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Post-Brexit, Britain still torn between nationalism and global leadership

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Political forecasters are smart about everything except the future.

At 7.30 a.m. on the not-so-bright Brexit morning, the polling site Populus had 55% of Britons planning to cast their ballots for continued union with Europe - 10% more than those predicted to be quitters. YouGov predicted a European margin of 4%. The betting markets had been on 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 Mail phantasmorgia.

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 or two about currencies and trade. He stands indicted by the plethora of misery in the tumbling pound.

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% of over-65s 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 foreign-born 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.

Yes, bad news for the well-housed, but a very good incentive for the ill-housed to vote Leave. And further proof that the elite hadn't a clue about how the other half lived.

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. But it was light on emotion. 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 to a small dinner at Downing Street 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.

At coffee, Thatcher's husband Denis, and his gossip mate, the amiable Bill Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph, vented about awful it would be to have smelly French trucks driving through the hop fields of Kent. Aux Barricades!

Listening glumly was the normally ebullient Christopher Soames, Conservative leader of the House of Lords. As ambassador to France from 1968-67, he'd helped Britain join the European Economic Community, the trading bloc that led to the European Union now so spectacularly disavowed by the English mainland.

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 dinner companion was prescient about what will enter history as the great Cameron screw-up, 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, the non-elected president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament that within 10 years he expected 80 percent of European legislation would be made by the European Community.

"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 re-imposed 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, however, is distrusted by many Britons, especially after he propagated almost as many misstatements as the world champion, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the United States. Johnson peddled the same Trumpian tropes about taking the country back. In place of Trump's Mexicans, the excitable former mayor famously likened the European Union to the Third Reich, with Adolf Hitler arriving soon at the white cliffs of Dover.

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 ill-equipped 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

© (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016.

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

10 Comments
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The Tory Party is not overflowing with strategic vision.

A veritable sledgehammer of understatement.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

The UK is not torn between nationalism and so c as lied global leadership, implying the socialist one world overlord government is a good thing.

Like many places, half the population wants to be enslaved by elites and the other half realizes every problem in the world is caused by that global leadership. It is sensible to remove an unnecessary political class which is oppressing you

-5 ( +1 / -6 )

This article still doesn't get it, this entire referendum was racial as demonstrated by all the hate crimes being perpetuated throughout England now. Nationalism was a small part, but the racial tinge of the referendum is impossible to deny

1 ( +3 / -2 )

Britain was a world leader centuries before the EU, and, hopefully, will remain so for centuries to come. Britain set the many of the standards which are the foundation of western life, and for the prosperity we enjoy today. Britain can be proud of the things it has accomplished, which are far greater than anything the EU has attempted.

1 ( +5 / -4 )

Britain was a world leader centuries before...

Quite. Opium wars, anyone?

Britain set the many of the standards

Johnny foreigner should show some respect.

Britain can be proud of the things it has accomplished

Most recent events included?

-1 ( +4 / -5 )

The UK is not torn between nationalism and so c as lied global leadership, implying the socialist one world overlord government is a good thing.

Socialist one world overlord? What?

Like many places, half the population wants to be enslaved by elites and the other half realizes every problem in the world is caused by that global leadership. It is sensible to remove an unnecessary political class which is oppressing you

Remove the political class and replace it with what, pray tell? Strange.....

The rise in reported acts of racism being carried out in parts of the country are disturbing. Even here in Scotland, where immigration is a non-issue there have been reports of neo-Nazi stickers being posted here and there. This stupid effing referendum has proven that scum really can float to the surface.

1 ( +6 / -5 )

UK will be fine after the mass bearish hysteria by liberal media & its proponents. London will remain the number one financial centre in Europe, as it has been in past decades and hundred of years. The vast developed infrastructure and deep soft skills and people network of the City will be extremely difficult for any other EU city to replicate. In a few years time UK will be the premier "flight to quality" financial centre for EU funds, the Pound Sterling will be a hard strong currency, as EU will prove to be too difficult to hold and rule. All these may sound insane and counter-intuitive, but has a high probability of coming to fruition. I will bet on the Pound anytime rather that the Euro. British products, services and assets are suddenly about 10% cheaper, making Britain very competitive. Britain may become Great Britain. Keep your cool England, you will do well!

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

Liberal media? Please... over here liberal means centre ground, neither left or right. Really wish Americans would use another word when they mean 'not right wing'.

The City is indeed rallying but that's probably due to George Osborne's speech rather than anything else... the poor lambs who control our financial destiny need someone to say nice things to them.

Also, yes things from the UK are 10% cheaper... but the converse is true: anything we buy from abroad is 10% more expensive.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Thousands, no millions of foreigners arrive in your country and suddenly the indigenous population becomes a minority?!?!

Don't expect smiling faces....ok!

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

It's always funny to see supposed progressives suddenly become champions of the views of the IMF, World Bank, and global finance when it comes to this referendum. Where were these economic experts when the UK almost adopted the Euro? Where were these economic experts when the 2007 financial crisis was brewing? I have never been so convinced that social issues are being used by elites to create useful idiots.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

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