That is it, the question that will confront those of
the enfranchised who choose to visit the ballot box on 23 June. In a display of
rare reticence OG has thus far kept his powder dry, bar the occasional
condemnation of samples of the multifarious cant and highlighting of some
(rare) decent journalism. But you can only escape my ministrations for so long
and today I will try to explain where I have got to and how.
Let us first make crystal clear what this is not
about for me – economics. Or rather it is not about the false promises of
either side in this vile campaign as to what continued membership or Brexit
will mean for the UK. Here’s the unvarnished truth – no one knows what will
happen, any more than they knew what was going to happen last year – how’s that
forecasting going lads? David Cameron and his dissembler in chief, Gorgeous
George Osborne, have continued the good work of those prize shits Blair and
Brown in suborning our once reputable civil service so that we are presented
with economic ‘facts’ signed-off by the Treasury based upon contrived
assumptions and presented in terms of deceitful formulae (GDP per household
anyone?). Bollocks, to put it politely.
No the clouds have parted and what it is about for
this spectator/participant is the desirability of the preservation or otherwise
of a democratic nation state, most particularly the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. And in fact the answer to this conundrum has
transpired to be easy – I have no title to use my vote to dispense with
democracy. I hope I can convince you that mine is a moral stance.
The first thing to acknowledge is that the good old
state has pressures enough from within even before we get to the question of
the EU and that elusive and mistreated beast sovereignty. It is clear that a
vocal minority of Scots no longer have any wish to be aboard the three hundred
year old ship. A disgruntled minority of the English would gladly wave the ingrate
Scots goodbye as they disembark. That is for another day.
The campaign has been an unedifying joke – the
Remain team lining up behind Cameron’s wanton dishonesty and willingness to say
anything to win, while the Brexiteers wail ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ and
conspicuously miss a series of open goals. Pitiful. Anyone for ‘democratic
deficit’? It seems not.
Define your terms. By the nation state I refer to a
state that conjoins the political entities of statehood to the identifying entities
of a nation, that is to say mechanisms of governance accepted (more or less
willingly) by a people of shared inheritance, most obviously the geographical
inheritance of a nation race. This definition gets a little frayed around the
edges (not least the Scottish edges) but I take it as proven that there is
still a majority population that both feels British and wishes to be governed
as British.
I also take it as given that most of that British
polity would think themselves (in so far as they think about these things at
all) governed under universal suffrage by a sovereign parliament. And this, for
me, gets us to the core of the referendum question. Because (and with profound
apologies to Joni Mitchell) I’ve looked at sovereignty from both sides now,
from give and take, and still somehow, it’s sovereignty’s illusions I recall, I
really don’t know sovereignty at all. Or perhaps I do. The news is this: a
surprising proportion of our legislation (perhaps as much as half, though there
is no reliable way of measuring legislation – you could I suppose just weigh
the printed matter) emanates from the EU. It is not scrutinised or amended by
our ‘sovereign’ parliament. Not a problem you might say, because there is a
European Parliament which includes our elected MEP’s. That would have some
weight were it not for the fact that the EU Parliament has a consultative role
only, not a legislative one; it is not sovereign. The sovereign bodies are the
Commission and the Court and we don’t get to vote for those. As Tony Benn said
(and we’ll hear more from him later) if you can’t change the man who makes the
decisions, you’re not living in a democracy.
Now let’s be clear, living in a democracy is not the
only option but in western terms it is the one unstintingly endorsed in public
utterance by the bien pensant. Now proclaiming oneself to have undemocratic
leanings might be an amusing dinner party gambit but it wouldn’t be the tone to
take if running for office. Democracy is the perceived ‘given’ of our
constitution. And yet, ironically, fudging the issue of democracy is the great
achievement of the EU. Since its foundation it has never had democratic goals.
Quite the contrary, it was the passionate brainchild of internationalists who
rated the assertive nation state as the harbinger of war. Its huge
administrative machinery is the weapon of mass suffocation by which nation
states are quietly euthanized for their own good. Ask the Greeks. And I simply
do not buy the arrogant patrician assurance that the EU can be reformed by the
actions of good men. We have been hearing that tune for four decades. It never
happens.
History is partial, so here’s mine. The rise of the
nation state had been a four hundred year project. It is not historically
inevitable but it was the dominant model in the technologically stunning
twentieth century during which armed empires crumbled and were replaced by
empires of influence. In that twentieth century we saw two World Wars, a near
calamitous Cold War, various proxy wars and vile local pogroms. Universal
suffrage was a twentieth century gift (at least in the West) but with it came a
problem – people have a tendency to daftness, prejudice, nationalism and plain
selfishness and betray an unholy cocktail of these influences when they vote.
Perhaps democracy isn’t the answer after all. Thus do benign clever people
conclude that the polity needs to be protected from itself. Technocracy is the
answer – a system of governance where decision-makers are selected for their
technical skill. By whom? By other experts of course. This is the hinterland
and history of the EU: a deliberately constructed monolith of political and
economic management whose very design attempts to resist the tectonic shifts
inherent in that venal and dangerous chimera, democracy.
But isn’t a little trade-off of democracy an
acceptable price to pay for decades of peace, prosperity and cheap holidays?
Actually no. I’m an old cynic but, do you know what, I rather like the tenor of
democracy. For me it is the tenor of individual liberty – a liberty in which
the freedom of your fist ends just short of my nose. It is not the tenor of
collectivism and prescribed decencies. I admire Bernard Levin, a commentator
who despised accommodation with the undemocratic left or right and who concluded
as long ago as 1979, ‘That there is no such thing, in the long run, as a state
which is both collectivist and democratic.’ The EU (‘le Grand Projet’) has
wrapped itself in the soft woolly blanket of peace and soothing
internationalism and that disguise is enough for a lot of well-intentioned
people. Take for instance the assembled hordes of knee-jerk liberal luvviedom,
our unimpeachable artists and actors, who have thrown the weight of their
rectitude behind le Projet. Never let the facts get in the way of a nice
sentiment. Perfectly decent politicians have also been conned. Look at the
admirable and dignified William Hague who has bought hook, line and sinker the
Foreign Office canard that the technocrats are our sort of chaps and can still be reined in. Newsflash –
they stopped listening years ago.
How do I assess our increasingly desperate Prime
Minister (and his sinister side-kick, the Chancellor) in all of this? Is he
deluded? Of course he is, like everyone possessed by a messiah complex. As with
Blair, so with Cameron – he knows, absolutely knows, what is best for us and he
must do anything to keep us from self-harm. That includes shameless lying. The
lying is not confined to the Remain campaign but it is most abject coming from
the Queen’s first minister.
I’ve started so I’ll finish. This liberty, this
democracy, what do they look like? With apologies for my own inadequacies I
will quote Bernard Levin at length. The argument for freedom is ‘not to be
understood in terms of material betterment’ alone. Much less, might one add,
when the ‘truth’ of material betterment is manifested by Gorgeous George’s
dodgy dossier.
This is not an
argument (though it has often been used as one) for telling the poor not to
mind their poverty. It is an argument for believing that only as individuals
can we hope to realize our full potentiality, and that anything which denies or
restricts that realization denies salvation itself. “If you wanted to put the
world to rights”, asks Solzhenitsyn’s Nezin in The First Circle, “who should you begin with: yourself or others?”
And Evelyn Waugh put it even more neatly in a radio interview, part of which
Ronald Harwood incorporated in his stage adaptation of Waugh’s autobiographical
novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
Asked “You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you?”,
Pinfold replies:
You must understand
that the man in the street does not exist. These are men and women, each one of
whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use the
street from time to time.
Despite all the accumulated evidence that I might be
wrong, despite that loutish yet enfranchised idiot behind whom I sat at the
cricket recently, despite my own economic interests (I’ve made my pile and the
status quo suits quite nicely) I still trust the people. All the people, making
manifest their views in a representative democracy. And neither the people nor
their representatives may take it upon themselves to give away the gift of
democracy bequeathed to them. That gift
had been hard-won by our betters. This was Tony Benn (a man who could be
unmatchably wrong on the detail but was never wrong on the principles) speaking
in the Commons at the time of the Maastricht Treaty debate:
If democracy
is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or
subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted
to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is
proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the
people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public
rights.
So this is where I stand. I stand for the nation
state as the viable vehicle for democracy in the sceptred isle. I was endowe for my lifetime with
public rights and I have the opportunity now to reclaim the portion of those rights
carelessly given away by my representatives. It is our imperative to cherish
those rights and to hand them unalloyed to those who succeed us. I am not
persuaded that there is even the remotest of possibilities of preserving those
rights within the European Union. Others disagree – they are, I believe, at best
deluded, at worst mendacious.
