LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Map of the European Union. United Kingdom (comprising of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland is in orange color MAP/Wikipedia
Responses to the Referendum
So who is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists – in fact, relatively few of them are – and they are not plain ignorant. You can’t fool that many people, even for a relatively short period of time. And yes it was close, but it wasn’t that close. The margin between the two sides – 3.8 per cent – was roughly the same as the margin by which Obama defeated Romney in the 2012 presidential election (3.9 per cent), and you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about the legitimacy of that, not even Republicans (well, not that many). Plus, turnout in the referendum, at 72.2 per cent, was nearly 18 per cent higher than in the last presidential election. The difference, of course, is that a general election is a constitutional necessity whereas the EU referendum was a political choice. If you don’t like the outcome, don’t say it was the wrong answer to the question. It was the wrong question, put at the wrong time, in the wrong way. And that’s the fault of the politicians.
Cameron must shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility. It was a reckless gamble, given that the stakes were so high. No one can say how this will play out, but it has already put enormous pressure on the basic functioning of the British state, something that Conservatives are meant to value above all else. As Scotland pushes for independence, Irish nationalists agitate for unification, Wales explores its relationship with England, Labour faces a split that may lead some of the party to an explicit embrace of extra-parliamentary politics, and Farage stirs the pot, the situation is unlikely to resolve itself any time soon. This has the makings of a full-blown constitutional crisis that the Conservative Party, no matter who becomes its next leader, may struggle to contain. No Conservative leader, least of all one as essentially pragmatic as Cameron, would open the door to such a possibility lightly.
Prime among Cameron’s reasons for doing just that was the belief he would win. When he went to Brussels earlier this year to brief his fellow European leaders about his plans, he is reported to have told them not to worry because he was a ‘winner’ and knew how to get the result he needed. This wasn’t just bluster. Till last week’s fatal reverse he had a remarkably successful track record: two general elections, two referendums (the 2011 one on the Alternative Vote system as well as the 2014 Scottish one) and before that winning the Tory leadership when the odds seemed stacked against him. What was different this time was that he wasn’t able to take the key players in his party with him. Johnson’s defection was perhaps to be expected – though Cameron does not appear to have prepared for it – but Gove’s was not. Had Cameron known that his decision would split the Tory Party at the very top, including his own inner circle, it might have given him pause. The other difference is that neither of the two previous referendums was really Cameron’s personal initiative: one was a sop to the Lib Dems, the other a concession to the SNP. This meant that his warnings of disaster carried some conviction, since he could plausibly say that none of it had been his idea. This time he had no one to blame but himself, and the voters could tell.
What about Corbyn? I don’t believe that a different leader, fighting a more full-throated campaign, would have made much difference to the final outcome: most Labour voters went for Remain anyway and many of those who didn’t were sufficiently alienated to be resistant to all persuasion. Nevertheless, if Labour had had a different leader there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be in this mess. Yvette Cooper might have been no better at convincing people in Labour’s heartlands to turn out in support of an unloved and distant institution – she might well have been worse – but she would have been far better at convincing the Tory government to think a bit harder about the risks it was running in holding the referendum, including the risk of defeat at a subsequent general election. Along with Cameron’s recklessness we need an explanation for Johnson’s and Gove’s. Part of it, unquestionably, came from their sense that Labour was no longer a serious party of government and therefore that their own freedom of action was commensurably broader. The chancers chanced it because they thought they’d get away with it.
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