What Brexit’s all about
Former speaker of the House Andrew Scheer, who is widely believed to be angling to run for the leadership of the Conservative party, recently wrote in the National Post that from his former position, he had a “unique vantage point from which to witness the democratic gifts the British people gave the world: responsible government, the Westminster parliamentary system, ordered liberty and common law.”
But he believes these gifts are now being squandered by their creator, and that Britain should l eave the European Union.
If it did, he says, Britain could be more like Canada when it comes to trade and regulations and, of course, border control.
“Local decisions by local representatives — that’s the core of the Westminster system of responsible government that we inherited from Britain,” Scheer says.
“Yet t hat’s no l onger what’s practised in the U.K.”
This last point is an important one, and it is the ostensible crux of the whole U. K./ EU i ssue f or many Brexiteers in Britain, too. But like much of the Brexit camp’s arguments, this idea that proper representation for those who desperately seek it would necessarily come from leaving the EU is flawed — most deeply when it comes to the question of who feels they are not being represented. As such an apparently keen viewer of the Westminster system, Scheer should know that it’s not really Britain that needs more local representation from local representatives, but England.
That distinction is important, because it is England that’s driving Brexit. The l atest YouGov poll shows this fairly clearly: 56 per cent of those in Scotland polled said they would have Britain remain in the EU. Only 39 per cent of those in the North of England would vote the same way, while 36 per cent of those in the Midlands and Wales would vote remain, along with just 43 per cent of those in much of the South of England. London is the outlier in England — 50 per cent of Londoners told YouGov they’d vote to remain in the EU.
And the division between England’s politics and the rest of Britain’s was clear before this point, too. The most recent Future of England study by the Univer- sity of Edinburgh’s Centre on Constitutional Change, published in 2014, found the rallying point for England’s “distinctive” politics was “an English desire for selfgovernment.”
The report notes, too, that “dissatisfactions with both England’s unions — the U. K. and the EU — were strongly related to one another, and were felt most strongly by those people in England who claimed an English rather than a British identity.”
The study also found that “people in England are not just reacting against their ‘others’ in Scotland and the EU. They are also searching more positively for an institutional recognition of England that can express their concerns better than the current political system, which submerges the representation of England within the wider U. K.’s institutions in Westminster and Whitehall.”
Leaving t he EU won’t solve that.
In fact, the most popular solution to this problem at the time of the report appeared to be something Pr i me Minister David Cameron had already suggested: English votes for English laws. After promising the Scottish parliament more powers during the 2014 i ndependence campaign, Cameron then opted to grant English MPs in London more direct voting power over English laws, too, in an attempt to create balance.
But t he f i rst of t hose votes happened this past January, only about a month before Cameron set off to see about renegotiating Britain’s deal within the EU. It was too little, too late to make much difference in what had already by that time become purely a debate about immigration — which is still about where it sits.
And it’s this last issue that makes Scheer’s intervention so unfortunate.
The push to leave the EU is symptomatic of a deeper problem within Britain that has been co-opted by people like UK Independence Party Leader Nigel Farage as a vehicle to legitimize a campaign to keep immigrants, especially those that can’t speak English, out of the country.
Scheer is right that he has held a very privileged vantage point from which to watch the Westminster system, and as such he should be equally aware that such a position gives his words more weight t han t hey might otherwise have.
In backing Leave by regurgitating t hat campaign’s talking points, and not pausing to consider the deeper roots of the perceived democratic deficit in Britain, Scheer has now used his platform to legitimize a very spurious argument about democracy, thereby breathing life into the most vile aspect of the Leave campaign, which is its race- baiting anti- immigration hokum.
One would have thought that, given his former posi tion, Scheer might have learned that democracy is rarely as simple as it is portrayed in the headlines. Apparently he did not.
IT’S ENGLAND, NOT BRITAIN, THAT’S DRIVING THE BREXIT. — COLIN HORGAN OUR FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW COMPLEX DEMOCRACY IS, AND WHAT’S ACTUALLY DRIVING BRITAIN’S CAMPAIGN.