Catastrophe

So post-truth politics won the day and in a grotesque act of national self-harm Britain has voted to leave the EU. Within hours reality began to bite back as the warnings of the much-derided experts started to become true. Stock markets around the world were in free fall, the pound crashed through the floor, and companies began to announce plans to move jobs and investment out. All through the campaign leavers braggingly talked of how Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy. Not any more it isn’t. Within just a day it has become the sixth largest. Again as warned, Scotland made the first moves towards what will undoubtedly be independence, and Northern Ireland might well follow or in any case faces turmoil. Calls to shift the British border back from Calais began. The Prime Minister resigned but not with immediate effect and so a complete political paralysis now exists, and there are rumours that senior civil servants are likely to resign en masse because they know that what they are going to be expected to deliver is completely impractical. This is just day one of what will be years of uncertainty and chaos.

Reality bit in other ways, too. Before the sun had set leading Brexiters disowned the claims that there would be £350M a week more spent on the NHS, and that there would be reductions in immigration. So that was two of the three central planks of their campaign discarded. And what of the third, ‘taking back control’? As had again been said all along, it immediately emerged that the Brexiters have not a single idea about what it is that is now going to happen, when, or how. Having with anarchistic, reckless glee booted down the central pillars of decades of foreign and economic policy they had literally nothing – nothing - to say other than that a ‘glorious future’ beckoned. Suddenly, having won their prize they do not even want to begin the process of leaving and seem amazed and outraged that the rest of the EU is saying that they need to do so. Out is out.

There are no good outcomes for England now. The best that can be hoped for might be some kind of Norwegian-style arrangement, although it is by no means clear that this will be available. Even if it were it would be very tricky, politically, although there would be a parliamentary majority for it, because it would mean free movement of people. But as the effects of Brexit get clearer, and the lies of the leave campaign are exposed, there are already signs that some who voted to leave are regretting it (‘Regrexit’ is the word du jour) and if opinion polls bore that out in large numbers it’s just about conceivable that such an arrangement could be agreed without a further referendum. It would just about honour the letter of the vote to leave the EU and frankly since the leavers refused to spell out what leave meant they would just have to accept that. But it would lead to decades of claims of ‘betrayal’ and ‘we did not know what we voted for’.

Whatever happens, the economic consequences are going to be dire for years to come. Anyone thinking that it represents a triumph of working-class solidarity over global neo-liberalism is in for a very nasty shock indeed when jobs start to haemorrhage and public finances and services collapse. A very chilling lesson in reality is about to administered and although it won’t only be those who voted leave who suffer it is likely to impact them the worst.  But the real catastrophe is a cultural one. It is a massive defeat for Britain as a place of tolerance, cosmopolitanism and openness; a victory for every sort of prejudice, for sullen and bitter anti-intellectualism, for resentful small-mindedness. Huge rifts between classes, generations and regions have been opened and they aren’t going to be healed any time soon. My European friends living here are shocked and scared, whilst friends abroad look on in bemusement and horror at what has happened.

As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.

The sleep of reason

The expression ‘post-truth politics’ is one which I have only just become aware of, and I am not sure who coined it. The earliest usage I have found is an article about the 2012 US presidential election (Parmar, 2012) but it seems to already have been a term in use at that time.

It has come to the fore in the UK now as people begin to reflect upon the EU Referendum. Since the vote is being held today I don’t know what the outcome will be but the polls suggest the result will be close. Much of the campaign has employed familiar techniques of political rhetoric which inevitably include partial facts, selective interpretations, spinning and sloganizing of all sorts. But it has also seen repeated lies told, especially those which I have written about before concerning the size of the UK budget contribution to the EU and the assertion that Turkey is joining the EU.

It is not that telling lies in politics is new, and it isn’t that which in itself constitutes post-truth politics. It is the sense that the truth does not even matter, or that there is not even a truth to be told and, therefore, that it is meaningless to speak of lies being told. The political roots of that in the UK are associated in my mind, at least, with the way that the case was made for the Iraq War in 2003 and, more generally, with the newly relentless emphasis on ‘news management’ by the New Labour governments.

There was nothing new about spin either, of course, but this was something different. In particular, one of Tony Blair’s distinctive skills when in difficulty was to ‘break through the fourth wall’. This expression, derived from the theatre, refers to an actor speaking directly to the audience and in the process revealing the artifice of the stage. It’s just a play, after all – which we already know, but suspend our knowledge of until that knowledge is shattered. In politics this has the effect of simultaneously acknowledging but re-enforcing the idea that it is all just a game.

For skilled politicians like Blair this is a strangely disarming way of having the cake of playing the game whilst eating the cake of ironized authenticity. The blustering humour of politicians like Donald Trump or, in the Referendum context, Boris Johnson when ‘caught out’ in some particularly preposterous claim is somewhat similar. It draws the audience into a knowing acknowledgment of artifice, whilst inviting applause for the actor’s ‘honesty’ in exposing it. It’s this, rather than the telling of lies as such, which defines post-truth (and therefore post-lie) politics.

The intellectual roots of post-truth may lie with a (bowdlerized) version of post-modernism or of social constructionism: there is no truth, only interpretations. Something like this is apparent in the way that the campaign has been covered by the BBC, in particular, where a commitment to ‘balance’ has meant that every claim by one side has always been accompanied by a report of a counter-claim from the other. Again there is no truth, just opposing representations of truth; thus for every five minutes airtime saying that Turkey is not joining the EU there must be five minutes of airtime saying the opposite. Never mind that Turkey is not, as a matter of fact, joining the EU. I had a conversation at the weekend with someone about the EU debate and she suggested that whatever the facts about – in this particular conversation – immigration these didn’t matter for those concerned about it since what they claimed to be the facts were ‘true for them’ and that was what mattered.

If that is so then we have to give up on any sense of rationality in political discourse, and indeed the campaign can be read as a kind of battle between rational and post-truth politics. Thus the remain campaign deployed endless statements from various experts in economics, trade, security and so on. In response, leading leave campaigner Michael Gove opined that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”. Incredibly, he subsequently compared pro-Brexit experts to the Nazis using scientific experts to denounce Einstein’s theories as wrong, in support of anti-semitic ideology. This from a former Education Minister!

Although usually less colourfully expressed, this trope of experts being in some way corrupt or untrustworthy has run through the leave campaign. It fits very neatly – like the rest of the leave campaign – with a populism in which ‘ordinary folk’ or consistently done down by ‘the elite’ – often, the ‘liberal elite’. The logic is completely circular – the evidence that they are the elite is that they disagree; the reason they disagree is that they are the elite. In this hermetically-sealed world anyone from global corporations to trade union leaders to ‘faceless bureaucrats’ to ‘the politically correct brigade’ to ‘so-called intellectuals’ are all part of an orchestrated conspiracy. Unless, of course, someone from one of these groups comes out in favour of the populist cause, at which point they become the fount of all wisdom, ‘courageously’ speaking out.

There is an interesting and important overlap between post-truth politics and the cosmopolitan and local split which I have talked about elsewhere. For the polling evidence suggests that views on EU membership are very clearly socially stratified: the more educated people are, the more likely they are to favour EU membership; the higher their social class (which is linked to educational level) the more likely they are to favour EU membership. As with Trump’s appeal, the cleavage is between those who gain from, or at least can cope with, globalization and those who suffer from its effects. In this way, post-truth politics are inextricably linked with the consequences of neo-liberalization. And in a way there is a connection between postmodern relativism and neo-liberalism: in the marketplace of ideas you pick the one that best expresses your economic interests.

These things probably connect with the media and social media culture in which ‘passion’ is the dominant value. Thus every game show contestant is judged on how passionately they want to win, just as post-truth politicians assure us of how passionate they are about their cause. What matters most is how strongly you feel. In that calculus, it is irrelevant whether what you feel is justified by evidence or argument; the strength of the feeling is its own validation. And why not? If, as my friend told me in the conversation I mentioned earlier, what matters is what people think is true then between all the different things that people think are true the only way to adjudicate between competing beliefs is the strength with which they are held.

But there are huge dangers here. The Spanish artist Francisco Goya captioned the most famous of his Los Caprichos etchings thus: “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos). This inspired the title of The Sleep of Reason (1968) a novel by C. P. Snow about whom I have written elsewhere on this blog. It is a reminder of the dangers of the abandonment of rationality, which are just as great as those of an over-attachment to rationality – dangers which include technocracy and totalitarianism. Tomorrow we will learn whether post-truth politics have won the EU Referendum but, even if it has not, its appeal and its consequences will not disappear.

 

References

Parmar, I. (2012). ‘US Presidential Election 2012: Post-truth Politics’, Political Insight 3 (2): 4-7
Snow, C.P. (1968). The Sleep of Reason. London: Macmillan.

Turkeys and Christmas

Before the virtual ink had dried on my last post, the campaign for the UK to leave the EU produced their biggest and, so far, most pernicious, lie with the launch of a poster stating: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. The idea – signalled in the population figure – is to whip up fears of Turkish – meaning Muslim – immigration to the UK.

The lie is that Turkey is not joining the EU. They applied to do so in 1987 but negotiations did not start until 2005. Joining requires the opening and closing of 35 ‘chapters’ or areas of agreement, of which so far only 15 have been opened and just one closed. Turkey is nowhere near to joining the EU and in any case its joining could be vetoed by any member state and almost certainly would be. In some ways it is further than ever from joining because of its deteriorating human rights and democracy record. And, for that matter, Turkey itself is far less interested in EU membership than in the past: its longstanding failure to join has led it to reposition itself strategically away from Europe and towards being a middle-eastern regional power.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Turkey or its EU negotiations, but the expert opinion is clear, as in this recent summary:

“To infer that Turkey may one day soon join the EU is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the political and procedural realities of the EU and of its enlargement process. Turkish membership of the EU is at best a distant prospect.”

Reading – as, sadly, I do – many internet discussion forums about the EU Referendum it was interesting and depressing to see how the lie that ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ was defended. One line was to say – mendaciously – that the recent deal by ‘Germany’ to give Turks visa-free access to the Schengen zone meant that they had ‘free movement rights’. It doesn’t (three month visa-free travel is not the same as free movement) and, anyway, the deal may not go ahead because it is not ‘Germany’ that decides but the democratically elected EU Parliament which is blocking or at least modifying the deal which, for that matter, Turkey may not accept. And even if this were to happen then, of course, it would not mean that Turkish membership of the EU was any closer.

Another line of defence was downright peculiar. It was that ‘joining’ is the present continuous tense and therefore the poster was true since Turkey was ‘in the process’ of joining. This kind of sophistry gives sophistry a bad name. If I say that ‘I am joining the campaign to leave the EU’ any reasonable person would think that means that it is going to happen, not that I am in a process that might or might not end in the future in me becoming a member of the campaign.

The wider context for this anti-immigrant sentiment associated with a supposedly anti-elitist movement is the well-worn theme of how the consequences of economic crisis play out. It never has a happy ending, not least for the ‘ordinary, salt of the earth folk’ that the anti-elite elitists play for fools in the way that the Brexit advocates are currently trying to do. For their goal is not to help, sustain and support ‘ordinary people’ in the face of global capitalism, but to expose them to the most extreme form of unregulated global capitalism. Those who fall for it are voting, like the proverbial Turkeys, for Christmas.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

The expression “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics” has never been definitively attributed but it has become a political cliché. And in some ways an unfair one, since it is a way of discrediting any and every statistic. Even so, there are some statistics which are palpably lies, and the campaign for Britain to leave the EU is replete with them.

The most egregious lie is the statistic used as the headline claim of the Leave campaign (appearing on the side of the campaign ‘battle bus’ and on all its leaflets and web sites) that “the EU costs us £350 million a week”.  This has been debunked numerous times, not least by the Office for National Statistics. It arises from the fact that in 2014, the last year for which full figures are available, the UK gross contribution to the EU was £18.8 billion. Divided by 52 this gives the figure of £350M per week. But stated as a cost to the UK it is a lie. Why?

Because it is the gross contribution. The net contribution is reduced by the UK’s budget rebate, which in 2014 was £4.4 billion, and payments received back in grants to for example agriculture and science funding which in 2014 were £6 billion. So the net contribution in 2014 was £8.4 billion – less than half what is claimed. And there is also the lie that this is what the UK pays ‘each year’. In fact, the figure varies each year and 2014 was the second highest contribution on record. Nor is the figure rising – the 2015 predicted out turn is lower than 2014.

In the face of this (although they have never acknowledged the fact that this was an unusually high year) the Leave campaign have made two defences. First, they say, that is the amount that we actually hand over, so it is what the EU costs, even if we get some back. That is a crazy logic in itself, of course. It is like saying that if I go into a shop and buy something priced at £5 and give a £10 note and get £5 change, then my visit to the shop has cost me £10. But it isn’t even true in this crazy sense: the rebate part is never even handed over.

Their second defence is that it is justified to quote the gross figure because, outside the EU, all this would be available to spend on what the UK wanted, whereas the £6 billion that comes back has to be spent on what the EU determines. The problem with that, though, is that Brexit campaigners have, whenever challenged that leaving would reduce UK agricultural subsidies or science funding, said that these payments would continue to be made by the UK government, and some have even said they would be increased. So if that is true, then only the net figure would be available to the UK.

But let’s look at that. First, it assumes that nothing else whatsoever changes in the economy on Brexit, which no analyst, even pro-Brexit, thinks. Second, it neglects how that contribution benefits the UK by, for example, boosting the economies of less developed members of the EU which in turn leads to demand for UK exports. Third, in 2014 it was about 1% of UK government expenditure anyway – almost a rounding error in the public accounts. And, fourth, the impact of the rebate (negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1984) is that the UK is exempt from the general rule of contributing 1% of GDP. The consequence is that in every single year the UK is the lowest contributing EU member as a percentage of GDP.

The zombie statistic of £350M a week refuses to die, no matter how often it is discredited, but it is not the only offender. This week, the Leave campaign produced what became a widely reported statistic supposedly showing that UK exports to the EU had dropped by over 18% in the last decade. The idea was to try to counter the argument that the single market is important to the UK economy. Buried in what they said was that this didn’t take account of exchange rate fluctuations between the pound and the Euro, which sounds rather boring and technical. But of course it is crucial. If a UK firm sells a good for £1 and the exchange rate is £1=2Euros and next month sells the same good at £1=1.5Euros then the value of exports has fallen by 25% - in Euros – but not at all in sterling. And in the period 2006-2016 the £-Euro exchange rate has fluctuated considerably.  So I checked and - surprise, surprise – the value of UK exports to the EU actually rose in sterling over the last decade. And that was a decade no doubt carefully chosen to encompass the global financial crisis – if one took the 20 years from 1996 the growth would be larger.

These two examples are taken from many that could be chosen, and this week several more were pulled apart by InFacts. The other headline lie, apart from the budget contribution, is that 65% of UK law is made in the EU when in fact is 13%. Of course in all political debates statistics are bandied about, and they are often dodgy, and the Remain campaign are surely guilty of cherry picking statistics to suit their cause. But that is not the same as lying and what I find extraordinary about the Leave campaign is not that they present figures that support their case, which would be one thing, but that every statistic I have seen them produce has been palpably – often absurdly – dishonest. Maybe I am biased – but if you think so watch Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings being questioned by the Treasury Committee about the £350M a week claim, and judge for yourself.

Lost in history

I am not going to write yet again about the EU Referendum today, or at least not directly, but rather about some reflections prompted by an article that appeared in The Guardian today by John Harris which was about the referendum but with a particular take. Harris, who is an invariably interesting journalist by the way, argues that many inclined to vote to leave the EU are reacting to having had huge and rapid social changes “imposed on them”. They should not, therefore, be patronizingly dismissed as “irrational, unhinged and gullible”.

Whether or not this is a valid reason for voting to leave the EU is an open question, and as I say not what I want to discuss here. Rather, it seems to me that the sentiment Harris is reporting is a variant of something I discuss and criticise at length in the book (especially pp. 88-92): the idea of a world in rapid, perhaps unprecedented, change which makes mandatory constant organizational change. It is one of the many ways in which organizations and politics are both connected and harmonic, something which is becoming a regular theme of this blog.

What strikes me most is how unchanging these claims are, and how they are both meaningful and meaningless. Harris is talking about the period since Britain joined the EU, so the forty or so years since 1973. But in 1973, which I can just about remember (I was 8), similar sentiments were expressed, and very vociferously too. The past, it seemed, was not just another country but, in the past, we had been another country. The memories of war, Empire, social cohesion and civility may have been refracted through the lens of nostalgia but they had their counterpart in more objective analyses of relative economic decline, shifting centres of geo-political power and changing social norms.

It was common then to hear adults talking about how ‘the country has gone to the dogs’, that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’ and, though I can’t recall hearing these exact words, that ‘I just want my country back’. Some of this, as with the present EU debate, was about immigration but, also as with the present EU debate, it was part of a more inchoate sense of unchosen changes. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this kind of sentiment was a big part of what lay*, a few years later, behind electoral support for Margaret Thatcher, including her remarks at the 1979 election campaign about British people feeling ‘swamped’ by immigration. And yet people now are wont to say that immigration ‘used to be ok’, even though their predecessors did not say anything like that at all.

So that sense of unchosen change isn’t new and perhaps this means that it is actually itself rather patronizing to uncritically accept it as an authentic, respectworthy sentiment. If anything it is just an unremarkable truism: 2016 is different to 1973, just as 1976 was different to 1933 in all kinds of ways, most of which were not ‘chosen’ and could not reasonably have been ‘asked’ about. Why would anyone expect otherwise? The issue seems to lie more in a sense that this change is going somewhere frightening or, perhaps most frightening of all, that it is going nowhere. It’s this fearful sense of being lost in history that I want to explore.

Fear of redundancy, fear of being left behind, fear of being judged unequal to the demands of change. That this fear is largely orchestrated through an invocation of hordes of Asians and Slavs – or, in more politically acceptable language, the challenge from the emerging economies of China, India and Eastern Europe; or the anodyne ‘global economic race’ – serves to underscore the perhaps not racist but certainly racialised tang of contemporary stories about Britishness. We may have no clear idea of what the future holds, but we are continually told that failure to change will mean that the future will occur elsewhere, in a faraway country of which we know little. There is therefore an easy translation from the ubiquitous experience of change in the workplace to a fear of foreign competition, and an easy translation from that to fear of foreigners in general and immigration and European integration in particular.

It is indeed quite remarkable that the bullishness about change in the organizational sphere has been so comprehensively unmatched in other areas. The most charitable interpretation of British involvement in the Iraq war is that it was animated by a desire to maintain the ‘special relationship’ and to influence US policy – a desire which was a continuation of British foreign policy since 1945 and which persists to the present day. New Labour’s attitude to the EU, initially relatively conciliatory, later became rather similar to that towards Old Labour: one of hectoring calls for modernization and change in the face of global competition. The Coalition government after 2010 was relatively muted on the EU because of the presence of pro-EU Liberal Democrats but the Conservative administration since 2015 is defined by degrees of hostility to the EU relations. (Interestingly, these two foreign policy areas are in conflict, since the US relation to the UK is refracted through the UK’s membership of the EU, as President Obama is beginning to make clear).

Back on the home front, immigration and asylum policies have also been animated by fear. There is no doubt that New Labour were more relaxed about multi-culturalism than was Thatcherism. And Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill’ conservatism has largely followed them in this, which in part explains the rise of UKIP (which was not just fed by the EU issue but the sense that Cameron is not a ‘real Conservative’ e.g. in terms of gay marriage legislation). Nevertheless, across all recent governments policy in these areas has been draconian and it is noteworthy that the case for tolerance has mainly been made in purely economic terms – the economic need for immigration – so that it is in effect inseparable from the mantra of change as an adjunct to global competitiveness. There is no real suggestion that immigration is related to either our past responsibilities as a colonial power or to our future possibilities as a cosmopolitan society. It’s just an economic presence, bereft of past or future.

It would be unfair to ascribe this culture of fear solely to the polity. It is also the case that any capacity to be positive about the future is limited by the rabidity of a press where it is not just the tabloids which are filled with blood-curdling stories of new causes for alarm. On Europe, immigration, asylum, crime, terrorism, paedophilia as well as health, climate change and, notoriously, house prices the media tell of a world to which a cringing fearfulness is a quite reasonable response. Yet it is not a fear of anything in particular, even if it attaches at moments to something specific. A combination of rolling news and limited attention spans means that each fear is registered, instantaneously forgotten and superseded by a new terror. What endures is not any specific anxiety but a generalised neurotic dread. But whilst fed by the media this climate has been able to flourish at least in part because it fills the vacuum created by the political failure to articulate any compelling future vision of ‘the good life’.

There is clearly a symmetry between the febrile atmosphere engendered by the daily kaleidoscope of media-fuelled panics and the managerialized politics and political managerialism in which ‘the only constant is change’. If we want an image of contemporary Britain it would be of a person running in terror away from an unseen yet omnipresent enemy, but running on a treadmill rather than a road. Standing at the side is a sadistic personal trainer in the form of politician, manager or journalist cajoling and bullying the runner to go faster, to redouble the effort to go nowhere on pain of being engulfed by the invisible demons which lie in wait for those who fail to keep up. The ‘global race’ has no finishing line. It is a journey with no beginning, no end and no purpose or meaning beyond its own self-fulfilling imperative to keep moving at any cost.

This is not, as is conventionally supposed, because we** are too wedded to the past but rather because we have too little sense of ourselves as located within the past-present-future continuum which more truly constitutes history. If, when I was a child, the problem was the weight of the past then for the coming generation it is the weightlessness of the future. When I was growing up, British identity was, unhappily and ultimately unsustainably, that of an old person stuck in the past with memories of a great empire, a heroic war, of glories lost. That is still discernible, but it is now much more akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Anyone who, as I have, has had the misfortune of witnessing this condition will know that what makes it so devastating is not simply that the sufferer recollects so little of the past and is often over-attached to those distant fragments which are flickeringly remembered. It is also that there is no conception of the future, and the present is just a fear-filled moment of transitory but ever recurring change. 

*Surprisingly from a present-day perspective it also in part lay behind the decision to join what was then the EEC in 1973. I can remember my highly Conservative – and conservative – primary school headmistress inventing a song about a ‘beautiful dream’ as part of a celebratory pageant of this event. I played – and I hope this will amuse anyone reading this who knows me – one of the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, then a slang term for Swiss bankers. Whether these gnomes were depicted positively or negatively in the pageant I unfortunately can’t recall.

**By ‘we’ I mean ‘we British’ but similar things may well be true in other countries. I think this is so in France, which I know quite well, and probably in the US and elsewhere. Indeed something like what I have said here seems to apply to US and is expressed by Donald Trump when, as in his now notorious ‘ban all Muslims’ speech he cried plaintively about the need to work out “what the hell is going on?”. Obnoxious as it was, it did express this sense of ‘historical lostness’ that I am trying to explore, and Trump’s popularity is surely a consequence of that sense.

Battling for Britain

I had intended to write a post about Owen Hatherley’s stimulating recent book The Ministry of Nostalgia, and then thought I wanted to write something about today’s EU summit where Britain is negotiating terms prior to a Referendum on continued membership. But it occurred to me that the two are in many ways linked.

Hatherley’s book picks up on something which I have also noticed and commented on in this blog, namely the grotesque historical spoonerism in which wartime and post-war austerity is invoked to justify swingeing public budget cuts. What was originally about shared suffering in order to build collective goods becomes the cover for their dismemberment. Hatherley analyses this “austerity nostalgia” at length, orchestrated in particular through the motif of the now ubiquitous ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan. Originally devised (although not in fact used) as wartime propaganda, it now indexes a certain sort of British – or English – self-identity of stoical suffering.

Whilst most obviously consonant with the political projects of the right – and I will return to this – Hatherley deploys a most intriguing argument about how it fits in with a certain kind of leftist nostalgia which, whilst he has some sympathy with it, he finds to be ultimately impotent. That chimed with me because it is a nostalgia that I am prone to, as I wrote in my post about Jonathan Coe’s novelistic treatment of the same kind of thinking. And amongst the wide range of examples – many of them to do with architecture – that Hatherley deploys I was interested to see that one was Ken Loach’s film 1945, which I also posted about on this blog, even linking it to the perversity of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ motif! There’s also critical (but again sympathetic) mention of one of my favourite recent(ish) books, historian Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, as a key statement of leftist nostalgia. So, in short, Hatherley’s book both spoke to but also challenged many of the things I believe and am interested in. I am still digesting what to make of it and may well post about this in due course.

But this book also re-enforces my sense of what lies beneath the EU Referendum. For “austerity nostalgia” and its associated tropes seems very much to inform David Cameron’s avowed intention to ‘battle for Britain’ in his EU re-negotiation. The very fact of using such language is surely designed to underline its primary purpose: to persuade the undecided or only vaguely interested to vote to stay in. It is not that the things under negotiation are of any great significance – they are as irrelevant to those implacably opposed to EU membership as to those, such as myself, who are broadly supportive. But the language speaks to the softer edges of opposition, the hard core of which is animated by the still potent idea of Britain ‘standing alone’ during the war, and which seems still to dream of a world something like that of (an imagination of) early post-war Britain. It speaks to a sullen, resentful sensibility, sometimes vicious, other times sentimental. Local, not cosmopolitan. Pathetic (in its literal sense) but not always necessarily ignoble.

In a more practical vein, though, the re-negotiation shows the incoherence of the Brexit case in at least two ways. One is that the persistent complaint of those making that case is that the EU is ruled by diktat from Brussels, with no democracy. Yet when it emerged that even if Brussels agreed to the terms, they would be subject to ratification by the democratically elected European Parliament there was outrage. The other is that the terms of the re-negotiation were seen as hopelessly limited and yet even these had been ‘watered down’ as the protracted negotiation progressed. Yet it is an article of faith amongst Brexiters that on leaving the UK will be able to quickly negotiate with exactly the same counterparties a full-spectrum free trade deal on the most generous of terms.

Those two things seem to spell out the twin poles of the Brexit version of nostalgia. On the one hand, the idea of Britain being hamstrung; on the other of Britain being overweaningly powerful. A battle of Britain speaks well to this, since 1940 was the moment at which Britain was both at its weakest and strongest. But how long are we to live in the long shadow of that summer, now 75 years ago? In my book (Grey, 2012) about Bletchley Park (the wartime codebreaking centre) I write about how ‘the war’ was an omnipresent part of my childhood in the 1970s, since it had been the defining experience of my parents and teachers. One might have thought that this would have diminished in the subsequent years, but it has not. Hathaway notes how it is now the experience of our grandparents that gets referenced in austerity nostalgia. Certainly the TV channels remain full of wartime films and documentaries. I am not sure that any other country in the world is still so preoccupied with the war, unless it is Putin’s Russia which, by the way, would more than any other country be the benefactor of Brexit.

In this sense, though, one can certainly see the present situation as a battle for Britain in a rather different sense. The decision about whether to remain in the EU is in some ways a decision about what Britain is to be and how it is to think about itself. A Brexit would re-enforce the remark made in 1963 by American Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. That indeed is very evident in the historical and geo-political absurdity of the idea championed by many Brexiters of creating a politics and trade bloc based on the Commonwealth. And it would very forcibly bring home to British people quite how much the world has changed since 1940 since in a muted way the US, Indian and Chinese administrations have made it clear that Britain is only of interest as a partner to the extent that it is an EU member. Plus Britain itself would surely not survive Brexit, since Scotland, for sure, would become independent.

So this is the link between Hatherley’s perceptive book and the EU Referendum negotiations going on even as I write: is Britain, or England in fact, to be locked into a nostalgic fantasy of keeping calm and carrying on? Or will it embrace the undoubted imperfections of the EU and acknowledge the geo-political realpolitik of the present? This is about unquantifiable feelings, images and sensibilities but it will in the end come down to some quite precise, quite narrowly-ranged, numbers between 60-40 for in and 60-40 for out. The 20% difference between those two outcomes represents the undecided or shiftable vote that Cameron’s otherwise meaningless renegotiation is designed to appeal to. His gamble is that they can be persuaded to keep calm and carry on with EU membership and if he is right he will win the vote. The argument? Well, that has still to be faced up to, let alone won.

References

Grey, C. (2012). Decoding Organization. Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Judt, T. (2011). Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin

Hatherley, O. (2016). The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso.

Sovereignty and Brexit

As a UK Referendum on EU membership gets closer, much is being made by those urging exit of the idea of national sovereignty. Indeed for some Brexiters this is the defining issue. What they mean by sovereignty seems to be that a country can make its own laws and act independently of all other countries.

Whether such a situation ever obtained is highly questionable; but it certainly hasn’t obtained for the UK or any other country in recent times. Like other countries the UK is bound into a web of multiple sovereignty-sharing arrangements regarding trade, defence and security via a multiplicity of bodies including the UN, the WTO, NATO and, yes, the EU. Indeed it is ironic that many Brexiters parade the idea that the UK on Brexit could ‘reclaim’ its seat on the WTO as a triumph of sovereignty (by which they mean that whilst remaining a WTO member the UK has since 1973 been represented in trade talks by the combined EU delegation). It’s an irony because the WTO has over 160 members and yet the Brexiters argue that within the 28 strong EU the UK ‘has no say’.

A similar irony is present in the Brexiters’ idea that the UK could lead a new Commonwealth trade bloc. Apart from the fact that there is no appetite in the Commonwealth for such a bloc, its 53 members are highly unlikely (for obvious historical reasons) to want to be lead by Britain! And if sovereignty is the issue, what could matter more than who can direct people in war? Yet Brexiters are quite relaxed about – and mostly in favour of – pooling sovereignty in NATO, which entails British troops being led by foreign generals.

Going back to trade, it’s notable that right-wing Brexiters have no problem with the idea that international ‘markets’ dictate what governments can do, and see no problem of sovereignty in that. Meanwhile, left-wing Brexiters point to the secretive EU-US negotiations to impose the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the UK, but are oblivious to the fact that even more sovereignty-violating deals are struck by ‘sovereign’ states outside of the EU, as the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) shows. In parenthesis, TPP, which includes as six of its twelve members Commonwealth countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand), also shows how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of a Commonwealth free trade zone. In further parenthesis, TPP is an example of the regional platform trade deals (the EU being another) which have emerged because of the failure of the WTO to enact a global deal, showing how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of the WTO as the arena for trade deals.

Brexiters habitually advance their sovereignty argument in terms of a claim that a large percentage of UK laws are made in the EU. The percentage given varies, sometimes being quoted as 80% but in recent months 65% has been the typical claim. The true figure is 8-14%. Then there is another, and very potent, line of Brexit sovereignty argument: that the EU interferes in the UK by imposing human rights judgments upon it. But neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the European Court of Human Rights are EU bodies. The UK was signed up to them (and in the case of the Convention largely created it) before it ever joined the EU and would be a party to them even if it left the EU.

Then, of course, there is the issue of immigration. Surely it must be a matter of sovereignty that a country can decide who enters and leaves its borders? As regards the Brexit debate several different things have been conflated. One issue, of course pressing at this time, is that of refugees and asylum seekers. But the rules governing that are not EU rules but those of the UN’s 1951 Convention. Moreover, since the UK does not belong to the Schengen Agreement and is exempt from the EU refugee-sharing agreement, it is in any case not directly affected by the crisis. Indeed, were Brexit to occur, the only consequences for borders would be to move the UK border from France to the UK and to require a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, both of which would have devastating consequences, firstly for border control and secondly for the still fragile Northern Ireland peace process.

But Brexiters’ arguments about sovereignty and immigration are also concerned with free movement of EU citizens, not just refugees and asylum seekers. Here, they point out that the UK has no choice but to accept immigrants from the rest of the EU. And they are quite right. That is part and parcel of the single market, which the neo-liberals amongst them want. For you can’t have a single European market without free movement of people any more than you could have a single market in the UK whilst having border controls between, say, Cornwall and Devon or Lancashire and Yorkshire. Left-wing opponents of the EU should welcome this, because it means that the international mobility of capital is matched, within the EU, by labour mobility. Why should workers have to stay where they are, beholden to globally free-wheeling companies to give them jobs?

And in any case, when it comes to free movement within the EU, British people do it quite as much as anyone else, and the numbers of EU citizens living in the UK is about the same as the number of UK citizens living in the rest of the EU. In round numbers its about 2M people in both directions. Many of these British immigrants fail to learn the local language, 'take' jobs from locals, push up property prices, and put pressure on local health systems.

In short, the sovereignty argument of the Brexiters is completely flawed, but actually it is worse than flawed. The globalization of economics and markets has created a political vacuum in terms of the democratic political regulation of capital, and it is that which has created the real crisis of sovereignty. The solution – and let's be clear, it's the only solution – is democratic transnational governance structures. And the only such structure in the world today, imperfect as it surely is, is the EU.

Corridors of power

For what will probably be my final post of the year I return, as no doubt I will many times next year, when it is likely to be held, to the UK Referendum on EU membership. For those interested in the global economic context of organizations, but also in the way that decision making happens in both politics and organizations, the current ‘renegotiation’ is fascinating.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is seeking to renegotiate the terms of UK membership so as to be able to recommend to the British people that they vote to remain in the EU. The terms he is seeking, even if achieved, will not in any way change the minds of those in his own party and beyond who are implacably opposed to EU membership. And although I disagree with their opposition, they are absolutely right to see the renegotiation as a charade. Even if it succeeds, it will not in any substantive way change the terms of membership. So what is it about?

The answer is that it will enable Cameron to say to his party and voters that a deal has been struck that they can support. The more there seem to be huge difficulties and conflicts over getting the deal, the better it will be in terms of making that case. This is widely understood within the political class, the media and informed observers. So the only way that it can be successful is by its appeal to those undecided and/or only mildly anti-EU voters not following events closely and who only tune in during the run-up to the referendum (currently widely expected to be held in June 2016). They will hear that there has been a fundamental change and – if things go to plan – will vote to stay in.

Since I am strongly in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU I hope this works. But it is a risky and in many ways unsatisfactory strategy. It’s risky for two reasons. First, if Cameron doesn’t get even the limited deal he is seeking it won’t have much credibility. Second, it’s by no means guaranteed that those voters it is designed to appeal to will hear this message, rather than that of the campaign to exit. But it’s unsatisfactory because it repeats the errors of the past in failing to make a positive case for EU membership, and just trying to bamboozle a semi-detached electorate into making a half-hearted choice.

Outside of the government, the embryonic campaigns are both, to varying degrees, in trouble. Neither is as yet a single organization (although that will change when the Electoral Commission identify and fund the campaign groups). The ‘in’ campaign is dominated by Lord Rose’s (former head of Marks and Spencer) rather dull, accounting approach, stressing the benefits of membership for businesses, although something more sparky and populist is offered by Alan Johnson’s leadership of the Labour Party’s campaign. And the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, remains at best lukewarm on British membership, a major danger for the ‘in’ campaign. Meanwhile the ‘out’ campaign is openly wracked by conflict between rival groups, a key issue being the extent to which Nigel Farage, the populist but divisive anti-immigration leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) will figure. Just today, UKIP’s only MP suggested that Farage should stand down as his party’s leader.

As readers of this blog will know, I was recently in Paris and whilst there had several conversations with people who expressed bemusement at the fact that this debate was even happening in Britain, and certainty that the outcome would be a vote to stay in. I am not sure that this is true, or at least that the vote will be decisive enough to prevent the question to continue to be raised. Opinion polls suggest that the result will be very close, although there is an interesting divide between internet polls (suggesting a close result) and telephone polls (suggesting an easy win for the stay in campaign). This may reflect the fact that the anti-EU movement (at least as regards UKIP) has a very well-organized online presence, and that views within the general population are rather different. It also seems likely that, unsurprisingly, the answer depends on how the question is asked.

Leaving aside the EU issue, I’m struck by how much of this has parallels with how decisions get made in organizations. Often there is a small group of highly involved and committed people on different sides of the argument, and a larger group of more or less uninterested or ambivalent people. Similar techniques are used of taking decisions and discussions to various forums and then bringing them to other bodies to make a final decision, with all the detail having been decided elsewhere. It is a perennially fascinating process about which much has been written in the organization studies literature. But, to bang on about another of my hobby horses, nowhere more insightfully than in the novels of C.P. Snow such as his 1964 masterpiece Corridors of Power.

As I said earlier, I will for sure be returning to these issues in 2016. In the meantime, a very Happy Christmas and New Year to all those reading this blog.

Shaping the EU debate?

In a previous post, I mentioned my article on The Conversation website, which tried to clarify what different Brexit options would mean. It has received over 16,000 hits – apparently an unusually high number – and although I certainly can’t claim that it has shaped the debate, the points raised are beginning to be more widely discussed. Thus last the British Prime Minister spelled out that the ‘Norway model’ would not be viable for the UK.  And this week the Policy Network published a pamphlet insisting, exactly as I had in my article, that the Brexit options be differentiated.

This isn’t an arcane issue, it is the central flaw in the Brexit case. If they champion Norway (or Switzerland) as models then they can’t leverage their main populist argument of reducing immigration, because if the UK remains in the single market, even if not in the EU, then free movement of people still obtains. So, then, they have to argue for a free trade agreement model. But that position is fraught with difficulties. There is no way of knowing what the terms of such a deal would be, nor its timeframes. Moreover, it would mean exiting (and having to try to re-negotiate over unknown timeframes) the EU deals with third-party countries, and from a much weaker position since the UK market is so much smaller than that of the EU.

The US have said this week that they would not be interested in a free trade deal with the UK, and that is very significant since the same thing would likely be true of many other countries. The issue is a simple one: trade deals are increasingly between platforms and blocs rather than individual countries. China, too, is urging the UK to stay in, as is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Meanwhile, it’s beginning to be recognized that trade and economics are not the only problems for the Brexit cause. The notion that ‘taking control of our borders’ is unproblematic is also starting to be debated. Of the many issues around that (including moving the border from Calais to the UK, and the position of Brits living in the EU), this week the position of Ireland has been raised. A full Brexit would mean creating a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, bringing with it serious problems for the still fragile peace process in Ulster.

Of course none of this makes a dent in the determination of hardcore opponents of British membership. Nothing could or will. What matters is what floating voters make of it all. At the moment, opinion is 54-46 in favour of staying in, but it is reckoned that the ‘hard’ vote for both in and out is 25%. There is much to play for still, especially as most of the ‘soft vote’ are not yet engaged with the still embryonic campaign. There is still plenty of time to reshape the debate. Watch this space as the story unfolds.

Europe: a defining issue

Regular readers of this blog – if there are any! – will know that I am very committed to the UK remaining within the EU. With a referendum on this now certain to be held within the next couple of years, the different sides are lining up.

I am in favour of UK membership not because I think that the EU is perfect or beyond critique. It isn’t. In particular, it is very lacking in democratic structures. But the reason for that is primarily because such structures are resisted by Eurosceptics, in the UK and elsewhere, who see them as building a ‘federal super-state’. And even in its present form I see the EU as a bulwark against the hyper neo-liberalism that I believe would characterise the UK in the event of exit, and which is certainly the ambition of most of those seeking exit. Moreover, I see the EU as having knitted together, in the aftermath of both World War Two and the Cold War, a relatively stable, peaceful and prosperous continent. It is easy to forget, but in both 1945 and 1989 that prospect would have seemed very far away.

I’m also dismayed by the level of ignorance and toxicity in UK debates about the EU. Some of this is just stupid, as with the idea that the EU wants to ban bent bananas. Other times it is pernicious, as with the misguided linking of the EU and the European  Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and the misrepresentation of what that Court and Convention do.

A couple of years ago I would have said that come a Referendum the UK would undoubtedly vote to stay in, and by a large margin – say 60/40. Now, I am less sure that this is so, mainly because of the, again, ignorant and toxic debates about the refugee crisis (by which I mean that being in or out of the EU would make no difference whatsoever to this crisis or to the relatively limited way that it affects the UK). If I had to guess, it would be that the outcome will still be a narrow vote for ‘in’. But that is not good enough, because without a clear result the demand for a further vote will immediately arise.

It may seem strange that in taking this view I line up with corporate and global financial voices that are also pro-EU. But there is a perfectly respectable ‘leftist’ case for staying in. And in any case my position is no less strange than those on the Left who line up with UKIP in arguing for exit. In fact, I don’t think that the EU debate is a straightforward left-right one, it is more a debate between what in another post I called ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals’. If Britain is to be a tolerant, sophisticated, multi-cultural and prosperous country then the 'cosmopolitans' have to win; if the 'locals' win then Britain will be a bigoted, fearful country permanently locked not just in a world that hasn't existed since the 1950s, but, even worse, in an idealized imagination of that world.

So, for me, this has become the defining political issue of the times for the UK. And it matters far beyond the UK since if Britain were to exit the EU it would have huge ramifications throughout Europe and beyond. I’ll be doing what little I can to persuade British people to vote to stay in, and my first efforts are a blog post on The Conversation website and a follow-up interview on BBC Radio Merseyside today (the interview starts about six minutes in to the link). But I expect to be doing much more.

Oxi and No

So Greece has voted 'Oxi'. The consequences are unclear, but the reaction so far from Germany, in particular, does not make my hope of a write-off and reconstruction very likely (I heard an interview on BBC radio this morning, that unfortunately I cannot track down to link to, in which a politician from Angela Merkel's party voiced this very forcefully). It is worth just pausing to reflect how extraordinary this is. If a major bank gets into difficulties through imprudent lending then it is deemed ‘too big to fail’ and is bailed out, as we saw several times during the financial crisis, although its sub-prime borrowers are left in debt. But when a state gets into difficulties through imprudent borrowing and its counterpart of imprudent lending, then bailout is deemed impossible. Or, to come at it from a different angle, lenders lend money on the basis that there is always a risk that it won’t be returned, and this is priced into the interest rate. So why, when a borrower cannot repay, is it deemed unacceptable for the debt to be written off? The general rule seems to be that under no circumstances can the lender lose out and under no circumstances can the borrower be let off the hook. So where's the risk, and the justification for the risk being priced in? Actually, the situation as regards Greece is even worse: not only can it not be forgiven but also it must be obliged to follow policies that will make it even less able to repay its loans.

But in this post I want to focus on the response on this end of the continent to events in Greece. They have been profoundly depressing. First, it has been seen as validating ‘austerity’* policies: 'look what happens if you don’t balance the books!'. The fact that it has been the pursuit of such policies in Greece since 2010 that has turned a crisis into a drama is completely forgotten. For that matter, the significant differences between Greece and Britain (principally, that Britain can print its own money and that its debt is completely differently structured) are never mentioned. By the way, we see today just how extreme austerity policies in the UK have now become, with it being reported that terminally ill benefits claimants are being questioned by welfare officials as to when they expect to die.

Second, and far more bizarre, is the spectacle of the anti-EU political Right lining up to cheer far-Left Syrizia, as in articles by veteran Tory Europhobe John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, presumably on the usually dubious principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. What they miss (or presumably don’t care about) is that Syrizia, and the Greeks who voted 'oxi’ in yesterday’s referendum, are rejecting the rule of global financial elites and the ideology of neo-liberalism. Yet what the British Europhobes have in mind in exiting the EU is an even more intensive embrace of these.

Redwood and Farage make as their prime argument that the Greek crisis reveals the gap between democratic nation-states and an undemocratic and overbearing EU and Eurozone (EZ). What this neglects is that the lack of EU democracy (which is indeed a serious problem) is a consequence of the fact that Europhobes like them in the UK and elsewhere have always refused to countenance a democratic European polity, deriding it as a federal ‘super-state’. The consequence is precisely the lack of democracy they now bemoan and, moreover, the fact that the entire basis of the Eurozone crisis is (as both Right and Left agree) that it is a monetary union without a fiscal union. And why is there no fiscal union? Because that, too, would require the European polity to which Europhobes are implacably imposed.

I expect that the attempt to tie together the Greek crisis with the case for Brexit will intensify, especially if Greece were to end up leaving the EZ or even the EU. For some voters it will be as simple as feeling that given the turmoil in Greece, Brits should pull up the drawbridge (as if, somehow, the rest of the world would then disappear). But for political leaders to encourage that by making false connections is deplorable. There are precedents, of course, such as the way that the French vote against the EU Constitution in 2005 was hailed by British Europhobes as supporting their view when, in fact, it was in large part a vote against a more neo-liberal EU.

The present case is even more clear. The Greek ‘Oxi’ in their referendum was a rejection of neo-liberalism and a vote for a more fraternal, collective EU project. A British ‘No’ in the forthcoming referendum would be a rejection of a fraternal, collective EU project for a more intensive neo-liberalism. 'Oxi' and 'No' do not mean the same thing.


A minor footnote. Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned today as Greece’s Finance Minister, is, so far as I know, the only politician of any note to have an academic publication in the organization studies literature:

Varoufakis, Y. (2008), ‘Game Theory: Can it Unify the Social Sciences?’, Organization Studies 29, (8-9): 1255-1277.

For an analysis of the role that Varoufakis’ knowledge of game theory may have played in the negotiations, see this article by the always interesting journalist and blogger Neil Clark. The answer, by the way, to the question in the title of Varoufakis' article is both 'oxi' and 'no' (and 'nein' and 'non') - but that is another story.

* I put 'austerity' in scare quotes because it is not just a euphemism but an objectionable one, invoking as it does the collective sacrifices of the post-war austerity that laid the basis for the NHS and the welfare state in support of a drive to erase the last vestiges of the post-war collective project.

European options

As I mentioned in my post on the British election result, one certain consequence of it was that there will be a referendum as to whether the UK remains in the European Union. This will have major consequences for Britain and for British businesses but also for the EU itself and for those doing business with Britain, and for those who currently come to live, work and study in Britain, and, actually, for the way the world geo-politics are configured.

Already there have been some important developments. First, who will get to vote in this referendum? There are various possibilities but what seems to have emerged is that the electorate will be those entitled to vote in a British general election. One consequence of this is that it excludes 16 and 17 year olds, unlike last year’s referendum on Scottish independence. Another is that citizens of other EU countries living in the UK will not have vote unless they have joint citizenship (there are some technical reasons why this does not apply to Irish, Maltese and Cypriot citizens in the UK). A third is that British citizens who have lived abroad for 15 or more years will not be able to vote.

This decision on the franchise can be seen as an attempt to assuage the demands of those who want Britain to leave the EU, in particular by excluding EU immigrants, which looks like smart politics from British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is widely believed to want the UK to stay in the EU. It heads off accusations of a rigged vote. On the other hand, it seems entirely illogical. If Britons who have lived in other EU countries for more than 15 years aren’t allowed to vote (apparently on the grounds that they have substantively exited the UK for another country) then why aren’t those from other EU countries who have lived in the UK for more than 15 years (and so made a similarly substantive commitment to the UK) not allowed to vote?

I know a great many people in both camps and in fact two of my closest friends are a French woman who has lived in the UK for 20 years, has a business, husband and children here but can’t vote, and an Englishman who has lived in France for almost 30 years but has children in the UK and pays taxes here but can’t vote. What such examples really show is that the extent of European integration already makes it absurd to try to separate out a British and non-British electorate.

The other big development has been an indication that the question asked in the referendum will be in the form (if not the exact words) of ‘should Britain remain a member of the EU’. This is significant because it means that those arguing to stay in will be arguing for a ‘yes’ vote, which is believed to be more psychologically appealing than asking people to vote ‘no’. Thus, unlike the decision on franchise, this seems to be likely to favour the pro-EU case (and hence has been criticised by those who want Brexit).

Alongside these really very important developments, the British Prime Minister has begun the process of ‘re-negotiation’ with the EU. It is not really clear what this means as there is no forum for such a re-negotiation and no mechanism for it. Anti-Europeans perceive, rightly I think, that no fundamental re-negotiation is possible, certainly not on the key issue of free movement of labour. The question is whether something that looks like a substantive re-negotiation but isn’t can be presented to the electorate as if it is. This is the hope of the pro-EU group and the fear of the anti-EU group.

Yet this attention to the terms on which Britain might stay in the EU completely fails to address the equally, or even more, important question of the terms on which Brexit might happen. Those advocating it oscillate between, and often treat as interchangeable, quite different scenarios.

One is direct single market access via European Economic Area (EEA) membership (the ‘Norway’ option). This is perfectly feasible, but wouldn’t deliver what Eurosceptics say they want. Not in terms of sovereignty (Norway has less control than the UK over the single market rules it must abide by), cost (Norway pays more per head) or immigration (there is still free movement of people) or the ability to negotiate third party free trade agreements (it does so via EFTA*).

A second scenario is single market access via European Free Trade Area (EFTA) membership by multiple bilateral agreements (the ‘Swiss’ option). That is much less feasible, as Switzerland’s idiosyncratic position developed piecemeal over many years. A Brexit on this model would have to negotiate multiple separate agreements (Switzerland has 120) over an unknown timescale with no way of knowing the outcome. The Swiss model does not enable free movement of services, which would be a major problem for the UK’s service-based economy. Moreover, the EU Commission is deeply hostile to the Swiss approach to free movement of people, and it is simply inconceivable that an opt-out on free movement would be granted alongside EFTA membership any more than it could be re-negotiated within the framework of EU membership.

The third scenario is a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU. It is absolutely crucial to understand that this is not the same as single market membership. In general, FTAs eliminate tariffs, whereas a single market eliminates non-tariff barriers to trade and harmonises regulation.  A particular difference, appealing to some Brexiters, is that an FTA would exempt the UK from free movement of people. But the consequence would be that 2 million or more British people working or living in the EU would lose their automatic right to live there, so Brexiters need to explain what arrangements would be made for them and for their families. It’s no good imagining that things would go on as at present or that post-Brexit the EU is ‘bound’ to accept British immigrants on rules other than those applying to other countries. Brexit (in this third sense) won’t just be some sort of game, it will be a fundamental shift in which Europeans lose their right to move freely to Britain and Britons lose their right to move freely around Europe.

A UK FTA with the EU would also mean ceasing to have access to the FTAs held between the EU and other countries such as South Korea and Singapore – in due course the UK might sign new deals, but that could not be guaranteed nor would the terms and timeframe be known.  What is certain is that the UK on its own could never get a better FTA deal with such countries than that which it enjoys via the EU, for obvious reasons of market scale.

The key question would be whether the EU would sign such a deal, on what terms and in what time frame. It cannot be assumed that a deal would be inevitable ‘because the UK is a big economy’: plenty of bigger economies don’t have an FTA with the EU. Anyway, it’s also the terms that matter: not all FTAs are the same.  As regards time frames, the EU deals with Singapore and South Korea took several years to negotiate: these kinds of arrangements are incredibly complicated. What happens in the meantime? Brexiters don’t say because they don’t know. They sometimes say that on exit it will just be a matter of trading on WTO terms. But the WTO does not establish global free trade, which is why individual countries negotiate FTAs within the WTO framework. For example, under WTO ‘most favoured nation’ rules, on Brexit the UK would pay a 15% tariff on food exports to the EU and a 10% tariff on car exports. Of course trade would not completely cease on Brexit, but the issue is on what volume and on what terms.

Even more fantastical is the idea floated by some Brexiters of the UK joining a Commonwealth free trade area. There is no such entity and no plans or possibility to create one. This idea is simply nonsense.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the anti-EU camp deliberately confuse the very clear differences between these Brexit scenarios. When challenged that leaving the EU will mean exiting the single market they invoke the Norwegian or Swiss model; when arguing that leaving the EU means avoiding the free movement principle they invoke the FTA model. This slippage really needs to be confronted and challenged by what we now know will be the ‘yes’ campaign. And that campaign needs to do something more than present the economic case for staying in: the EU represents not just an economic bloc but also offers multiple opportunities for study, research, culture and retirement. Moreover, it operates to secure peace within Europe and is a force for projecting a European view into the world polity.

It’s a perfectly reasonable to say that we should leave the EU. But if the British people are to be asked to vote for EU exit they deserve to be given a proper explanation of what happens next.  Just saying airily that it can all be negotiated afterwards isn’t good enough, nor is it good enough to conflate the very different options just outlined. And it will certainly be no good saying afterwards that ‘we didn’t understand what we were voting for’, the repeated complaint made by Eurosceptics about the 1975 Referendum. By then it will be too late. There’s no way back in. Which is what makes it a big moment.

 *There is a lot of confusion in these debates about the meaning of EFTA and the EEA, and their relation to the EU. Briefly, the EEA members are Iceland, Liechenstein and Norway. EFTA consists of those three countries plus Switzerland. Both EEA and EFTA groups are de facto subject to EU principles and regulations.