When interests take a back seat to values
In Britain, as in South Africa, politics gets in the way of reason, writes Peter Bruce
‘THE mass of men,” wrote the 19th-century naturalist and activist Henry D Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” Over time that phrase has increasingly been used to describe the English and it has seldom had a louder echo than on Thursday when the English middle classes of the shires and English working classes of the northeast turned out in their hundreds of thousands to drive Britain out of the EU.
Essentially, the EU referendum was an attempt to fix a running sore in Britain’s Conservative Party (the Tories), the home of Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher. The sore was a chronic division among Tories over Europe. The business types liked it because it brought them into a huge market. But the gentry didn’t. It meant rules and immigrants.
But, as it turns out, not only did Tory Prime Minister David Cameron badly miscalculate when he promised to hold a referendum he thought he would easily win after negotiating “reforms” with the EU, the actual damage was done by the Labour Party, whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was lacklustre in his support for Cameron’s bid to remain in the EU. Worse, he underestimated the strength of Labour feeling in the midlands and the northeast that the EU was damaging their lives.
South Africans will recognise the problem the Remain campaign faced. It can be summed up in the eternal question of why people don’t vote in their own interests. Why did Thatcher win three elections on the working-class vote when all she did was to shrink their rights? Why do poor and unemployed black South Africans vote ANC when it is demonstrably incapable of improving their lives to any significant degree?
Mainly it’s because people, at a certain level, vote their values and not their interests. So working-class Americans turn their backs on Obamacare, a health scheme designed to help them, because their churches tell them abortion is a sin.
But once you vote your values you risk placing yourself outside of reason. English workingclass life will become more desperate, not less, when their country is no longer a member of the EU. Sure, there will be a negotiated withdrawal, and the UK might score some enriching agreements as it withdraws, but the EU is under no obligation to be too helpful.
Up until Thursday, Britain scored easily the most direct foreign investment in the EU. That was because it is close to and part of the huge European market and has the amazing good fortune that the inhabitants speak English. That saves Asian investors having to learn French, deal with German verbs and Spanish declensions — and it matters.
Now it will gradually decline. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist, had this to say yesterday: “Everything we’ve seen in both Europe and North America suggests that the assurance of market access has a big effect in encouraging longterm investments aimed at selling across borders; revoking that assurance will, over time, erode trade even if there isn’t any kind of trade war. And Britain will be poorer as a result.”
Of course, British politicians, just like South African ones, will say this is rubbish. Just as the government here says we still have an industrial future, so the incoming UK prime minister, probably Boris Johnson, will call leaving the EU an opportunity. They are wrong. All the big Asian and American motor manufacturers produce cars for the EU in the UK and they will think long and hard about investing any more there. Already some big banks are planning to move to the continent.
And in Britain, as in South Africa, politics gets in the way of reason. In theory, the Brexit referendum is not binding on the British government. It could simply be ignored. It is only when Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon establishing the EU is triggered that an exit becomes unstoppable. Johnson is smart enough to know the economic damage Brexit will cause. And he has crafted his way to the very brink of power in the UK now that he has knocked Cameron out of office. Could he not just pocket the referendum? After all, it was close and the facts are that the EU has done nothing to harm the workers of Sheffield and Sunderland at all.
No, he can’t. Because if he did try to make it all go away he gives new life to the UK Independence Party, the rabid right Tory offshoot that took a heap of votes (but few seats) in last year’s general election.
For Johnson, UKIP is the threat. Labour will be on its knees for a decade. But once assuaged by a Brexit, the “values” that made UKIP big in the first place will need to be fed, and in a slowing economy.
And the value in question here is nationalism, British Nationalism. It is ugly and destructive and the essence of Brexit. Johnson now has a tiger by the tail. It will rule him and not the other way around.
People, at a certain level, vote their values and not their interests