Brexit: Leave vote gains momentum as Britain heads to referendum

The feeling grows that David Cameron has badly misread the public mood.

Britain goes to the polls on June 23 to vote on its future relationship with Europe.

Australians ought to beware the consequences of Britain leaving the EU next week. According to British Prime Minister David Cameron, a vote for Brexit on June 23 could lead to World War III. His Chancellor of the Exchequer, George ­Osborne, insists a vote to leave could precipitate a worldwide ­recession. Donald Tusk, head of the European Council, has gone one better. According to this senior Eurocrat, if the British people vote to leave the EU it will cause the end of civilisation.

So though you may be on the other side of the globe, if you are reading this before Thursday you should stockpile beans and bottled water. If you are reading this after Thursday and the British people have voted to leave, then take up those tins and head for the hills.

Since the start of this year, when Cameron headed to Brussels for his renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership and returned with the better part of diddly, the debate on the country’s EU membership gradually has grown to this peak of derangement.

From the moment he came back with a promise from the European Commission that he might get some minor alterations to migrant benefits if the EC subsequently agreed to pass them, Cameron has gone from a statesman to a figure of menace to a figure of fun.

Having got his unimpressive deal, Cameron was bound by a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on it. And hoping to win that referendum, he obviously made it as easy for himself as pos­sible. Not by getting the British people to vote on a specific aspect of the deal or a specific aspect of EU membership, as the Danish and Dutch electorates have done in recent referendums, but by turning it into an “in” or “out” question: it’s yes to the deal or get out of the whole thing.

It was the PM’s hope that such a bald choice would scare the naturally small-c conservative British public into staying. In which case he misread the British public.

To begin with, the polls showed Remain to be ahead in the polls. In celebration, the Remain camp — which includes nearly the ­entire British (as well as Brussels) political class and most major ­financial and other institutions — unloaded its entire range of ­munitions in a process that ­became known as Project Fear.

It was classic Cameron.

A similar process had worked in persuading the voters of Scotland to remain part of Britain in 2013. But the Prime Minister forgot — as the ­result of that referendum clearly showed — most Scots regard Britain as having been a pretty successful union that has done some good in the world. Few Brits regard the EU in such a benign light.

But every cannon of the establishment went off. Bang went the International Monetary Fund with a threat that in the event of Brexit, the fifth largest economy in the world would become an economic basket-case, twin-able only with Yemen. Boom went the Canadian-born governor of the Bank of England, warning of a simultaneous rise in mortgages and fall in house prices. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan did their best (or worst). Osborne watched the effects of his prearranged volleys with a barely disguised smirk.

Soon every day’s papers were filled with joint letters from ­experts, all neatly arranged on 24-hour cycles by No 10 Downing Street. One day it was some retired military chiefs saying we were safe only in the EU. Another day it was former ­intelligence heads saying the same. Several former American secretaries of state said Britain’s place in the world would disappear unless we continued to be governed from Belgium. And an array of foreign leaders, including Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama, popped up in London alongside Cameron, put on their most severe faces and threatened the British public about the grim consequences of leaving.

The US President’s performance was particularly striking. Britain should expect nothing from America if we left, he warned. Were we to leave we would have no more purchase on the ­affec­tions or trade priorities of the US than Burundi or Burkina Faso. Indeed, in April, Obama said we would be sent to “the back of the queue”.

Perhaps one should have ­expected the British people would not like being talked to in such a fashion. Public trust in ­institutions and authorities is as low in Britain as in any Western country at present, and the public does not like being told by such people that it does not know what is good for itself. As Australian-born political philosopher Ken Minogue once put it, there has been a growing awareness that we seem to have become a disappointment to our politicians. We appear to think the wrong things on a range of issues. It is surprising they have put up with us for so long.

But there is also a strain of contrarianism in the British public.

Some years ago there was a television experiment on the continent to show how much electricity could be saved if everybody watching turned off one utility or light switch at the same time. Lo, the public saw the amount of energy instantly saved on the grid.

The same experiment was mooted by a British broadcaster until someone pointed out that the British public would most likely take the opportunity to run around the house switching everything on to see the grid go off the chart and wreck the whole experiment.

Such aspects of the British public clearly surprised the PM and his team. For ever since Project Fear started, the poll leads for Remain have become ever narrower until finally they have been reversed.

The more they fired their strongest guns, the more the Remain camp became surprised that their shells seemed to be landing to the noise not of concern but of ­derision.

And by this time the official Leave campaign (headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove from the Conservatives and Gisela Stuart from Labour) as well as the ­unofficial additional Leave campaign (headed by the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage) had also got going. And though ­Remain tried to fill people only with fear for the future, Leave had a very positive argument.

Independence from Brussels would not be a “leap into the dark”, as the ­Europhiles had spent weeks insisting. Rather, it would mean “taking back control” of our future as a country.

If you don’t like something that is happening then Brexit gives you a better chance of making your voice heard. If you don’t think we see much back from the £350 million ($675m) a week we give the EU, then here is your chance to get back control of that money. And if you don’t like the seemingly limitless, record-breaking immigration, then here is your chance to stem that flow and take back control of Britain’s borders.

Of all the Leave arguments, this last is the one that has most seized the public mood. For many years, public opinion polls in Britain have consistently shown immigration to be the No 1 concern of the public. Poll after poll has shown not just a majority but serious majorities (generally 60 per cent to 80 per cent) favouring the idea that we need less immigration.

For a generation the ­Labour and Liberal Democratic parties have told such voters they are racists. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have disdained such people while pretending to listen to them.

So when he became Prime Minister, Cameron promised to get net ­immigration into Britain down from the “hundreds of thousands” a year to the “tens of thousands”. He has never managed anything like that, and the latest immigration figures show migration to be at record levels (330,000 in the past year alone). The public is not just angry about this, is it furious. And it knows who to blame.

For years Cameron and his equally pro-Remain Home Secretary, Theresa May, explained their inability to get immigration under control by the fact membership of the EU wouldn’t allow them to do so. This is the same EU they are now trying to ­intimidate the public into voting to remain in.

So though there is some truth to the Remain camp’s complaint that the public is using the EU as a cipher for every disgruntlement, there is also cause for such disgruntlement and a sense that this may be our only time to really show it. Add in the disdain for lectures from financial institutions that have not precisely covered themselves in glory since 2008 or before, and you have the perfect brew for a popular revolt.

And though some link this to the Trump and Sanders phenomena in the US, it is not quite the same thing. This is not least ­because the Leave camp in Britain is notable for its positiv­ity and cheeriness, while Remainers (or ­Remainians as some call them) seem to be voting for the EU with a heavy heart and despite its multiple disasters (the eurozone, the migration crisis). Those voting to bring on “independence day” are doing so not only with joy but with drive and determination. The common wisdom is that the result could come down to the weather on the day (weak ­Remainers will stay at home, ­determined Leavers will come out, rain or shine).

The latest polls show Leave ahead of Remain, some outlier polls suggesting this could be by as much as 10 per cent. Though the result is likely to be far narrower than that, it is still ­extraordinary that it has come to this.

Whatever the result, let it be noted that in 2016, when a near ­entirety of the national, international and transnational political class, along with the IMF and everyone else, said to the British people that they knew our interests best, a good half of us (and perhaps more) were willing to turn around and blow them all a very British raspberry.

Douglas Murray is an author and associate editor of British magazine The Spectator.