It might have been my 42nd birthday, or maybe it was the words “don’t panic”, which supporters of liberal causes are muttering with dwindling confidence these days, but something impelled me to reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And of Douglas Adams’s many acute observations, one struck me as pertinent to the Earthly turbulence from which I had hoped to escape by picking up the book in the first place.
Arthur Dent, the only human to survive the destruction of his home planet, learns about Deep Thought, a computer of mind-boggling magnitude constructed with the purpose of discovering the ultimate meaning of life, the universe and everything. After millennia of calculations, it declares a result: 42. This is bit of an anticlimax. The ultimate answer turns out to be useless without the right question, to which end an even bigger, planet-sized computer is built. At this point, my unsettled imagination decided that Adams was saying something relevant to political campaigns.
So much energy is spent getting a numerical answer that teaches us how poorly we understood what was really being asked. Simple answers — 42 as the meaning of life — are the stuff of science fiction. Even when the ballot paper has binary options — should the United Kingdom stay in the European Union (EU)? — the response contains a mess of competing motives. The Remain strategy relies on voters asking themselves if they want a reckless gamble with the nation’s economic stability; the Leave strategy is an invitation to pull the emergency cord on uncontrolled immigration. Within each proposition are cultural inflections for which the main decision is a vague proxy. Do you trust British Prime Minister David Cameron? Do you want your country’s future kneaded in the sweaty palms of Nigel Farage?
Opinion polls, tweaked in atonement for last May’s bum steer, suggest the Leave side has pulled ahead. Anecdotal testimony from around the country corroborates that story, as does body language around parliament. Pro-European Labour MPs have the palest complexions and the most furrowed brows. It is a look of trauma revisited, a flashback to Scotland in the summer of 2014 and the surge of nationalism among voters whose Labour allegiance had been taken for granted. In the English iteration, EU membership is proving a hard sell to people who feel the system has been skewed against them for decades. Pro-Leave Tory MPs look concomitantly relaxed, like runners with a tailwind. They are buoyant not because they believe they have won — anything could still happen — but because they can claim a kind of cultural victory regardless of the final count. The floodwaters have already reshaped the political landscape, with pillars of traditional authority suffering the most corrosion.
That reflects a deliberate tactic of the Leave campaign. Their plan to abandon the single market and sabotage international alliances with glib disregard for the consequences lies far beyond what most economic and diplomatic wisdom would counsel. So discrediting expertise itself is part of the game. The governor of the Bank of England, the Treasury, every living former prime minister, trade unions, scientists, thinktanks, international organisations, the heads of other EU member states and the United States president must all, in the Brexiter imagination, be captive to the same malign Brussels influence. There is a nihilistic streak to a campaign that throws flames at the very idea of institutional independence and professional judgement because mistrust of an inchoate “establishment” spreads faster across scorched earth.
The problem Remain advocates have is that expertise is a cousin to nuance. They hang out in the balance of probabilities, relaxed in the company of rival viewpoints, cohabiting with uncertainty. Their family motto is “It’s complicated” — which, as the energy secretary, Amber Rudd, discovered when repeating those very words in a televised EU debate, is not a crowd-pleasing slogan. Some of the ways in which Britain benefits from EU membership are uncomplicated — seamless trade across a continent is a simple bonus. But none is as visceral as the Leavers’ pledge to apply the brakes on disorienting social change, or the implicit offer of financial and cultural compensation for years of neglect by Westminster elites. Those are not bonanzas that anyone campaigning for Brexit is in a position to deliver, nor are they available by quitting the EU. But they are not obviously on offer inside the EU either — not now, not soon. One of the hardest arguments in politics is the one that tells angry people they can’t have what they want, that certainties of the past are lost and the journey to a better future requires patience.
Reserves of trust have been depleted by years of pretence that simple solutions are available, followed by painful collision with complex reality. When the Leavers speak of “taking control”, they mean casting off from our continental harbour into the swell of unregulated global markets in a vessel crewed by Tory mutineers whose competence is scuttling governments not running them. But that is a flat-pack risk that requires a few steps of assembly for people who are not generous with their attention, least of all when one set of politicians is on telly bad-mouthing another.
Appeals based on the difficulty of a problem can sound like an evasion of responsibility. Aren’t these people paid to have the answers? Or they sound patronising. Pro-Europeans risk playing the intellectual Marie Antoinette, wondering aloud from the Palace of Westminster why the mob that hungers for security cannot be fed hot analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. And yet “It’s complicated” is more often a preface to honesty than “It’s easy”. The argument that thorny issues require collaborative, imperfect compromise is intrinsic to the case for sticking with the EU. It will be a decision to engage with problems — economic regulation, climate change, migration — at the continental level because there are no self-contained national solutions.
The process is slow and frustrating, but the Brexit alternative is a slower, harder process of dealing with the same issues, and negotiating with the same people — but as the wrecker nation, demanding special treatment from the club as it tries to repair the damage. Simple answers — 42 as the meaning of life — are the stuff of science fiction. And if the Leave campaign wins, it will not take years of deep thought to discover that the value of EU membership should never have been in question.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Rafael Behr is a political columnist for the Guardian. He has been political editor of the New Statesman, chief leader writer on the Observer and a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in Russia and eastern Europe.
