Ignore David Cameron’s fear campaign: Brexit’s best for Brits

The Union Jack flutters among EU flags outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week.

If Britain votes on June 23 to leave the EU, it will be a decisive act of Western self-assertion and self-confidence. That is why, geo-strategically, a vote for Brexit would be so beneficial.

Without being too alarmist and one-minute-to-midnight-ish about all this, the Western civilisational project is under severe challenge in a way it hasn’t been since World War 11.

The collapse of Europe’s borders, the spending and entitlement crisis leading into the budget crises across the advanced Western economies, the feebleness of Europe’s military capabilities, the bizarre turn in US politics which has seen Donald Trump emerge as a credible White House contender, are the outward signs of a massive civilisational loss of confidence, purpose, elan and good governance.

In all this, the European Union is not best viewed as one of the remaining institutions of Western solidarity that should be defended. Rather, it is a symbol of complete and abject Western failure, a symbol of the inability of Western governments any longer to undertake the basic tasks of government.

A Britain that frees itself from the EU will be one which can make its economy better, and which can play a bigger, more internationalist, and indeed even more globalist, role.

Quite naturally, these are not the terms on which the Brexit debate is being held in Britain. Most British voters are rightly asking themselves whether they will be better off in the long run inside or outside of the EU. It is a question of the practical benefits of sovereignty versus European integration, or more negatively the price of no British control over who comes into and stays in the country versus the threats of economic retaliation from a vengeful Brussels.

The way British Prime Minister David Cameron has run this debate is a textbook case of disgraceful fearmongering by a democratic leader. He has no case to make for staying in Europe beyond the wildest fear campaign in modern British history about what would happen if his country leaves. Cameron has said Brexit could lead to war, that it will mean Scotland breaking away from Britain, that it will immediately induce a recession, that it will put mortgage payments up by $2000 a year, that it is akin to bombing the economy, that to vote for Brexit is immoral, that house prices will collapse, businesses go bust, unemployment go up and that the leave campaign, run predominantly by his cabinet colleague Michael Gove and Tory heavyweight Boris Johnson, is based on “complete untruths and nonsense”.

Cameron has recruited a vast cast of international panjandrums and potentates — a gaggle of Euro blatherskites and even, God help us, Barack Obama — to browbeat the British people about the perfidy and dire consequences of a vote to leave.

Never in modern democratic history has an attempt to intimidate voters been so naked.

And yet this last week the leave campaign has roared back in the polls and there is a cigarette paper’s difference between support for leave and support for ­remain.

How can this be?

In a life dedicated to fairly heavyweight analysis and commentary, Robert Manne has occasionally blessed us with a truly witty insight. He once remarked that he didn’t think bipartisan support would be enough to win any Australian referendum. Rather, he thought bipartisan opposition would be the only chance for referendum success.

If the British vote to leave, they will have defied bipartisan opposition. Not only Cameron, but Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as well as the Scottish Nationalist Party, the third largest party in Westminster, and the Greens are all campaigning for remain.

It is tempting to see support for Brexit as the British expression of the nasty, nativist populism of Donald Trump. I think this is a deeply unfair analysis but, more important, it is factually wrong. The leading lights of leave, Gove, Johnson, Dan Hannan, Nigel Lawson and countless others are genuine ­internationalists and economic liberals.

In any event, populism demands a more sophisticated analysis than just denunciation. Destructive populism, like most political fanaticism, does not start with pure evil. Rather, the maniacal fixation on one virtue to the exclusion of all others is the essence of fanaticism.

Patriotism is good, it is a positive, nourishing sentiment. But if it excludes other competing and qualifying virtues it becomes fanatical and intolerant nationalism. The same is true of tolerance itself. If tolerance is the only public virtue, pursued at the expense of everything else, it destroys all sense of purpose, identity, morale, and the norms a society needs to thrive. Finally it eats itself, devoured by its own contradictions.

So it is with populism.

The extremism, racism, inherent nods to violence and contempt for institutions such as the judiciary and the military which are inherent in Trump need to be vigorously resisted. But that is not to say that everything in the Trump phenomenon is evil or that there are no real grievances behind Trump’s rise.

In Europe, popular hostility to the EU is rising. Part of this can expressed in vicious populism, which can be racist. But the failure to address the issues giving rise to this populism is one of the reasons conventional politics is held in such disrepute.

The EU has made five catastrophic mistakes which mean that as an institution it is probably irredeemable and certainly Britain would be better off out.

The first is the euro, an unmitigated disaster which has wrought dreadful economic havoc on societies and deprived them of the means of addressing their difficulties. The second is an economic model that is regulatory, embodies excessive government, welfare and size, and makes Europe one of the slowest growing big economies. Third is a wholly undemocratic method of government.

Fourth is the illegal immigration crisis, which the EU cannot address and which means the EU has almost no effective control of its borders. And fifth is a determination to impose all these mistakes on all of its members.

This is in great contrast to, say, NATO, which is a successful Western institution that deserves support.

Cameron himself once understood all these difficulties about Europe and railed against them. He told British voters at the last election he would seek major reforms in the EU, and significant concessions from Brussels for Britain, especially in controlling the numbers allowed to come into Britain and claim welfare.

He said that at the end of this process he would submit Britain’s membership of the EU to an in/out vote. Obviously implicit in Cameron’s program was the assumption that if he didn’t get sufficient change from the EU he would lead Britain out. Instead he was completely humiliated in these negotiations. He played a strong hand exceptionally badly and got nothing from Brussels.

Having got nothing, he now says that the mere idea of leaving the EU is catastrophic for Britain. If that was true then Cameron should never have proposed a referendum at all.

Indeed the trajectory that Cameron has taken over Europe is so dishonest, and involves such a massive volte-face, that in itself it is a significant blow to the credibility of the governing class throughout the West.

If Britain does leave the EU, it will be a deliberate decision by the electorate to take responsibility for its own destiny, economically and in security terms.

The leave campaign is not a nativist rejection of immigrants. Instead, Johnson, Gove and their colleagues explicitly propose implementing an immigration system akin to Australia’s, the most successful long-term legal immigration program in the modern world.

The essence of that system is that a colour-blind, race-blind, ethnicity-blind points test selects immigrants with the skills and education that give them the best chance of succeeding in their new society. At the same time there is a loading for family connections and, parallel to all that, you can run a large humanitarian and refugee intake as well, as part of a compassionate desire to share your good fortune with the disadvantaged as well as the skilled.

Brexit represents a popular assertion of good government against the dishonesty, equivocations and failures of a paralysed governing class. Typically, when such an effort is defeated, the next step is more paralysis followed by really nasty populism.

In every way, Brexit offers Britain a way out that it ought to take.