Nicola: He’s hung up. Why on earth couldn’t he understand me?
Mhairi: Do you think it could be anything to do with you saying
Scotland wants to be an independent country with a proud nationalist agenda,
while simultaneously denying the primacy of national borders by claiming you
want to be an enthusiastic part of the European Union?
Nicola: Shut it, wee Mhairi, and go for a long roam.
Tracey
Breaks the News (not
sure which episode, but definitely 2017)1
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| Turns out my favourite stock photo website is sort of all right at Brexit-themed pictures. |
At the end of the day, I suppose what
it comes down to is that I believe in the democratic nation-state as a thing. As
I’ve phrased it before, I believe that a people-group with a shared history and
culture ought to be allowed to inhabit a defined chunk of land and govern
itself.2 The thing I hadn’t properly twigged until more recently was
that there are a heck of a lot of people out there who don’t believe in
the democratic nation-state as a thing. Once I twigged that, Remainerism
started to make an awful lot more sense.
Much as I don’t usually talk about
politics, I once had a conversation with my next-door neighbours which lingered
on the matter of Brexit for a little too long for me to get away with chuckling
vaguely and making noncomittal comments and leaving them none the wiser. I
admitted which box I’d put my cross in in 2016, at which point I turned into
some sort of fascinating exotic specimen to be examined: a young, city-dwelling,
highly-educated Brexiteer, who knew such a thing existed? They asked me some questions
and, among other things, I told them that I’m in favour of the local
concentration of power more generally; it just makes sense to me to put most decision-making
on the lowest level of the hierarchy it can feasibly go on, because that way it’ll
be better tailored to the needs and circumstances of the small and specific
groups of people involved. And that’s one reason why I think it’s daft to put a
pan-European government in charge of matters that Britain is perfectly capable
of dealing with by herself. My neighbour was unconvinced. By my logic, he
suggested, if Brussels has no right to rule over Exeter, then why should, for
instance, London have any right to rule over Sheffield?
I didn’t actually manage to make any
good response to that one – did I ever mention that I hate debates? – and it
wasn’t until later that I realised why not. I’d been approaching the discussion
all wrong. I’d been assuming that it was a given that Britain was a thing,
as it were; that the British people was a distinct society, with meaningful
stuff in common, beyond mere happenstance of birth; that we were a nation
and had a national identity. Naïve as it may have been, I sort of thought
everyone agreed on that, and so when my neighbour made a response that
demonstrated that he didn’t, I floundered. It was only later that the pieces
fell into place: in my neighbour’s mind, Britain doesn’t have – or didn’t ought
to have – any distinctive identity or status of nationhood at all. And,
presumably, neither does, say, Belgium, or Brazil, or Belize or Bahrain or
Botswana or Barbados. If Brussels governing Exeter is arguably just as valid as
London governing Sheffield, then nationhood doesn’t mean anything at all.
Except it does. That bit of a
Tracey Ullman sketch I quoted above hits the nail on the head. If nation didn’t
matter, then parties like the SNP wouldn’t exist. If nation didn’t matter, then
there’d be nobody kicking up any sort of a fuss in Catalonia right now. Heck,
if nation didn’t matter, we’d still have the Empire. I mean, if there’s no
problem with Brussels exercising governmental powers over Exeter, then what’s
the problem with London exercising governmental powers over Belize or Bahrain
or Botswana or Barbados? Except that latter one jars, doesn’t it; that latter
one feels wrong. In that context more than the other, it feels wrong for a
people-group with a shared history and culture to be denied the right to
inhabit a defined chunk of land and govern itself according to the will of its
own people.
Matters of nationhood can get messy,
of course, as the cases of Scotland and Catalonia prove; some members of the
nation conceive of it as being part of a larger nation, others conceive of it
as being an independent nation in its own right. And when things are messy like
that, you put the question to the people and implement their verdict. That’s
what happened with Scotland in the 2014 referendum; what will happen with
Catalonia remains to be seen. I remember GCSE History classes in which we
looked at the use of plebiscites to decide where to draw certain borders in
Europe during the early twentieth century, and I remember thinking at the time,
what an eminently sensible idea. Ask the people concerned whom they trust to
govern them.
The case of the 2016 referendum on
Britain’s EU membership isn’t completely analogous to plebiscites of that sort,
because the European Union isn’t a nation, but a supranational government.
Still, it was very clearly the same principle at work: the relevant population
was consulted, in a free and fair election, about who it wanted to be governed
by, and the verdict was returned. Because I believe in the sovereignty of democratic
nation-states rather than partially-democratic supranational governments, I
voted to leave; and apparently a majority of my compatriots agreed with me. I
stayed up all night watching the results come in, huddled under my duvet on my
parents’ sofa drinking one cup of tea after another, barely believing what I was
seeing on their little TV screen.
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| Tea and Brexit. It was a good night. |
Another question my next-door neighbours
asked me in that discussion we had was whether I could give any specific
examples of EU laws enforced in the UK that I didn’t like. I blanked. (Did I
mention how much I hate debates?) Yikes. What sort of Brexiteer did I think I
was, unable to point to a single bad piece of EU legislation? Of course, with
the luxury of hindsight, I can think of all sorts of things I might have mentioned.
I might have mentioned the Common Agricultural Policy, which I understand
subsidises EU farming to the extent that markets in the developing world,
particularly Africa, are flooded with cheap EU imports with which local farmers
can’t compete; and on top of that, tariffs are imposed on imports of processed (as
opposed to raw) goods to the EU – all of which serves to severely hinder
African countries from developing economically.3 I might have
mentioned the Common Fisheries Policy, which opens up the territorial waters of
every EU country to fishing boats from every EU country, with quotas on how
many fish can be caught in each area, which is clearly a pretty terrible deal
for countries like the UK which have a heck of a lot of territorial waters and
for which fishing has historically been a very important industry.4 I
might have mentioned how the proposed EU Digital Services Act threatens online
free speech;5 or on a less serious note, I might have mentioned how
this irritating GDPR business apparently forbids me from keeping normal paper
registers of the university classes I teach, or of weekly Brownies meetings,
which I have to say is pretty blooming inconvenient. But in a very significant
way, none of that is the point. Even if I thought that every law the EU
introduced was absolutely brilliant, I still wouldn’t want Britain to be in it,
on principle. Because I believe that the democratic nation-state is a thing; I
believe that a people-group with a shared history and culture ought to be
allowed to inhabit a defined chunk of land and govern itself; and I believe,
therefore, that the British people ought to be governed by our own government,
our own democratically-elected government, and not by a supranational body.
People sometimes try to tell me that
the EU is democratically elected. I’m like, all right, then, explain to me how
it works. Because whatever might be wrong with first-past-the-post, at least with
the UK government, I know how to hold it accountable. I know that I cast my
vote for my favourite candidate in my local constituency, and whichever candidate
gets the most votes becomes an MP, and whoever has a majority of MPs forms a
government that makes laws, and if I don’t like the laws they make I can vote
for someone else next time. And in the meantime, I can write to my MP about
specific issues I care about, or sign or start a petition if I feel so moved. I
know where the power is; I know where to take my complaints. In the EU, on the
other hand … well, leaving aside how complicated the process of electing MEPs
is (have you seen that elaborate system where the number of votes a party got
in a region is cut in half for every MEP awarded?), they don’t even get to
propose legislation. That’s done by the European Commission, which is chosen by
a Commission President proposed by the member-states’ governments. The European
Parliament is asked for its approval of a proposed new Commission, but that’s
just rubber-stamping: it’s not as if these people have to campaign to win the
MEPs’ votes, or even as if there’s a choice between different options. And how
many miles are we from anything that an ordinary citizen voted for by this
stage? The European Commission also manages the budget and is responsible,
together with the European Court of Justice – made up of judges appointed by
member-state governments – for enforcing EU law. And there’s also a thing
called the European Council, which is, take note, not the same as the thing just
called the Council, which has the power to pass laws and define foreign policy;
the European Council is made up of government leaders, while Council is made up
of government ministers from each member-state – different ones depending on
the issues on the table – who are entitled to act on behalf of their country.6
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to in order to make the point: where do
I take my complaints? How do I hold this huge and elaborate structure of
government accountable? How do we the people hold it accountable, when it’s so
many steps removed from anything we actually voted for?
This, I should say, is the
fundamental divide that the EU referendum revealed: whom do we trust to govern
us? Not just Brussels versus London, but a set of ‘appointed’ top bods who we’re
told know what they’re talking about versus the whole collective of our own
ordinary compatriots. This divide seeps back into our own internal politics; for
instance, a recent survey revealed that, while a heavy majority of ordinary
citizens think it’s an MP’s job to represent the views of his or her
constituents in Parliament, regardless of his or her own judgement, an even
heavier majority of MPs, meanwhile, think it’s their job to represent their own
judgement regardless of the views of their constituents.7 In other
words, the representatives we’ve elected don’t think we actually elected them
so that they might represent us. It’s pretty jaw-dropping stuff. But this is
the nature of the divide. Whom do we trust to govern us? Professional politicians,
or the country as a whole? A thin slice of educated elite, or we the people?
Whom do we trust to govern us? I
believe in the democratic nation-state as a thing; I believe that a
people-group with a shared history and culture ought to be allowed to inhabit a
defined chunk of land and govern itself; and so the answer to that question is
that I trust my compatriots. Some of them have some pretty stupid ideas about
governance, sure, but democracy means that extreme, fringe views are swallowed
up by the greater prevalence of more popular, moderate ones – and at the end of
the day, we’re a single nation, and we all want what’s best for that nation. I trust
the British people with the fate of Britain. I certainly trust them with it far
more than I trust a bunch of unelected foreign bureaucrats whom we have no
means of holding accountable.
This is the divide, friends. Brexit
isn’t just about the EU. It’s about whom we trust to govern us.
Footnotes
1 I love Tracey Ullman’s
impressions; she gets Nicola Sturgeon spot on and is always very witty about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to8QPF5zCMc.
2 That was in ‘On Postmodernism,
Nationhood, and This Whole Antisemitism Business’, in September 2018.
3 Try this article by Calestous Juma,
https://capx.co/how-the-eu-starves-africa-into-submission/,
and this letter to the Guardian by Sam Akaki, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/28/the-european-union-is-an-ongoing-disaster-for-africa.
4 Here’s a nice detailed explanation
from British Sea Fishing: https://britishseafishing.co.uk/common-fisheries-policy-cfp/.
5 As Andrew Tettenborn explains here:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/16/the-eus-latest-assault-on-internet-freedom/.
6 I’m getting all this from the EU’s
own 40-page layman’s document about how it works: https://europa.rs/images/publikacije/HTEUW_How_the_EU_Works.pdf.
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