Post Brexit, Britain still torn between nationalism and global leadership
At 7.30 a.m. on the not-sobright Brexit morning, the polling site Populus had 55 percent of Britons planning to cast their ballots for continued union with Europe --10 percent more than those predicted to be quitters. YouGov predicted a European margin of 4 percent. The betting markets had been a binge for Remain.
Now please estimate how many Remain voters, seeing their side so far ahead and weather nasty in places, decided to take a rain check. Then consider the effect of the same Thursday morning polls on Leavers who felt impelled to get out their umbrellas and vote down the Europeans and the “faceless bureaucrats” and refugee “hordes” of Daily Mailphantasmorgia.
The Leavers may have found the polls that morning credible, but they chose not to believe the experts’ forecasts of disaster that a Remain vote would engender. After all, even the former education minister, Brexiteer Michael Gove, had inveighed against giving credence to experts -- people who knew a thing of two about currencies and trade.
James Moore, former U.S. assistant secretary of commerce for international affairs, assures me this financial turmoil will last for months.
One wishes the Leavers long and happy lives -- but they’ll mostly escape the relatively stagnant future they chose. Roughly 75 percent of over65s voted exit while a similar number of under-25s voted to remain to stay in Europe. If younger Brits bear the burden of the future, the older carry the burden of what they remember as a better past.
Britain is a culturally richer, more interesting and innovative country than it was in 1993. But it is noticeably a different Britain. The foreignborn population of 3.8 million has increased to 8.3 million, not evenly distributed. Immigrants get blamed for delays in the National Health Service and for pressure on schools, hospitals and housing. One daft Remain argument was that a Leave win would lead to a fall in housing prices.
The Remain campaign had by far the better intellectual case in the analyses by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England. Remain lost Blue Labour workers by not realizing how deeply the older people in the north resented seeing their home communities change beyond recognition without so much as a by-your-leave from London.
Britain has always been conflicted in its patriotic nationalism and its desire, bred of an extinct empire, to be a world leader. I lived through a series of European torments. When I was editor of The Times in 1981, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher invited me at a small Downing Street dinner to honor French President Francois Mitterrand. The idea of building a tunnel under the English Channel (or, as the French would say, under La Manche, the sleeve) was first mooted by a French engineer in 1802. By 1981 it was a subliminal item on our menu.
The entente was cordial at Thatcher’s top table. I was sandwiched between Europhiles, Bank of England Governor Gordon Richardson, and the British Rail Chairman Sir Peter Parker, who was nodding agreement with the French minister of transport. We would have had a deal before the noisettes of lamb, but for the noises off.
It took six years from that dinner for Thatcher to wear down internal opposition to the Chunnel. “Too often in the past,” she said when the tunnel treaty finally was ratified in 1987, “pioneering spirits, men of vision and imagination, have been foiled by bureaucracy, narrow minds or plain fear of the unknown.”
Thatcher became a passionate supporter of Britain’s first referendum, in 1975, over joining the single market of the European Economic Community (EEC). So was Richardson, the Bank of England governor. My din- ner companion was prescient about what will enter history as the great Cameron screwup, the decision to buy off pressure from the far-right whiners in his own party, the tabloids and the Tory Telegraph, by promising a referendum.
“I must confess that I sometimes have to rub my eyes to be sure that I am not dreaming,” said Richardson of the 1975 vote. “That we really are deliberately engaged on a constitutional innovation as unsuitable and destabilizing as the referendum we now await.”
That referendum went well. Two-thirds of the country backed British membership of the European Economic Community.
Thatcher was torn over Europe throughout her premiership. She could see the economic benefits of cooperation and she was determined that Europe should be able to defend itself. At the same time, she was provoked into her Iron Lady posture when Jean Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament that within 10 years he expected 80 percent of European legislation to be made without British involvement.
“Let me say bluntly on behalf of Britain,” she said. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
Britain’s new cabinet is likely to feel similar ambivalence when it takes over this fall. Populist insurgencies have gained ground in a Europe struggling with low growth, debt and the refugee crisis. The Leave vote, bad as it certainly is for Britain, is worse for Europe. Other dominoes may fall.
The Tory Party is not overflowing with strategic vision. Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, the crowd-pleasing leader of the Leaves, clearly expects his betrayal of Prime Minister David Cameron to be rewarded with Johnson’s own succession to 10 Downing Street.
Johnson has his history upside down. A united Europe would have seen off Hitler in 1936. “Had the French marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tail between our legs,” Hitler sneered after admitting that he took a gamble by sending three illequipped battalions into the demilitarized zone between Germany and France.
Ian Kershaw’s To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 documents the terrible price the continent paid for the isolationism of the 1930s, the xenophobia, the mass media nationalist incitements and the pathological delusions that doomed a generation -and are again rampant. The two- state solution, “with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace and harmony”. What a lovely thought. This mantra is repeated endlessly by high-profile politicians the world over and in editorials of much of the world’s media. Unfortunately the reality is rather different.
If, for a moment, one puts aside issues of history and the origins of the conflict, where do we find ourselves today? The West Bank (also known as Judaea and Samaria, the Biblical and ancestral homelands of the Jewish people) is divided into three areas agreed to in the 1995 Oslo Accords: Areas A and B (run and administered by the Palestinian Authority, “the PA”), and Area C which is administered by the Israelis and where almost all their settlements are located.
The West Bank is run by the PA, and led by Mahmoud Abbas (who is in his 11th year of a four-year term), whereas the Palestinians in Gaza are run by Hamas, bitter rivals to the PA. In spite of the fact that there have been numerous failed attempts at reconciling both parties, Hamas operatives in the West Bank are responsible for numerous assassinations and attempts at undermining Abbas. It is mostly due to the presence of the Israel Defence Forces (“IDF”), stationed in Area C where they can co-ordinate with PA forces, that the PA under Abbas remains in power. It is largely accepted that should Israeli forces be forced to withdraw from the West Bank for political reasons, this would be swiftly followed by a Hamas-PA confrontation that would inevitably lead to a Pandora’s box of hell—a Hamas takeover and a Gaza makeover, an open threat to both Israel and Jordan, and ultimately an opening to the Iranians. This would also result in the disruption of air traffic at Ben Gurion airport with serious consequences for Israel’s economy. This is simply unacceptable to the Israelis. The lesson was learned in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, uprooting some 8,500 settlers. Politicians in the West praised PM Sharon for this bold gesture which many assumed would surely be reciprocated by the Palestinians. Furthermore, many in government at the time said that withdrawal from Gaza could provide a template for the West Bank. Unfortunately it did not lead to any hoped-for gestures for peace or any breakthrough with Hamas. On the contrary, within 48 hours Hamas militants moved rocket and missile units up to the border and proceeded to rocket Israeli towns and villages in the immediate areas. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal has been a controversial subject ever since (among Israelis), and similar moves proposed for the West Bank have, not surprisingly, been placed on the backburner. In any case, with whom is Israel supposed to make an agreement? with Israel null and void? Their charter (which can be downloaded) calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, an aim which is repeated as regularly as by the ayatollahs who run Iran.
Overlaying the above is the relentless and unprecedented level of demonisation and incitement against Israel in the Palestinian media, schools and mosques, and the glorification of terrorism through the naming of sports centres, streets, town squares and monuments after the killers of Israeli women and children. “Occupied Palestine” doesn’t mean the West Bank, it means all of Israel, so Palestinian maps show Israel as “Palestine”, and all Israelis, no matter where they live, are called “settlers”. What is happening is that senior figures in the PA are competing with Hamas in issuing hatefilled, extremist messages to the Palestinian people, who are consequently being increasingly radicalised to the point of supporting Hamas, and even ISIS. The peace process continues to be severely compromised by this, to which the international media pays scant attention, preferring instead to blame Israel for lack of progress. Likewise, President Obama seems unable to raise this issue directly with Mahmoud Abbas. It is no secret that there is no love lost between President Obama and PM Netanyahu. There is some speculation that, after the elections in November and before Obama leaves office in January, he may attempt to shore up his legacy by imposing a solution to the peace process by not using the US veto in the UN Security Council in the event of a French resolution that seeks to achieve the same ends. Abbas of the PA is banking on this, which explains why he consistently refuses to meet with Netanyahu for faceto-face negotiations. Why should he meet him if the Americans can deliver what he wants without having to pay any diplomatic price?