membership of the EU looks antiquated, atavistic.
Fair enough, you may say. But I submit to you that this line of argument – this manner of thinking – is identical to the worldview peddled by some of the wilder members of the Scottish National Party this time last year. The Outers are the new nationalists; the Inners the new Unionists.
Now you may object that leaving the EU and seceding from the United Kingdom are not quite the same thing and you would have the advantage of having a point were you to make this objection. Nevertheless, the parallels are clear. Alex Salmond, like Hannan, stressed the normality of ‘independence’ and if the former SNP leader was sensible enough not to suggest himself that the UK is antiquated, undemocratic, corrupt and all the rest of it, many of his colleagues were not so shy.
Normal people, it should be observed, do not think Britain is no longer an independent state. They may accept that elements of its sovereignty are shared but they do not, on the whole, feel the need for a crusade to liberate the country from the intolerable, oppressive, burden of EU directives regulating the workings of the single european market. Normal people have a life.
At the same time, it is already evident that the Inners are going to run an utterly useless campaign. This is not altogether their fault. They start from the unpromising position that the status quo is not much thought about and then, when it is, loved even less. Vanishingly few people in this country have any emotional or psychological connection to the glories of the ‘european project’. They’re just not that into it.
So the In campaign has little poetry with which to inspire its battalions. Instead it will base its campaign upon arid statistical analysis. Some of this analysis might even be true but it is plainly a daftness to scurry around Britain pretending that all will be lost if Britain inexplicably decides to quit the EU. If that happens, life will go on and much of the time, in most policy areas (save, perhaps, immigration), most people will scarcely notice the difference.
Equally, however, the notion that all this country’s difficulties can be solved by a single swing of the constitutional sword is just as obtuse when proffered by Outers as it was when insisted upon by Scottish nationalists last year.
All of which means the Inners need to learn from the mistakes made by Better Together in Scotland last year. The Unionist campaign actually did have the economic facts of life on its side last year (at least in terms of the short to medium term future of an independent Scotland) but there was, or should have been, every difference between suggesting Scotland would have been poorer as an independent country and suggesting, or allowing it to be suggested you were suggesting, this meant the country was too poor to be independent. The latter impression insults the very people it is intended to impress and little good can ever come of that.
Even so, on balance, a majority of Scots decided that the country’s economic prospects were fairer within the UK than outwith it. That was, to my mind, the prudent choice even if it was not a calculation likely to please those campaigners, on both sides, who thirsted for a great clash of rival destinies.
Was Britain loved? Not as much as Unionists might have liked. Was it irretrievably broken? Not as surely or completely as nationalists averred. Something similar may, in time, be said of the EU. That, at least, is what the Prime Minister appears to believe.
Still, the similarities continue, right down to the mystifying thought celebrity endorsements (June Sarpong, who she?) might sway otherwise unimpressionable voters. More significantly, perhaps, Cameron and other Inners are assisted by their enemies. A ragbag collection of Faragists, Corbynites and right-wing Tories might be a glorious parade of English eccentricity but it is not necessarily the army with which you’d choose to fight if your main aim was, you know, winning.
Middle England, to say nothing of Middle Wales and Middle Scotland (though these places matter less since this is a contest that will be decided in the shires of old England), may look upon these troops with some suspicion just as, in the end, Scotland shied away from independence at least in part because ordinary Scots didn’t much like the look of the kind of nationalists who marched on the BBC calling for Nick Robinson’s head.
A sense of proportion matters which is why the Inners will doubtless do their best to suggest the Outers are goggle-eyed, vein-popping, cranks. Some of this will be unfair. But not all of it. Equally, the In campaign will go on and on and on and on about the risks and uncertainty of leaving the EU, trusting that a status quo worth grumbling about remains preferable to the known unknowns of life beyond europe.
This may prove sufficient to win the day but if so it’s not likely to be a victory that comes with any glory. That’s fine in this instance, not least since, unlike in Scotland, it is not, in its fundamentals, an argument about identity. (Unless, that is, you actually believe Britannia is in chains. This is a minority view.)
Nevertheless, it is also clear that the Conservative party cares much more about this battle than it did about the fight to preserve the United Kingdom. I think there’s something regrettable about that but it’s the way it is. The outcome of the EU referendum may yet have some bearing on the future integrity of the UK too but that, of course, is a matter of little interest to the eurosceptic right. That too is their prerogative. England’s ‘self-determination’ may open the door again to Scottish ‘self-determination’.
As it is, however, we shall endure the same tunes being played with the same levels of honesty as in our previous constitutional brouhaha. Just by, mostly, different actors and with, in general though with one large and unknowable exception, much lower stakes. It won’t be great box-office.
The Spectator is hosting an evening discussion ‘Is the EU bad for business?’ at 7pm on Tuesday 20 October at The Royal College of Surgeons, WC2. Speakers include: Dominic Cummings, director of the ‘No’ campaign and Will Straw, executive director of the ‘Yes to Europe’ campaign and is chaired by Andrew Neil. For tickets and further information, click here.
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