The evil forces behind Brexit
The panic of white males took time,
Three forces combined to kill both pro-Europe British MP Jo Cox and Britain’s membership in the European Union: insularity, racism and shockingly stupid, cynical leaders.
For nations, geography is destiny. England, “a small island” broken off from a big continent, has, for centuries, feared its menacing neighbours: Roman, Saxon, Viking and Norman invaders, then the failed invasions of Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler.
Result: a now-inbred British paranoia about cross-Channel involvements. And pride in standing alone, as in the 1940 London Blitz.
Deepening the “free” sovereign mindset, two 20th-century world wars dragged a million British soldiers to their deaths. Said Margaret Thatcher: “Most of the problems the world has faced have come from mainland Europe.”
“Splendid isolation,” lyricized Britain’s 19thcentury foreign policy. But “the Continent” as “abroad” lurks in the British psyche. Imperial nostalgia, Kipling’s “white man’s burden” and the triumph of English as the world’s lingua franca still stir casual contempt for foreigners.
Insularity underpins Britain’s gut preference for seaborne free trade, not land-based EU peace-building. Therein lies the historical core of EU-U.K. misunderstanding.
Racism? E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel, A Passage to India, portrayed the evils of racial and cultural bigotry. He traced the inexorable progression of ignorance to fear to prejudice to hate.
When Whitehall opened U.K. doors after 1945 to less colour-obsessed Commonwealth immigration, it imported the empire’s cultural-racial tensions. This was not Forster’s feathery malefemale touchings in a dark, faraway Indian cave. Over decades, it brought millions of strangely dressed, non-white, non-Christian peoples into British neighbourhoods and jobs. The panic of white males took time. Tory MP Enoch Powell dramatized fear of ethno-cultural conflict, in 1968. Fired from Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet for denouncing non-white immigration, he warned: “Filled with foreboding, like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the
In the horrific mess the referendum debate leaves behind, there is lots of blame to share.
River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ”
Since then, Britain has see-sawed between fear and hope. Welcome-the-immigrant agencies have bravely preached tolerance, and fought hate. Yet some hard-to-assimilate Muslim communities have stoked security fears.
Only a handful of Muslims are linkable to terrorism. But this tiny minority’s murderous acts have drawn massive media coverage. The British gutter press — notably the Sun and the Daily Mail — fans racial paranoia unconscionably.
That’s not hard when the political caste has fed the fear — deliberately or by supportive attitudes, cowardice and selfishness. In the horrific mess the referendum debate leaves behind, there is lots of blame to share.
The obvious fear-feeders have been the Out-brigade: creepy Nigel Farage of the U.K. Independence Party and the bloated Tory clown Boris Johnson. The strategy from the outset was to blow up legitimate queries about immigration into hysteria against an unstoppable brown-skinned “invasion.”
Farage’s told-you-so, standing before a poster of an endless line of migrants, shocked even many UKIP backers.
Johnson — Britain’s Donald Trump — outdid even Farage in lies and distortions. A tiresome mountebank, he displayed his desperation after Cox’s death by insinuating that his alleged Turkish blood somehow made him tolerant.
On the Remain side, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn was AWOL for most of the campaign. Not even his own people were sure where he stood.
Prime Minister David Cameron never knew where he stood in the Conservative party. For the past two years, he played both sides, pro-EU and Euro-skeptic. With one foot in Brussels and the other in London, he landed squarely in the Channel — soggy, foggy and unbelievable to everybody.
His dumbest move: calling a referendum, a sure way to make emotion (often fleeting), not ideas, decide Britain’s future.
Forgotten culprits of the referendum tragedy? EU leaders who, by worsening migration problems, made immigration a dominant U.K. referendum issue; and Brussels’ EU bureaucrats — overpaid and so “over there.”
All need to take a tough look at how Europe can rise above its resurgent tribalisms. At how it might, as Jo Cox dreamt, rebuild a stable peace.