As soon as the vote totals were announced, the U.S. media decided Britain’s vote to leave the European Union was primarily a manifestation of the anti-immigration sentiment it believes has animated New York developer Donald Trump’s successful bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
It’s an explanation that fits nicely within the conventional narrative. It’s not hard to explain and it doesn’t require too much thinking. It’s also wrong. The biggest issue, according to Lord Ashcroft’s post-referendum poll, was the overwhelming desire to preserve what remained of British sovereignty.
In “How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday … and why,” a survey of 12,369 voters in the United Kingdom conducted the day of the referendum, Lord Ashcroft found the No. 1 issue propelling people to vote “leave” was their belief that the U.K. should remain a self-governing entity not responsible to some supranational body writing rules and regulations about the economy and other matters.
Editorial Cartoons on Brexit
This was true for all voters, those who described themselves as Labour voters as well as those who said they were Conservative. It’s a direct shot at “big government” interference in local affairs coming out of the bureaucracy in Brussels. Immigration – or immigration sans assimilation, as I wrote here Friday– was the second most important motivator behind a vote to “leave” the EU.
To quote directly from the analysis of the poll:
Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. One third (33%) said the main reason was that leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders.” Just over one in eight (13%) said remaining would mean having no choice “about how the EU expanded its membership or its powers in the years ahead.” Only just over one in twenty (6%) said their main reason was that “when it comes to trade and the economy, the UK would benefit more from being outside the EU than from being part of it.”
Those who sided with “remain,” interestingly enough, did so out of fear. Lord Ashcroft’s poll found the argument most persuasive to Conservative and Labour voters alike was the idea things would get much worse, in some nonspecific way, should the U.K. leave the EU. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the founder’s vision of a United Europe.
Again, to quote directly from the poll analysis:
For remain voters, the single most important reason for their decision was that “the risks of voting to leave the EU looked too great when it came to things like the economy, jobs and prices” (43%). Just over three in ten (31%) reasoned that remaining would mean the UK having “the best of both worlds”, having access to the EU single market without Schengen or the euro. Just under one in five (17%) said their main reason was that the UK would “become more isolated from its friends and neighbours”, and fewer than one in ten (9%) said it was “a strong attachment to the EU and its shared history, culture and traditions.”
“Overall,” the survey found, “small majorities of voters thought EU membership would be better for the economy, international investment, and the UK’s influence in the world. Leaving the EU was thought more likely to bring about a better immigration system, improved border controls, a fairer welfare system, better quality of life, and the ability to control our own laws.”
Why this should come as a surprise to anyone is really the only surprise left in the analysis. The principle of national self-determination has animated global policy since the Wilsonian era; indeed it is a cornerstone of American foreign policy throughout the post-war period. It’s been seen consistently ever since the end of the Cold War: Czechoslovakia split itself in half, Yugoslavia has broken apart into all its constituent parts and then some and the Soviet Union came apart into constituent republics, some of whom have tried – very much over the objection of Vladimir Putin – to align themselves firmly with the West. It’s a sentiment even present in the U.K., where Scotland voted by the narrowest of margins not to cut itself loose from the rest of Great Britain and may, in light of the Brexit vote, soon try to leave again.
Self-determination is an important concept, so much so that slightly more than 72 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. The winning side got – at 17.4 million votes thereabouts – 1.2 million more votes, meaning the Euro-sceptics are not and probably never have been the fringe movement some in the British press and government tried to make them out to be.
The lesson to be drawn here in the United States, if there is one, is that big government may be just as much if not more of a thorn in the side of the American electorate – left and right – than it was in 1980, when Ronald Reagan used the idea of beating it back as a central theme of an ultimately successful presidential campaign. This is a sentiment into which Trump has tapped and which Clinton – who is running as the representative of the party OF government – cannot. Those who are running down ballot of either candidate would be wise to take heed of this. The age of the trans-fat ban and elimination of the super-size meal and the big gulp may be giving way to a new birth of, if not freedom, then a desire to stop being pushed around by so-called experts who believe to the core of their being they know better what we need than we do. That, by the way, may be the best description of Brussels you’ll find on either side of the ocean.
Credit: Source link
