It’s a statement
often made by those opposing Brexit, and it has a nice ring to it, but it simply isn’t
true. Some people certainly did vote,
consciously and deliberately, to make us all poorer. And that is far from being as irrational as
it sounds; there’s nothing at all wrong with doing exactly that if one is
convinced that there’s a greater good involved.
Much of the
debate surrounding Brexit has been based on the economic consequences rather
than any perceived non-economic costs and benefits. That is part of the reason for the huge gulf
in understanding of what the EU is about between the two sides in the
negotiations – for most of the other EU states, economics has always been only
part of the argument. The EU is, and
always has been, at heart more a political project than an economic one, and
the failure of the UK side to recognise that, assuming instead that economics
would eventually bring the EU round to the UK position, has been a major factor
in the time taken to reach any sort of deal.
We all place a
value on things which cannot be priced in strictly financial terms, and there
is always a trade-off between those things which can be priced and those which
cannot. Democracy and sovereignty, for
instance, have a value, and at least some of those who voted for Brexit will
have valued those more highly than any anticipated economic disadvantage. People in that group really did consciously
vote to make us all poorer. (There were
also a larger number who unconsciously voted to make us all poorer – this would
be those who placed a similarly high value on democracy and sovereignty, but
simply didn’t believe those who told them that these things come at a price. And I can’t blame them when many of those
leading the Brexit campaign knew full well that there would be a price but simply
lied - and are still lying today).
That underlying
trade-off – between sovereignty and democracy on the one hand, and economic
benefit on the other – is one we all make; it’s just that we don’t all assess
the trade-off in the same way. I
remember one independentista (no
longer with us, sadly) telling me that he’d eat grass if that was the cost of
independence for Wales. It’s not a
position with which I could ever agree, but it illustrates the point. And it works in the
other direction as well. Given a choice
of being poor in a democracy or rich under a dictatorship, which would we
choose? For some – at either end of the
spectrum – it’s a black-and-white issue.
For most though, it’s more nuanced than that; it requires asking a few
more questions, such as ‘how poor?’ and ‘what sort of dictatorship / what sort
of democracy?’ It’s an oversimplification, but faced with a choice of grinding poverty in a democracy or having adequate
food and shelter in a dictatorship, I can see why many of the poorest might prefer the latter, whilst it is those who can afford to lose a little who might be more willing to take the more principled position. And it is that question of nuance, balance and
trade-off between the economic issues and the non-economic issues which is where
the debate should have been from the outset, instead of which we’ve had
something closer to absolutism on both sides; one demanding that economics
takes precedence and the other insisting that sovereignty and democracy are
more important.
That helps to
explain why it isn’t enough to simply ‘prove’ that the economic consequences
are bad. We also need to talk about the
other side of the equation. And here’s
the thing – membership of the EU does, unquestionably, reduce the absolute
sovereignty of the member states. (The
democracy question is rather less straightforward: I’m not at all sure that the
EU can really be considered less democratic than a state in whose parliament
the majority of members are appointees, hereditaries or bishops. It is, however, true that the electorate of a
single member state cannot by themselves dismiss those running the EU, and from
a perspective which believes that absolute sovereignty should sit at the level
of the member state, that can be, and has been, too easily presented as ‘undemocratic’.)
Part of the
reason for the current mess is that proponents of greater European integration
have generally been unwilling to even discuss this issue of sharing or pooling sovereignty,
and why that isn’t at all the same thing as ceding sovereignty to someone
else. Anglo-British exceptionalism has
made them afraid even to attempt to explain the difference. The result has been that a narrative
developed, over decades, that the UK was no longer a sovereign state. It brings us to a strange situation in which
it is those who have given most thought to the question of what constitutes
independence and sovereignty, the independentistas
of Wales and Scotland, who argue most strongly for a twenty-first century
definition which involves nations coming together as equals with a degree of
sharing and pooling for the common good, whilst the Anglo-British
not-nationalists-at-all, who have given a lot less thought to the question, are
stuck in an eighteenth century mindset in which things were much more absolute
– and where they and their ilk were in charge and the rest of the world simply
did as they were told. My fear is that,
if it comes to a second referendum – an eventuality which is now looking
increasingly like the only way out of the current deadlock – that that argument
about the nature and extent of ‘sovereignty’ in a highly-connected twenty-first
century world will be lost by default again.
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