Brexit: the tide tuns on the crises Britain can do without

European mismanagement has given British voters more incentives to quit the European Union.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron is showing signs of panic.

Six days before the June 23 referendum on Brexit, the polls in Britain were pointing towards a Leave victory. That would have been a shock result only weeks before. Remain had led comfortably for most of the year. However, from the start of this month, Leave steadily gained ground until the polls seemed to offer two possibilities: a neck-and-neck finish or a substantial Leave lead of between 4 per cent and 7 per cent.

And though experts pointed out that there was often a late election swing to the status quo, there was a growing consensus that Leave had enough momentum to carve out a victory, maybe even a substantial one.

Then Jo Cox, a rising young Labour MP and a young mother, was brutally murdered by a man who, according to some reports, shouted “Britain First” as he shot and stabbed her. Both Leave and Remain immediately suspended their campaigns out of respect for Cox, and tributes to her have poured in from politicians on all sides.

That said, is this horrible crime likely to change the result of the referendum? In general, such atrocities tend to have a direct political impact on voters only in two contrasting circumstances: first, when politicians have incited violence in their campaigns; second, when they have falsely attributed violence to their opponents.

Neither seems to apply here. First, the referendum campaign has been a model of democratic argumentation with crowded and good-humoured debates held in town and village halls across the country. The only violence done by politicians has been to statistics.

Second, with almost no exceptions, Leavers and Remainers have been careful not to speculate on whether the murderer was acting out violent rhetoric he had heard from political platforms. And since he seemingly has a record of mental illness, any such violence could hardly be blamed on politicians unless they have incited it.

Unless later reports change things, therefore, Cox’s murder should not push the voters in either direction. But politics is not strictly logical. The crime may make the electorate more risk-averse generally and give an assist, large or small, to the Remain camp. Or something else. We cannot know.

We must return to the calculations as they were on Thursday morning.

And Leave was leading comfortably in the polls. It looked like a sure thing.

But that appearance was superficial. For Britain, unlike every other EU member-state, had never completely reconciled itself to EU membership. “Europe” as a political issue had never ceased to be controversial in British politics. Nor was this simply a reflection of internal Tory disputes as left-wing Remainers have sometimes argued in the campaign. On the contrary, from the 1970s to the present, opinion polls fluctuated regularly between Inners and Outers, with the latter rarely falling below 40 per cent and occasionally rising above 50 per cent of those questioned.

But since the leaderships of the major parties, backed by what Frank Johnson called “the chattering classes”, were committed to EU membership, this persistent opposition had very limited impact on politics and policy. That changed with the emergence of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Not only did discontented Tories and alienated working-class Labour voters have “somewhere else to go” but UKIP’s presence ensured that Europe remained a live political choice at every election and by-election.

It won some of those elections, too, gaining only one seat at Westminster but the largest single bloc of UK seats in the European Parliament. Ironically enough, it was its European representation that gave UKIP respectability and a platform from which to advance the Eurosceptic cause.

As a member of the European Parliament, UKIP leader Nigel Farage has become one of Europe’s best-known politicians because his speeches in Brussels, officially videotaped as a parliamentary service, went viral on the internet. Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, also a Eurosceptic, seized the same opportunity to advance the anti-EU cause from within the Belly of the Beast.

If anti-EU opinion had always had numbers, and as it had recently developed a small but effective presence in British and EU politics, it was next given the best form of propaganda: events in the real world.

In the past four years, the EU has generated two international crises that it proved unable to resolve satisfactorily: the euro crisis and the migrant crisis.

The first arose because the EU developed a common currency without the financial institutions to run it effectively. The results are a succession of financial crises on the Greek model, a permanent recession in Mediterranean Europe, and an endless flow of subsidies from northern Europe.

The second crisis arose because the EU abolished internal borders without first securing external ones. The results are migrants, only some of whom are legitimate refugees, overwhelming borders illegally or by a dubious agreement with an authoritarian Turkish president that postpones rather than cures the agony.

Together these crises have undermined a familiar rationale for the EU — namely, that it is necessary to deal with crises too big for single nation-states — by demonstrating the exact opposite. And though these are only two of many EU crises (the energy crisis, the democratic legitimacy crisis, etc, etc), they have been played out on television and via the internet in their full horror.

All these factors — the long-lasting subterranean support for Brexit, the rise of serious anti-EU parties, the outbreak of crises fostered by the EU — made it impossibly risky for Remain to attempt a positive campaign rooted in idealism about a united Europe.

On the other hand, David Cameron’s failure to obtain any serious restoration of powers from Brussels to national parliaments meant that he couldn’t plausibly argue that Europe was reforming either. So there was always the real possibility of a large swing towards Leave once the campaign focused the attention of voters on what was actually happening in Europe.

That was the problem that Project Fear was designed to solve. It would distract attention from Europe’s failings and highlight the risks of being outside the EU; stress the authority of the people backing Remain and mock the mediocrity of those advising a leap into the dark of Brexit.

Unless the polls are way out of line, it hasn’t worked. And the best guess as to why it hasn’t worked is that the Remain camp believed its own propaganda and, because of that belief, exaggerated it to the point of unbelievability.

Roger Bootle, a leading pro-Brexit economist, speculated that the reason the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and all the other financial heavyweights produced the same forecasts of doom under Brexit was that their leaders went to the same conferences, took part in the same Davos forums and imbibed the same ideas.

As a result, they fell victim to groupthink, making the same judgments and, as on the euro, the same mistakes. When their first dire warnings failed to persuade the voters, they simply tried harder. And with each prophecy, the nation’s fate outside the EU grew ever more horrendous.

So when Cameron endured his first interview of the campaign, his interlocutor began by asking which of his two recent post-Brexit forecasts would come true first: World War III or a great depression. The audience burst out laughing.

This rhetorical Rake’s Progress reached its climax this week when Chancellor George Osborne warned that if Brexit occurred, he would be forced to raise taxes by an astounding £30 billion to plug the hole in the nation’s finances that Brexit supposedly would create.

This threat — for that is how it was seen — was generally treated with derision. In particular Osborne received an unprecedented rebuke from two former chancellors and two former Tory leaders in a letter to The Daily Telegraph in which they described the threat as “nothing more than ludicrous scaremongering born of desperation”, adding that “no responsible Chancellor would propose any such thing”.

Project Fear hasn’t given up — Christine Lagarde of the IMF is in town next week to present its latest statistical picture of death in Brexit. But the voters don’t seem to be paying these forecasts the attention and respect their authors (and Cameron and Osborne) think they should.

Admittedly, the Leave campaign wasn’t always adept at making its case either. Its quarrelsome factions couldn’t agree on what should be the right model for the post-Brexit UK — Norway, Switzerland, the European Free Trade Area. But that was an arcane topic as far as most voters were concerned.

Besides, events played into the hands of Leave. A series of immigration figures far higher than the government had predicted apparently confirmed the Leave view that immigration could not be controlled unless the UK recovered its sovereignty from Brussels. Remain never really developed a good reply to Leave’s sovereignty argument, especially as it related to migration or any hot topic.

One could tell that the debate was shifting against Remain from the way the champions of both sides gradually exchanged demeanours. Remain had started as a smooth Rolls-Royce operation with Cameron and Osborne exuding the self-confidence of effortless superiority; Leave was more like an Ealing comedy with Boris Johnson, Farage and Michael Gove each representing a different kind of British eccentric.

But Cameron and Osborne have been exhibiting signs of panic, testiness, and bad judgment as the campaign wears on while Johnson and Farage have been relaxed and self-controlled and urbane. And with a week to go, the Ealing amateurs were beating the professionals more generally.

The evidence for that was the general expectation in the Westminster village that Cameron and Osborne would be seriously under threat unless Remain won by a substantial margin — and Osborne even then.

Fifty-seven Tory MPs have declared publicly that they will not vote for his emergency budget if Brexit passes. Four Tory grandees have implied he is irresponsible. He has lost authority in the past fortnight and today he is a dead Chancellor walking.

Cameron is in only slighter better shape. If Brexit passes, he would not be regarded even by Remainers as a suitable man to negotiate the terms of Britain’s new relationship with the EU. He might just survive a small-margin win for Remain, but only by surrounding himself with cabinet colleagues who have opposed him in this campaign.

The Tory Left thinks he should never have called the referendum; the Tory Right that he should have supported Leave or fought a less aggressive campaign in the interests of party unity.

Both think that if he had fought such a campaign, the Tories would have emerged with credit from any result as the one party representing all sections of the nation in a great debate on its future. Instead, they are a fractured party waiting for the referendum result to guide them on what principles and under what leader they should reunite.

For Brexit will not disappear if Remain wins. Leave voters on left and right are now a permanent and more influential element in British politics. They are known to command the support of half the UK population.

They will be suffering from buyer’s remorse. And they will be a watching Britain in Brussels to ensure that the promises given in the campaign are kept by both sides. Will a new leader be able to reconcile not only Tory Leavers and Remainers but also the entire Tory party with its former stalwarts and current rivals in UKIP?

What kind of conservatism would be the result of such mergers? One suspects it would be a very different conservatism from Cameron’s.

John O’Sullivan is a British journalist, former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and the editor of Quadrant.