With a bleak inevitability, I have reached the point in this referendum campaign where I see the vote and the argument over Brexit everywhere I look. Even at Glyndebourne’s sensational revival of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg I found myself struck by the topicality of the warning issued in the final scene by Hans Sachs, the civic hero and poet, concerning falscher welscher Majestat (“false foreign rule”) and the risk that welschen Dunst mit welschem Tand (“foreign delusions and trinkets”) will take hold of German lands. As the townsfolk listened enraptured, I half-expected Gerald Finley (sublime as Sachs) to urge his fellow guildsmen to “take back control”.
Yet the echo was also a sharp reminder of how much is at stake in just nine days’ time. It is one thing to see these atavistic impulses surfacing from the depths of the human psyche in a work of art: Sachs’s handful of xenophobic lines are controversial enough in that context. How much more perilous, then, are sentiments similar to these when applied to contemporary society and presented as reason enough for Britain to leave the European Union.
If voters do choose Brexit, it will be in no small part because the Leave campaign efficiently aggregated fear of immigration in its various forms and — much more importantly — persuaded a sufficiency of voters that getting out of the EU would fix the problem. Remain’s closing argument is going to be: we should stay because leaving would trigger what David Cameron, on Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, called “a DIY recession”. Hostility to foreigners versus fear of indigence: scarcely a feast of reason and flow of soul.
All the same, let us not pretend, as is often asserted, that this is a case of moral equivalence (“a plague a’ both your houses”, “they’re all the same”, “all politicians are liars”, and other cop-out cliches). Because it isn’t. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Remain camp has been exaggerating the risks of Brexit. It is certainly guilty of presenting as exact data what can only be informed estimates. But these are peccadilloes compared with Leave’s deployment of immigration as its core theme. I don’t doubt for a moment that the recent spike of support for Brexit reflects this focus. Poll after poll shows that immigration is at the very top, or near the very top, of voters’ priorities. It is a proxy issue, uniting outright xenophobia and racism with a much more general fear of globalisation, of the forces of change tearing through the international labour market and of the consequent surge in population mobility. So it is little surprise that a campaign, led by orators as persuasive as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, promising to address all these anxieties in one fell geostrategic swoop, should be gaining in popularity.
There is much that is deeply objectionable about this. But the least edifying feature of it all is the spectacle of intellectually brilliant politicians pretending that profoundly complex policy problems are, in fact, easily solved. Vote for Brexit, heat the stove to No10, add political will in quantity — et voila! All your immigration problemsfixed. We have not sunk to the level of Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall. But what the Leave campaign’s promises share with those proposed by the Republican presidential nominee’s is a bogus simplicity. The most famous wall of the 20th century symbolised the division of the western world into democracies and totalitarian regimes. The most famous wall of the 21st so far has not yet been built, but already symbolises a more subtle but equally important division in modern politics: between those who are willing to confront and concede the nuance of most problems of government, and those who think (or say they think) that such intricacies are excuses, and pretexts for delay. In this referendum campaign, the debate about population mobility and border control has been skewed by the misrepresentation of immigration as an inherently pathological process — a national affliction that we can ignore, contain, or stop. The absurdity of this premise is that most immigration is no such thing.
Migrant labour is routinely needed in this country by the NHS, supermarkets, cleaning firms, public transport and most other sectors of the service economy. Visit any campus, hospital, trading floor, or IT department and you will see that this requirement is not confined to low-wage labour. Britain plc is absolutely dependent upon newcomers (as Johnson was the first to insist when he was mayor of London ). As I have written before, this is a collective dependency that should unite us.
This is not to deny that problems of capacity in housing and public service provision are a side effect of this core economic reality. Pragmatic border control is part of any social contract, and should marry flexibility to common sense. But the diverse, kinetic society that the Tory right now seems to regard as a problem is a direct product of the economic liberalisation for which it argued so vociferously in the 1980s. If the Leavers are seeking a culprit, they need only look in the mirror.
Worst of all, their campaign has nurtured expectations that cannot possibly be met. If Brexit carries the day, the jobs that migrants presently fill will not disappear. It will simply become more difficult and bureaucratic to enable EU citizens to carry on performing the functions they are currently fulfilling. And if not them,who?
Net migration from non-EU countries — 188,000 a year — is greater than the figure from the EU. The status of these migrants will not be affected one way or the other by Britain’s departure. And what about the 420,000 Britons working abroad? What will happen to those of them who have jobs in other EU countries? In short, has anyone thought this through?
We are days away from making a terrible mistake for deplorably stupid reasons. As the comedian Billy Crystal said at Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday: “Life is best when you build bridges between people, not walls.” True enough. But in this referendum those who disagree, or have chosen to disagree in pursuit of power, are making the most noise. With a symphony of dog whistles as our soundtrack, we are trudging dangerously close to the idiot option.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Matthew d’Ancona is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books, including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition.
