RUTHFULLY YOURS

The level of support enjoyed by the Remain campaign should not be taken as a reflection of enthusiasm for the European project; there is ample polling data to show that most people in Britain neither trust nor like the EU. Nor do many people think much of Cameron’s deal, which falls far short of his earlier promises to bring about fundamental change in Britain’s relations with the EU and to get back powers ceded to Brussels. It is also clear that the modest concessions he achieved are not secure, since they must be confirmed in subsequent treaties which the twenty-seven other EU members must approve and because British law remains subordinate to European law. No, it is clear that the main reason people give for saying they will probably vote to remain is that they believe leaving would represent a step into the unknown.

Remain campaigners do not sing the virtues of the EU, or promise that continued membership will lead to a golden economic future. Given the troubles in the Eurozone and the migrant crisis which has effectively killed the Schengen Agreement, such claims would not merely lack credibility; they would invite derision. Instead, while admitting that the EU has its faults and requires further change, they have launched what Eurosceptics have come to refer to as “Project Fear”, dire predictions that Britain would face a series of disasters on leaving: British families living in Europe would no longer qualify for state health care; collective security would be undermined; international co-operation to fight jihadists would be jeopardised; three million jobs would be lost; migrants in Calais would no longer be restrained from reaching Britain; air fares would rise; UK residents would be expelled from Portugal.

Much of the scare-mongering has been successfully dealt with by Leave campaigners and the Eurosceptic sections of the media. When Downing Street issued a letter signed by thirteen senior ex-military officers suggesting that Britain would be safer remaining in the EU, one of the officers protested that he hadn’t signed it and disagreed with its content, another said he had signed “only under pressure”, while other senior military men made known their opposition to it. Major-General Julian Thompson, a military historian who led the Royal Marines during the Falklands War, argued that membership had damaged Britain’s security and that intelligence—the key to effective anti-terrorist activities—could be more reliably shared with members of the Anglosphere than with members of the EU.

It is unlikely that many voters will be persuaded to vote to remain because of security fears; the slaughter of 130 people in Paris in November and the identification of Brussels as the operations centre and bolt-hole for extreme radical Islamic groups hardly provide compelling evidence that being in the EU keeps you safe. Meanwhile, the EU’s “sado-austerity” economic measures in southern Europe are giving rise to extremist parties, and the growth of political violence continues to grow.

However, such considerations do not demonstrate that the government’s strategy of maximising public fear and uncertainty will not work, only that the strategy has been poorly executed. Whether such a policy can work over a period of months is uncertain; if the grotesque exaggerations, half-truths and fabrications are simply repeated, the greater the opportunity for the Leave campaigners to expose them for what they are. To succeed, the strategy therefore requires a series of new fabrications, greater deftness on the part of the Downing Street spin machine, and a high degree of public gullibility, conditions which seem unlikely to be met. The lengthy campaign period also permits the Leavers to point to some striking inconsistencies in the position of the Prime Minister, support for whom among Conservatives voters has plummeted.

During the weeks when Cameron was seeking domestic support for his European policy, he was at pains to stress that the choice would be between staying in a reformed EU and leaving if he could not get the concessions he sought. There was nothing in his remarks to suggest that leaving would be an unmitigated disaster.

What has happened since to alter his assessment of the dangers to which he believes Brexit would inevitably lead, other than the realisation that within his own party support for leaving is much greater than he thought, that the public is unwilling to accept that his attempts at renegotiation ended in triumph, and that there is a significant risk that his premiership will end with a Leave vote in circumstances of abject failure? To date, six cabinet ministers have joined the Leave campaign, along with Boris Johnson, the popular Mayor of London, and 130 MPs, representing two fifths of the parliamentary party. Polling data suggests that Conservative Party members largely support Brexit.

The rationale for Project Fear is not hard to fathom: the same strategy was used to win the referendum on Scots independence in 2014 with the argument that Scotland could never survive alone. Yet there are crucial differences, the most important being that the UK is ten times larger than Scotland. As John O’Sullivan has pointed out: “If the UK can’t survive outside a European Zollverein, nor can more than 150 nations in the world, including Australia, and most other countries in the G20.” In 2014 the UK economy was forging ahead, providing excellent prospects for Scots. Today Europe’s economy struggles to avoid negative growth while the UK continues to enjoy modest economic growth and to create record numbers of jobs.

There are similarities as well as differences between the two campaigns. During the Scots campaign President Obama, Prime Minister Abbott and even the Chinese President issued statements effectively opposing independence. To date, President Obama, Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel and the G20 have all voiced their opposition to British withdrawal from the EU, while graciously acknowledging that the decision lies with the British people. It can be taken for granted that Cameron is now already calling in favours from Commonwealth leaders by asking them to follow suit in order to demonstrate that there is no possibility of restoring or building on trade links that existed before British entry to the EU in 1973. What difference all this orchestrated bullying will make to the way people vote is questionable; the British dislike of bullying, reflected in a thousand schoolboy comics and magazines, is not yet extinct.

Sovereignty is one of the two issues which have dominated debate, the other being jobs and prosperity; sovereignty, however, is not an issue that will win over the undecided. Those who believe it is the most important issue of all are likely to be long-standing opponents of EU membership whose decision on how to vote was decided the moment that Cameron promised a referendum.

Cameron appears uneasy when the sovereignty issue is raised, arguing either that it is something that can effectively be shared or pooled or that it is no longer a meaningful concept. “When it comes down to it, sovereignty can be an illusion,” he recently told BBC radio. “What I am interested is using the EU to get things done.” The problem is that EU membership routinely prevents Britain’s government from doing the things it wants done, and imposes laws and directives which British ministers do not want done.

As Michael Gove, Cameron’s justice minister and a long-standing friend, pointed out in an article explaining why he was putting principle before his friendship with the Prime Minister:

As a minister, I’ve seen hundreds of new EU rules cross my desk, none of which were requested by the UK Parliament, none of which I or any other British politician could alter in any way and none of which made us freer, richer or fairer … Every single day, every single minister is told, “Yes, Minister, I understand, but I am afraid that’s against EU rules.” I know it. And the British ought to know it too: your government is not, ultimately in control in hundreds of areas that matter.

What disturbs Gove and many other Conservatives is not simply that powers are passing to a supranational body but passing to one which is incapable of reform and which provides no means of replacing unpopular laws and legislators. Most Tories now understand that the EU’s “democratic deficit” is not some minor design defect that can be overcome by British argument or persuasion but is an inherent characteristic of the European project, and that, for at least the time being, the nation-state remains the only practical basis for democracy.

When it comes to prosperity and jobs the electorate appears unsure. The Remain campaigners repeat the mantras that the risks of leaving exceed those of staying, that Britain would be entering uncharted waters, find itself in strange new territory, suddenly face a completely new set of challenges and so on. They also assert that the Leavers have failed to provide a description of the new economic environment that a vote to leave would bring about. The BBC, and even some newspapers that favour a British exit, have accepted this as established truth, and the Leave campaign has not yet found a way to respond.

The short and accurate reply to the question of what would follow in the immediate aftermath of a British decision to give notice to leave the European Union under the terms of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is nothing. The Treaty specifies that for a period of two years after such a decision a member state opting to leave would continue to be represented in the Council of Ministers and in all the other EU institutions and that life would go on as before during negotiations about future trading relations.

To be successful, it is vital the Leavers ram home the point that membership of the EU and membership of the Single Market are not the same thing, and that it is possible to belong to the latter without belonging to the former; indeed this is precisely what would happen in the event of a vote to leave. The choice was accurately described by the former EU Commission President and arch-federalist Jacques Delors in 2012: “If the British cannot support the trend to more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis. I could imagine a form such as a European economic area or a free trade agreement.”

Britain would reach a similar agreement to those signed up to by the members of the European Free Trade Area—Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein—with which the EU shares the Single Market, and all of whom are doing better economically than the members of the Eurozone. To be sure, many EU members will not take kindly to the departure of the second-biggest contributor nation; there will be nasty threats. But given the huge trade imbalance between Britain and the EU, Britain’s negotiating strength will be far greater than that of the thirty-plus countries which have reached free-trade deals with Brussels in the past. The Leave campaigners need to remind the electorate that France and Germany export more goods and services to Britain than they do to the US or China and are not likely in the medium and long term to do anything to change this.

Once it is recognised that Britain’s membership of the Single Market is not seriously in question, matters are greatly simplified. The aim of the Leavers can then be clearly stated: to leave the political and judicial structures of the EU while remaining in the Single Market. This means saying goodbye to the CAP, the EU Court, the Commission, the Common Foreign Policy and Britain’s contribution to the EU budget.

A vote to leave consequently would not mean entering a strange new and threatening world but remaining in a largely familiar world from which certain highly undesirable features have been removed. The Leave campaign has been hampered by differences in strategy among the various Eurosceptic groups as well as by clashes of personality, but if matters are presented in this way the prospects of victory are very good. As a report from Business for Britain following focus-group research stated:

The Out Campaign has one essential task, to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards … If those who want to leave the EU neutralise the economic arguments, then the people will vote to leave, as there is nothing else to support membership.

Almost twenty years ago Margaret Thatcher wrote:

That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on will be seen in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain, with her traditional strengths and global destiny, should ever have been part of it will appear a political error of historic magnitude. There is, though, still time to choose a different and a better course.

There is still time, and if Project Fear is shown to be based on a series of misconceptions and falsehoods, the chances are that the British people will do so.