I have already voted in the UK referendum concerning the UK's future in Europe. I voted remain. As a researcher in Europe and UK resident (some of it part time) for 22 years I have come to see myself as essentially European. As I have written elsewhere I have regarded the EU as one of the greatest and most needed experiments in governance in the last two centuries.
Despite the
millions of words written and spoken about "Brexit", as it has become
known, nothing has shifted my fundamental conviction that Britain, and the rest
of the world, will be better off with the UK inside Europe. Little that has been written or said about
"Brexit" is intelligent or insightful. There is little acknowledgement that
successive UK governments abandoned responsibility for shaping and improving
Europe. Cameron's last minute dash for reform was far too little and too late.
It also elicited cynicism conditioned by internal Tory Party power struggles.
The great tragedy, and perhaps great shock for many, is that when the lid was
taken off, when citizens were enabled (well sort of!) to participate in a
'conversation' about the UK and its future, very few people had a narrative, a
story they could tell themselves, about Europe. The emergent narrative is one
of disaffection and fear, and stories that hark back to an imaginary period
when Britian was 'great'! That this is a
myth shows how powerful narratives can be.
Don't get me
wrong, the EU needs reform, but so too does the Westminster system of
government (perhaps even more so). Much better to work together to design new
governance arrangements for the world we humans are creating. Simon Caulkin, whose work has often featured in my posts, makes elegant and
intelligent arguments for remaining; they are reprised below in this blog from Simon.
Why I'm voting to remain
Simon Caulkin (Thu,
16th Jun 2016)
"There’s a more than respectable
progressive case for voting to leave the European Union in the forthcoming UK
referendum. It’s set out here by the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott,
someone I like and respect. The lack of democratic accountability, the
austerity that has driven Greece to its knees when it voted for the opposite,
the failure of the euro, the inability to come together over Putin and
migration, the environmental and other failings detailed by another Guardian
writer, George Monbiot – all these are dagger blows at the heart of the limping
half-century-old European project, and they can’t be wished away.
Yet I passionately believe that we
should remain, and shall have no hesitation in voting so on 23 June.
My reasons are personal, historical
and political.
First, having married into a French
family, half my close relatives are French. I care about what happens to France
and know at first hand that for all the cross-Channel barbs and
incomprehension, the French on the whole, like other Europeans, care about us
too. Read this letter of affection in the TLS signed by, among others,
footballers, football managers and rugby players, authors, architects,
restaurateurs, actors and film directors, and musicians from Greece to Sweden,
Italy to Poland. Or these. Despite our best current efforts to make ourselves
as dislikeable as possible, Europeans believe that traditional British
tolerance and fortitude are an important counterweight to different continental
qualities – and any honest inhabitant of these islands would have to
acknowledge that the trade is equally advantageous in the other direction.
There is another personal reason. My
father’s physical and intellectual journey from committed pacifist to
lieutenant in a reconnaissance regiment fighting its way through Belgium, the
Netherlands and Germany in 1944 and 1945 is vividly preserved in the letters
that he wrote home at the time. Reading them now, there is not the shadow of a
doubt that he and his colleagues knew perfectly well that they weren't only
fighting for their and their own families’ futures; for them, the terrible
bloodshed and mayhem that they witnessed (and suffered – my father was killed a
week before the armistice) was only redeemable by a settlement that cemented
all the nations affected, including the defeated, in a binding democratic
embrace. (So well did these soldiers do their peacetime work that, as I only
realised much later, German teenagers in the British occupied zone grew up as
familiar with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other icons of British
popular culture as I did; while the German postwar economic miracle owed much
to the company governance regime of two-tier boards and co-determination
instituted under strong influence from our own TUC.)
I’m dismayed that the remain camp has
ignored these broader issues to focus on the economy and Project Fear. I don’t
doubt that there would be short-term shocks to the economy from a Brexit, but
that's not why I'm voting to remain. I don't trust any of the numbers. But more
than that, to collapse the European idea to name-calling over numbers, as both
sides have done, is both embarrassingly reductive and beside the point. Given
the government’s well proven ability, not least over the last eight years, to
make a pig’s ear of the economy without any outside assistance, using economic
freedom from Brussels as a rallying cry for leave is almost comically brazen.
There is a real economic argument to be had, about the nature and purpose of
business, but like all the other important issues we face, it can only be
addressed at supra-national level. Only at EU level is it conceivable that a
counterweight could be developed to the dangerous arrogance of Silicon Valley
and the excesses of US finance and shareholder-dominated capitalism.
As for immigration, the shrill, angry
discourse about migrants reminds me of efforts 20 years ago to block the
building of the Channel Tunnel for fear it would bring in an epidemic of
rabies. Scapegoating is as old as history. But so, as a dispassionate New
Scientist analysis reminded us recently, are waves of human migration, the
inseparable companion of wars, famine, natural disaster and, although this is
usually left out, gross global inequality. Of course, it would be mad to deny
that an influx of incomers seeking a new life creates uncomfortable issues. But
they can be managed, as they have been before, by tackling them head on with
thought, effort, sympathy and state help, usually temporary, with cost. For
those responsible for austerity to whip up anti-migrant feeling by blaming the
latter for stretched public services and lack of affordable housing is
breathtaking in its dishonesty, while to believe that any country can pull up
the drawbridge and shut out these global tides is wishful thinking of the most
vapid kind.
Also disappointing is the narrow
vision of other European leaders who don't seem to see the UK referendum for
what it is, an existential challenge that can only be met by imaginative and
sweeping restatement of what Europe is for. ‘What has happened to you, the
Europe of humanism, the champion of human rights, democracy and freedom? What
has happened to you, Europe, the home of poets, philosophers, artists,
musicians, and men and women of letters? What has happened to you, Europe, the
mother of peoples and nations, the mother of great men and women who upheld,
and even sacrificed their lives for, the dignity of their brothers and
sisters?’ I’m not aware of having quoted the Pope before, but the reproach
implicit in the questions he raised in his Charlemagne award speech can't be
easily swept aside.
Europe,’ as Churchill once put it,
‘is where the weather comes from’. The migration surge welling up from the
Mediterranean, the Eurozone crisis and the outbreaks of right-wing populism all
underline that that’s as true today as it ever was; and now as then it’s no
more possible for Britain to negotiate an opt-out than from European isobars or
the Gulf Stream. We’re in, and we have to deal with it. Do we face up to the challenge,
or run away in a way that we never have before? What’s at risk in this
misconceived referendum, it’s now apparent, is not our economic future but our
soul, our identity and an idea of Europe that our parents and grandparents
helped to shape 70 years ago."
Like Simon I
have family connections to war in Europe (though without such devastating
personal outcomes). 2016 is the centenary of my grandfather's induction into
war on the Western Front. As a young Australian he also went to war to fight
for the European ideal - to fight tyranny, hegemony, and the attempted
imposition of belief through bullying and violence. This is worth remembering
and honouring.
