How much does public opinion on Europe matter? A poll for today’s Sunday Times found that 41 per cent want out of the EU and on the BBC1 Politics Show today, Jon Sopel confronted Douglas Alexander with
this statistic. Wee Dougie replied that, on Monday’s vote, he was in the “no” lobby with the leaders of all British political parties – so of course he was in the mainstream. This
raises a crucial issue: the vast disconnect over Europe between the political elite and the masses.
To declare my hand: I’m in favour of our EU membership and regard the free movement of people, goods and services as a noble endeavour (albeit one which the EU has yet to live up to). But I’m in
the minority. The European Commission’s own polling makes the British public’s position devastatingly clear (summary here). It shows that just 26 per cent view our EU membership as a good thing. Yet this is the view of 100 per
cent of the main parties in the House of Commons. There is a large democratic deficit here, a gap that might yet be filled by another party.
I was on the Politics Show with Zoe Williams from the Guardian, and said after Wee Dougie’s interview that he shouldn’t confuse Westminster consensus with British public consensus. Zoe then asked a
very good question: perhaps the general punter is Eurosceptic because they don’t give it much thought. Is an opinion born of study and analysis superior to a gut reaction?
The EU are taken with this thesis, and every now and again release polling showing a link between lack of education and Euroscepticism. Here’s the latest:
This is also the case against referenda: these issues are complex, lawyerly – can we expect ordinary folk to reach an informed opinion based on a hunch? Does the bouncer’s opinion count for
as much as the barrister’s?
To me, this questions cuts to the very nature of left vs right. I’m a free marketeer because I believe that the masses are smarter than the elites. That knowledge and instincts of the many – expressed collectively through the market or the ballot box – are usually superior to those of any elite, of whatever political persuasion. That if the government let people keep more of the money they earned, Britain would be stronger and more socially just.
There’s a lot written in America about this. The Stanford academic Thomas Sowell argues that the world is so complex that no one person can possess “even one percent of the knowledge currently available, not counting the vast amounts of knowledge yet to be discovered”. So, “the imposition from top down of the notions in favour among elites, convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue, is a formula for disaster”. Hence central planning, the Soviet Union, etc. As Sowell says, the real ideological fault line – rather than the diminishingly useful party political labels – can be drawn here. How do you define knowledge? Do you see it as something that is concentrated (i.e. in universities and libraries) or spread across society? If you believe the former, then you’re on the side of the Polly Toynbees and the Tory Paternalists who believe power (and money) should rest with an enlightened elite. If you believe the latter, then you’ll be in favour of transferring power to the many, not the few, and be against nicking their cash.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile pollster, Mark Penn, puts it from a different perspective. He refers to the problem of “impressionable elites” which he says are, basically, more gullible because they’ve been born and brought up in a bubble. They are therefore “more removed from everyday problems, more trusting of what they hear, and more likely to adopt unthinking viewpoints based on brand or emotion”. So a gap emerges between those who run the country, and those who live in it. Thus extensive education, rather than being an advantage in making public policy decisions as the EU suggests, can become a handicap because it makes you gullible. A lack of real-world experience can lead you to place too much value on textbooks: on what should be, rather than what is likely to be.
This problem is exacerbated by what Peter Oborne called the “political class” – people who left university, became special advisers, and then MPs. As politics becomes captured by a
class of professional politician, not just in Britain but around Europe, the gulf grows wider. As Penn
puts it in his book, “While today’s elites are reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat, the rest of America is living in it.”
All of this is a challenge to people like me, who are in favour of Britain’s EU membership and would like to save it. Something as important as this needs to be resolved by the country as a whole.
It won’t do to claim, as Douglas Alexander did this morning, that being pro-EU membership the mainstream because all Westminster parties believe it. There is a wide gap, as Cameron discovered on
Monday, between the Westminster consensus and the popular consensus. This gap is, in my opinion, wider than can be sustained in a democracy like Britain. A realignment is now overdue.
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