The campaign to take Britain out of the European Union has become just another excuse to shout about race. It might have been a constitutional argument about democratic rights and self-determination. It might have been a worthwhile debate about our economic future. As it is, we have months of nativism and English nationalism ahead of us; six months of accusations of elite conspiracy, and cries of: “I don’t recognise my country any more.”
I admit that I’ve been enjoying it so far. More than enjoying it, in fact. I have been hugging myself with delight at the backstabbing between Vote Leave, Grassroots Out, Leave.EU, and the other gangs of angry-eyed zealots.
What a bloody shower. What an embarrassment to the England they claim to love. Liam Fox, David Davis, Nigel Farage, John Redwood, Dan Hannan, Bill Cash, Douglas Carswell, Dominic Cummings, Matthew Elliott, the rightwing press, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Institute for Economic Affairs have been demanding a referendum since the 1990s. They have had two decades to prepare their arguments.
Now, like children pestering their parents by the supermarket sweet display, their wish has been granted. They are the centre of everyone’s attention at last. The curtain rises. The audience falls silent. But the show won’t begin. The actors are too busy fighting each other to learn their lines.
The result of the feuding, however, is not remotely funny. Farage has won the battle on the right. For all their faults, the Tories around Vote Leave grasped a political truth and a moral argument. The case for leaving Europe could not be racist. If Farage gave us a referendum about immigration, he would turn it into a culture war. Voting to leave would mean voting against racial equality and gay marriage and in favour of confining women to the kitchen and bedroom.
We got a taste of the Trumpish politics that are about to hit us during last year’s general election campaign. Farage announced on a TV debate that he would stop people coming “into Britain from anywhere in the world and get diagnosed with HIV and get the retro-viral drugs that cost up to £25,000 per year per patient”.
In one sentence he managed to “signal” to his “core” that he was against gays, foreigners and scroungers. It wasn’t so much dog-whistle as wolf-whistle politics. Farage was leering at prejudiced voters and telling them how much he fancied them.
Rationally, the triumph of the Farage faction in the battle for control of the Eurosceptic movement is perplexing. For although he whistled in 2015, victory did not come. Only one Ukip candidate won a seat at the last election, and it wasn’t him. Farage now ranks alongside Jeremy Corbyn as the least respected politician in Britain. Many like me who have little respect for the EU, and many more who don’t care about it at all, will vote to stay if they think a vote to leave is a vote for Ukip.
The sleep of reason does not end there. After the migration of hundred of thousands, it is understandable that immigration leads the list of voters’ concerns. But it is highly unlikely that leaving the EU will reduce immigration.
For all their posing as plain-speaking English yeomen, the supporters of Out dodge questions like the sleekest media-trained politico. On the rare occasions when you can get a straight answer, some of them say they want Britain to be like Norway and Switzerland, which are outside the EU but can trade freely with one of the world’s richest markets without paying customs. But Norway and Switzerland not only have to implement European regulations, and have no say in drawing them up, they must also accept the freedom of EU citizens to move in and take up residence. To such an extent that Norway has higher per capita immigration than Britain .
The perplexity deepens when you look at the perverse, almost utopian, faith the Eurosceptics place in the European Union itself. Of course, the EU will agree to give us everything we want, they say. Brussels will allow Britain to have all the advantages of being a member of the EU with none of the burdens. Presumably, no Eurosceptic has ever been through a nasty divorce. Obviously, it has never occurred to them that the EU will want to discourage other members from leaving by making Britain pay a price.
To confine ourselves merely to our nearest neighbour, do they imagine that the French government would want to give Marine le Pen the pleasure of saying that the soft deal the EU gave Britain showed that the French far right’s dream of removing France was easy to obtain?
Sir Stephen Wall, one of Britain’s senior diplomats, once wrote: “If you hate the European Union, but are looking out for Britain’s interests, you would have, however reluctantly, to vote ‘yes’.” His seeming paradox makes perfect sense. If you don’t trust the continentals, if you see Europe as the dark continent from where Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin menaced us, then you must believe Britain should get involved with Europe, spend money, form alliances to confound our enemies and stop a new coalition ever uniting against us again.
Today’s Eurosceptics have no scepticism , however. They believe – or rather they want you to believe – that the remaining 27 countries will grant us an easy life if we leave. No one is more naively trusting of the European Union than the people who have spent their lives opposing it.
In its choice of leaders, its hopes of controlling immigration and its negotiating tactics, the Out campaign makes no sense. But Farage understands what Trump knows too. His supporters don’t want logic and rational strategies.
Our unfair electoral system may have denied Farage a seat. But nearly 4 million people voted for Ukip. They were the “left-behinds” – the losers, who have been hit by conservative economics and liberal multiculturalism. Their secure jobs have gone and so has their sense of national identity. They didn’t retch when Farage conjured the bogey of HIV-infected foreign scroungers. They cheered, and said: “Here’s a man who isn’t afraid of political correctness… Here’s a man who tells it like it is.”
They want their prejudices verified. They want a stage-army of villains to boo and jeer. Whether the Eurosceptics dog whistle or wolf whistle, they will come, and they won’t care that their behaviour wrecks their own cause, and disgraces their country.
It is for this reason, above all others, that they must be comprehensively defeated.