Eurocratic elites stifle British sovereignty

It is the lust of political life. Sovereignty is staging a comeback, drawing on its emotional and democratic heartland. And sovereignty largely equates with control — a quest apparent in the rise of Donald Trump, the campaign to take Britain out of Europe and at home varied campaigns against local council amalgamation and coal-seam gas.

The more we lose control of our lives to allegedly superior “elites” and interests, the more people grab every available chance to keep control — to assert sovereignty at the street, neighbourhood and national level.

Occasionally a moment of destiny arrives when a nation must decide what it means by sovereignty — and that moment has now come for Britain with the June 23 referendum on whether to stay in or quit the EU.

In America, as John Howard argued in his recent interviews, Trump’s success is built on the anger of alienation — a grassroots voter belief that their living standards and values have been treated with contempt by the political class. It is a revolt to reassert some control over the system.

The most effective display of sovereignty in Australia in recent years was Howard’s asylum-seeker policy as prime minister. It was a quest for sovereignty in its purist form: “we will control who comes to this country” — a stance Labor was forced, finally, to embrace in a repudiation of the human rights cosmopolitans in its ranks.

This is a war between the two great forces of our age — the rationalism of globalisation and shared humanity on the one hand, and cultural assertion on the other that springs from religious and ­national heritage reinforced by the power of localism.

The current era is defined by the failure of power elites in ­Europe and America that has ­generated a backlash in a polarised politics that challenge ortho­doxies.

The exit campaign in Britain had been given a persuasive intellectual framework by senior minister Michael Gove, who broke with Prime Minister David Cameron on the issue.

In his 1500-word manifesto, Gove writes: “The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time.

“It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and, like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date.

“The EU tries to standardise and regulate rather than encourage diversity and innovation. It is an analog union in a digital age. The EU is built to keep power and control with the elites rather than with the people.

“It is hard to overstate the degree to which the EU is a constraint on ministers’ ability to do the things they were elected to do.

“The experience of government has only deepened my conviction that we need to change. Every single day, every single minister is told: ‘Yes, minister, I understand, but I’m afraid that’s against EU rules.’ I know it. My colleagues in government know it. And the British people ought to know it too: your government is not, ultimately, in control in hundreds of areas that matter.”

While Cameron is expected to prevail in his argument to keep Britain in Europe, the power of the exit case cannot be dismissed. The early days suggest its campaign will be powerful and based on two ideas: the EU project is failing and that Britain should reclaim its sovereignty from a flawed 20th-century experiment.

It was revealing at the weekend, interviewed on Sky’s Australian Agenda program, that Howard said Britain should leave the EU.

He said the idea of a free-trade zone had been “terrific” but the once the notion of political union took hold the union became “an affront to sovereignty” to member nations.

Howard said future internal pressures, whether or not members were part of the euro zone, “will be towards greater integration. That would not work for Britain; the EU had overreached.

“I think history is against the European project in its current form succeeding,” he said.

The emphasis on sovereignty is triggered by public frustration at current policy failures by Western government though these are less pronounced in Australia.

These failures are not normal, run-of-the-mill failures but loom more as historical turning points.

They relate to finance (entrenched stagnant or failing living standards since the 2008 global financial crisis) and border security (the imperative for a nation to decide for itself who joins its community).

In his book The End of Alchemy, being serialised at present in Britain’s TheDaily Telegraph , former Bank of England governor Mervyn King argues that “trust in money can only work if it goes with sovereignty”.

This truth has won a new vindication. Referring to the European Monetary Union, King says: “Put bluntly, monetary union has created a conflict between a centralised elite on the one hand and the forces of democracy at the national level on the other. This is extraordinarily dangerous.”

He points out that last year the presidents of the European Commission, the Euro Summit, the Eurogroup, the European Central Bank and the European Parliament published a report arguing for a fiscal union and “implicitly supporting the idea of a single finance minister for the euro area”.

“This approach of creeping transfer of sovereignty to an unelected centre is deeply flawed and will meet popular resistance,” King says.

“In pursuit of peace, the elites in Europe, the US and international organisations such as the IMF, have, by pushing bailouts and a move to a transfer union as the solution to crises, simply sowed the seeds of divisions in Europe and created support for what were previously seen as extreme political parties and candidates.

“It will lead to not only an economic but a political crisis.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore, a former editor of the paper and Cameron critic, has addressed mass migration from the Middle East, arguing that the foundations of the EU Schengen Agreement — abolishing internal borders and restrictions on people movement — had largely unravelled.

This agreement, Moore argues, hinges on external security and mutual trust. Because the EU cannot control its external borders, it cannot manage internal migration.

And if Britain could not control the numbers or type of people it was admitting, then governments could not honour their task of keeping Britain safe.

One of Britain’s wisest decisions under the former Labour government was to stay away from the euro zone.

But this will not prevent the sovereignty argument from playing out front and centre in the referendum campaign.

The purpose of this column is not to endorse Britain’s exit. Indeed, a strong argument can be mounted that Britain would lose more than it would gain and Europe would most certainly be losing more.

The point, rather, is that the British debate might turn into what The Economist has called “an alarmingly close contest”. This testifies in dramatic fashion to the forces now unleashed across many democracies.

They originate in sustained low economic growth, the new status quo that also brings inequality and poverty.

This is compounded by the patronising attitudes of elites who lecture, but with diminished authority, while the public seeks to regain what it has lost.

As for Australia, don’t believe it will be immune from these forces. They will merely arise in a different manifestation.