‘Brexit’ vote outcome Cameron’s undoing
Win or lose, the British prime minister faces heavy backlash for referendum
LONDON— David Cameron, the British prime minister, has no one to blame but himself.
In 2013, besieged by the increasingly assertive anti-European Union wing of his own Conservative Party, Cameron made a promise intended to keep a short-term peace among the Tories before the 2015 general election: If re-elected, he would hold an in-or-out referendum on continued British membership in the bloc.
But what seemed then like a relatively low-risk ploy to deal with a short-term political problem has metastasized into an issue that could badly damage Britain’s economy, influence the country’s direction for generations — and determine Cameron’s political fate.
As the nation prepares to vote Thursday, the betting markets are signalling that Britain will choose to remain in Europe, but polls suggest that the outcome is still too close to call.
On Tuesday, speaking in front of No. 10 Downing St., Cameron warned that a decision to leave would be an “irreversible” choice. Appealing to older voters, many of whom tend to favour leaving the EU, Cameron urged them to think about what they would bequeath to the next generation.
“Above all, it is about our economy,” he said.
Cameron is famously lucky, having pulled out last-minute victories in numerous other scrapes. In this case, many analysts say he will be damaged goods even if he wins, with Conservatives more divided than ever.
If he loses, he will come under pressure to resign, and even if he hangs on for some portion of the four years left in his government’s term, whatever substantive legacy he might have built will be lost to what many consider to be a wholly unnecessary roll of the dice.
Martin Wolf, the economic columnist of the Financial Times, wrote that “this referendum is, arguably, the most irresponsible act by a British government in my lifetime.” Summarizing the nearly unanimous opinion of economists that a British exit — “Brexit” — would be followed by a major shock and permanent loss of growth, he concluded: “The outcome might well prove devastating.”
Cameron argues that the referendum had to be called to resolve the festering debate over Britain and the EU. As in the Scottish referendum on independence in 2014, he says, this vote represents a “great festival of democracy” on a very difficult and divisive topic.
But if the Scottish referendum turned nasty, and kept the United Kingdom together, this one has become poisonous, with Cameron’s own cabinet colleagues and supposed friends saying that he has eroded trust in politics, portraying him as a liar and acting like a government in waiting.
It has been a campaign punctuated by numerous claims that have little relationship to the facts, with sharp tones of xenophobia, racism, nativism and Islamophobia. And it was marked tragically last Thursday by the assassination of a young Labour member of Parliament, Jo Cox, who fiercely supported remaining in the union.
“Who put Britain in this situation if we leave?” asked Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “Cameron has made the case against himself, and he’s damaged either way.”
Cameron presumably thought it would be an easy win for the “Remain” forces, Fielding said. “But it’s far tighter than anyone thought,” he said, “and rather than a salve on the Tory party, it’s made the fever worse.”
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, is slightly less harsh. “It’s really a binary legacy” for Cameron, he said. “It is either one that ends in almost complete failure or one that seems pretty respectable in electoral and policy terms. I can’t think of another prime minister who had so much riding on one decision.”
If the Remain campaign loses, Cameron “will go down as the person who miscalculated, taking us out of Europe almost by mistake, and then shuffled off the stage,” Bale said.
Charles Lewington, a former director of communications for the Conservative Party, said there had to be a referendum. By 2013, he said, “there was tremendous pressure for an inout referendum and not just from the old guard.”
Lewington cited growing concern from Conservative members of Parliament that they were at risk of losing their seats in districts where the hard-line U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, was strong. Given the panic in the party, he said, “I don’t think he could have avoided making an in-out manifesto commitment.”
Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, a friend of Cameron’s and a Tory legislator, was more scathing about the failure of Conservative leaders to confront, rather than appease, the hard-line Tory euroskeptics.
“If you have an Alsatian sitting in front of you, and it growls at you and bares its teeth, there are two ways of dealing with it,” Soames said in an interview with the British website Conservativehome. “You can pat it on the head, in which case it’ll bite you, or you can kick it really hard.”
“Successive prime ministers, and it’s not the present prime minister alone, have never understood that they have to take these people on,” Soames said.
If the Remain side loses, both Cameron and his deputy, the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, are likely to be gone within months, Lewington said.