Nostalgia fights economics in U.K. campaign
Brexit backers invoke a Britain that is long dead
The lunatic fringe that supports Britain leaving the European Union was already getting far more than its share of attention before one of them shot and stabbed to death a member of Parliament last week in northern England.
The heinous murder of Jo Cox does not obscure the fact that millions of placid, sensible Britons will likely vote for Brexit in Thursday’s epochal referendum on the United Kingdom’s ties with the continent.
The newest of a thousand imponderables that make the results a toss-up is whether Cox’s shocking death will scare the many Britons still teetering on the fence into voting to remain in the EU. Another imponderable that the Remain side is counting perhaps too heavily on is that when confronted with a choice between the status quo and a leap into the unknown, voters will opt for the security of the present deal.
It has been a bizarre campaign that has turned conventional logic on its head. One of the oddest aspects is that most older Britons want to rock the boat by ditching the EU. Younger Britons, who love being able to work almost anywhere on the continent and are rather relaxed about having several million Europeans working and living in Britain, strongly favour keeping things as they are.
Milton Keynes — often jokingly described as the most boring place in the U.K. because it is a planned city that resembles a sprawling North American suburb — rests on the fault line between London, 100 kilometres to the south, where a strong majority wishes to stay in the EU, and the rest of England, which wants out.
Another stark divide is that while a majority of the English wants to quit the EU, the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scots strongly wish to remain. A further complication is that if Britain leaves the EU, the Scots will almost certainly hold another referendum on independence.
When I asked the son of a friend who was livid over the possibility that Britain might cut its ties to Europe what kind of folks were attracted to the Leave camp, he pointed me to the Facebook page of a reasonably well-off woman he knew in her late 60s.
This Everywoman from Milton Keynes — call her Betty Brit — had just posted an article about how easy it is to abduct children. Her previous posting, which was festooned with Union Jacks, revelled in the pomp and pageantry that surrounded Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday last weekend. This paean to a time when Britain still had an empire was preceded by a slick video seen by millions of viewers that uses fearmongering about immigration and fanciful arithmetic about how much money the EU costs to make the case for severing the knot.
Before that posting was an off-the-wall link about how to be British, and another about how Britain could somehow become the next Switzerland.
That is, Britain could continue to maintain some ties to Europe, but would be able to opt out of the many parts of the current arrangements that it did not like. For example, British citizens would retain the right to travel freely within the EU but the country would regain the right to say who from Europe can settle in Britain and under what conditions.
Curiously, almost no thought has been given to how picking and choosing from the EU menu might go over with Britain’s erstwhile partners.
Despite the best efforts of the Remain side to make the referendum about the economy, with a mountain of statistics that support their argument that Britain has prospered in the EU, as well as apocalyptic talk about the fate of the pound and the stock market if Brexit wins, a quick scan of any news kiosk in the country confirms that the Brexit campaign has cleverly shaped the debate to be almost entirely focused on the far more emotive subject of immigration.
There is a fixation on how immigrants from eastern Europe have stolen jobs from locals and plundered the National Health Service and about the alleged dangers posed by Muslim refugees, although the truth is that Britain has accepted fewer asylum seekers from the Middle East than Germany, Sweden or Finland.
There is no clear answer in Milton Keynes or elsewhere about whether the obsession with immigration and yearnings for a Britain that has not really existed since the empire collapsed after the Second World War, will exert a stronger pull on voters than the tragedy of Cox’s murder and the economic problems, at least in the short or medium term, that will surely ensue if Brexit wins.
Simply put: when Betty Brit and others who think like her mark their ballots on Thursday, will they vote with their hearts or with their minds?