Boris Johnson has got a nerve claiming that Tony Blair’s call to arms to oppose Brexit is undemocratic. He is an Oxford classicist by training. Has he forgotten that Athenian democracy was destroyed by people like himself exploiting popular fears and prejudices, deceiving people with false promises and shamelessly buying their allegiance? Has he forgotten that demagoguery – leading people by the nose – is the inseparable twin of democracy?
Can he or any other Brexiteer cite a single law the people of this country live under that was imposed on us against our will? Can they produce any evidence that this country will be more prosperous and in any way freer after Brexit? What exactly is it that we want to do that we are prevented from doing at the moment? Where is that 365 million pounds a week that was going to enrich the NHS?
Policing, education, the health service, planning controls, business rates…Which of these has been determined these last forty-three years by the EU? Not one.
Which British political party applauded asset-stripping? Introduced the Big Bang in financial regulation? Advocated every kind of de-regulation? Encouraged mergers and the growth of massive multi-nationals that have no local roots and do not give a damn about the people the daily detail of whose lives is blighted by their activities, justified always, of course, as inescapable economic necessity? Wrecked the mining industry, even if it were ultimately doomed, without the slightest regard for the suffering of those it threw out of work? Pursuing a relentless policy of austerity whose repercussions are felt most keenly by the poor, when it was essentially the rich and powerful who brought about the 2008 crash by their shameless ambition and greed? Who has been selling the family silver, as the Tories’ own erstwhile leader once put it?
We know the answer. The party of Duncan Smith, Gove, Rees-Mogg, Redwood, Lilly, Lamont, Lawson, Sir Bill Cash and Sir Edward Leigh (what the hell did they ever do that deserved such titles?), Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They created the conditions which have led to the disaffection of the huddled masses who are too ill-informed and blinded by their own prejudices to see through the lies and deception they have been fed. And is it surprising they are ill-informed when three quarters of the British press – the most widely read titles at that – have done nothing but rubbish the EU from its inception? Has any other newspaper in Europe stooped to the depths of Murdoch’s Sun when it tried to marshal its readers into dropping their trousers and mooning in the direction of the Continent?
The EU was founded to make war between European states impossible by gradually linking their economies and bringing them together so closely that war would be unthinkable. It has succeeded in that. It has succeeded in making all of Europe more prosperous. It has brought goods to our shelves that had never been seen on them before. It has rescued the countries of eastern Europe from the misery of Russian communist oppression. It has created a sense of togetherness and shared destiny among peoples, whose cultures have been formed by the same influences: Greece, Rome and Judaeo-Christianity. It has made Europe a block of nations to be reckoned with in the world’s councils and given us a collective strength in the face of other big powers, in a dangerous world. There is strength in numbers. These are things that in the long term are far more important than whether we are three pence richer or four pence poorer.
Since when was the Tory party in favour of factory-gate politics, a vote by show of hands following a rabble-rousing speech? “The bosses are locking us out, the bosses are cutting our wages, the bosses are banning tea breaks…The only course is to withdraw our labour. All in favour, show!” That in effect is what the referendum was. Rabble-rousing: no concrete proposals, just wishful thinking and playing on people’s disquiet and resentment – if not, naked racism – at the scale of immigration, in particular, I strongly suspect, inspired by the bloody-minded refusal of Muslims to make any concession to the fact that they live in someone else’s system. None of which has anything to do with the EU.
For democracy to function without becoming merely a tyranny of the majority, certain necessary conditions must obtain. Aside from the vote of course, one must be that society is sufficiently equal and mobile for voting choices to be made on the merits of the case and not according to sectarian or tribal loyalties and the promise of rewards, as happens under clientelist regimes like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Another must be that the electorate has a sufficient level of education to understand the issues and has unrestricted access to unbiased information on which to base its choices.
It is highly questionable whether this last condition was present where the Brexit referendum was concerned, something which should surprise no one, considering that the Brexit ringleaders themselves had not and have not the faintest idea about what the consequences might be. Their antagonism to the EU is visceral, a peculiar mix of John Bullery, little England-ism, lingering disdain for Johnny Foreigner and the ultra-Right Wing ideological head-bangery of people like my old classmate, Patrick Minford. When anyway did this splendid golden age of Free Trade that made us all so rich exist? Unless, as seems to be the case, you include the days when half the globe was pink. And would the Malays accept that they had any say in the matter of where their rubber went and at what price? Did the Indians consider themselves free to buy their railway engines wherever they chose? As for the native English working class who were lucky if they earned £2 a week in the 1940s, where were the benefits of this golden age for them?
The British people have spoken, we are told ad nauseam. Well, some of them have, although it is hard to see that their voice tells us much more than a collective fart would have. And their “voice” is being exploited by a bunch of Right-Wing headbangers or fools and knaves, as Ken Clark and Will Hutton call them, who can’t believe their unhoped-for luck in having the opportunity to implement some of their destructive hare-brained schemes. And why? All because of domestic disputes within the Tory party. Calling the results of such a farcical process democracy at work and any opposition to it undemocratic… It is not very edifying and likely to give democracy a bad name.
I’m with Tony Blair. Johnson tries to dismiss his arguments on the grounds that he is not to be trusted because of his involvement in the war in Iraq? Hardly relevant to any judgement about Brexit. But is it so clear that it was a disaster? Of course it was in a sense, like all wars. But what might have happened if there had been no war in Iraq? Is it so clear that Saddam would not have brought about some equally calamitous situation, as he had already done in invading Kuwait and in fighting Iran? Is it so clear that the egregious level of misgovernment throughout north Africa and the Middle East, indeed throughout the Muslim world, would not have led to the whole region erupting in chaos and destruction sooner or later without any US or British hand in the matter?
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