I have read virtually every edition of The Guardian for the past 54 years, ever since I arrived in the UK as a 23 year old Rhodes Scholar.  Over that whole period, I have regarded it as the most reliable and trustworthy guide to the great affairs of the nation and the world.

I have never expected to agree with everything that the Guardian says, nor, I am sure, would they have thought of agreeing with everything I say.  Indeed, there have been two major issues on which I have felt strongly and on which I have knowingly (and not always to my advantage) disagreed with The Guardian – first, the Common Market or, as it became, the European Union, and secondly, what I see as the perennial propensity to hold the pound at the highest possible (that is to say, invariably over-valued) level.

I had the satisfaction of seeing outcomes on one of those issues – our membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and then our proposed membership of the euro – resolved in the way I wanted; I wonder if The Guardian still supports those arrangements?

I have long recognised that many Guardian writers treat the question of Europe as one of virtually religious significance.  The impulse to share in and contribute to the glories of European civilisation (which I am as glad as anyone to celebrate and enjoy) has transcended for them any other consideration.  My own view on these matters regards our arrangement with the continent not so much a matter of eternal verities, as of severely practical consequences of a largely economic character.

That view of these matters was first formed when I served in the Foreign Office and then in the Brussels Embassy at the time when Britain was attempting to lift the Gaullist veto against our membership.

As the Common Market has grown into its present form as a huge single European economy, I have been confirmed in my view that the deal we have been offered is not “Europe” but a very particular economic arrangement which serves the interests of large international corporations and their political representatives and is accordingly inimical to British interests and adverse in its effects on the lives of many British citizens.

I fully expected, therefore, to find that The Guardian took a different view from mine during the referendum campaign.  What I had not foreseen was that Guardian readers were not permitted to know that such a view – the view of, I like to think, perfectly sensible and moderate people that we and Europe could do better – actually existed.  I remain happy to explain, to whomever wishes to listen, that once the immediate market turmoil subsides and European leaders face reality rather than yield to pique, the post-Brexit economic outlook for the UK is strongly positive.

Throughout the referendum campaign, even the smallest grain of anti-Brexit sentiment, however improbable, was grist to the mill.  Readers of the Guardian were told relentlessly that the only people who wanted a different Europe were those who are either disreputably racist or prepared to exploit racism to gain their own political ends.

When it became apparent that there is a majority in favour of a better arrangement, the Guardian – like so many others of the bien pensants – expressed shock and horror (not to say fury and vitriol) and accused the majority of our fellow-citizens, who had done no more than express their view in a democratic ballot, of treachery and evil.  No attempt has been made to reconsider the misapprehensions as to what would happen.  Instead, all those who had good and legitimate reasons for wanting to see a Leave outcome have simply been lumped together, with no other explanation, with the supposed forces of darkness.

It has been asserted (without fear of any contradiction since it is supported by a scrutiny of the Guardian’s coverage of the issue), that no case worth consideration in favour of Leave was ever advanced – a classic instance of adding insult to injury.  It is a gratuitous insult suffered not only by the perhaps small proportion of Guardian readers who took a different view, but also by the millions of people who voted to leave, despite the constant advice of their supposed betters.

Even the issue of immigration, which features so large in the minds of disappointed Remainers as the flimsiest of fig-leafs to conceal what they are convinced is an incipient racism, is misrepresented to Guardian readers.  It is easy to see a constant flow of cheap labour as simply a boon, particularly for employers.  And for the London-based middle-class, it means – doesn’t it? – inexpensive help to look after the children or to do the housework and to provide cheap and efficient service in shops and restaurants.

But for millions of others, particularly in the north, cheap labour is a tap that cannot be turned off.  It is in full flow as we speak (or write) and it means constant daily and ever-increasing competition for jobs, houses, school places, hospital beds.  It is an unwelcome fact of everyday life.  It is essentially a matter of numbers, rather than race.  While it may of course, whether we like it or not, fade too easily in some minds from one into the other, treating those who face these harsh realities as somehow traitors and criminals shows how far removed we are from the days when The Guardian included the word Manchester  in its title.

The failure of the ruling class, and that includes the Parliamentary Labour Party, to understand these realities is an indictment of our democracy.  Jeremy Corbyn, it seems, is castigated by his parliamentary colleagues for failing to tell Labour voters with sufficient conviction that they must vote against what they see as their own self-interest.  Sadly, there you have the modern Labour party’s problem in a nutshell.

Bryan Gould

28 June 2016

Among the many hysterical reactions to the Brexit decision, a particular post on Facebook caught my attention.  The author was convinced that the decision to leave was the equivalent of the Visigoths’ sacking of Rome; civilisation itself was apparently in its last days.

It did not seem to occur to him that the decision to leave the EU was the product of a vote in which a majority of his fellow-citizens had simply, as part of their democratic right, acted on a view, or views, on a subject of interest to the whole community, that were just as valid as, but different from, his own.  The barbarians whom he castigated were not invaders from elsewhere; they were Britons like him, enjoying the same right as he had to consider the issues and express a view.   It is what is called democracy.

The fury and hatred aroused by the discovery that there was actually a majority that disagreed with those who thought that they alone were capable of reaching the right and proper decision – and the vitriol with which those sentiments are expressed – provides us with an insight into the mentality of many of those who simply could not believe that any view other than theirs was possible.

For them, whether to remain or leave had ceased to be a practical issue to be calmly and rationally assessed.  It had passed beyond the bounds of rationality and was approached with all the zealotry of the religious fanatic. “Europe” had become a symbol of who they were or wished to be – making common cause with all those of similar sensibilities across the continent.

The fact that the European Union was not “Europe” but simply a particular arrangement that – in some views and on some criteria – impacted adversely on the practical everyday lives of millions of their fellow-citizens was simply not a factor worth acknowledging, let alone considering.  Many of those fellow-citizens, when they looked at the EU, did not see an embodiment of the glories of European civilisation, but an economic and political regime that served the interests of big international business rather than their own.

The zealots apparently believed that a judgment based on perceived experience should and could not stand in the face of their own more lofty convictions.  Little wonder, then, given their lack of concern for democratic opinion, that they were equally undisturbed by the fact that the “Europe” they espoused provided an essentially undemocratic form of government imposed by unelected and unaccountable European bureaucrats on those who had never been asked in more than 40 years to agree to its growing pretensions.

The conviction that there was a kind of objective truth about the EU which could not be gainsaid led to a further error by the custodians of that supposed truth.  For them, the referendum would be won if the less enlightened could be led to the truth.  So, an endless procession of serious figures – the grandees whose views had always prevailed – were wheeled out to ensure that people were in no doubt as to how they should vote.  What they did not seem to realise was that, the more insistent their supposed betters were, the more likely ordinary people were to disregard what they were told.

One of the most surprising manifestations of this de haut en bas attitude is the attack made on Jeremy Corbyn by his parliamentary colleagues for failing to do enough to lead Labour voters into the remain camp.  No attempt should have been made, it seems, to find out what those whom the party claims to represent actually thought.  The task, according to Corbyn’s critics, was to tell them how they should vote.

It is becoming clear that many Labour voters – almost certainly a majority – voted to leave.  It is true that Corbyn, partly perhaps because his heart wasn’t in it and partly in an attempt to placate his critics, found himself caught in a sort of no-man’s land.  As a consequence, the Labour leadership missed the chance to place itself at the head of that majority who were fed up with the obvious, serious and growing deficiencies of the EU as a model for European integration.  Instead, Jeremy Corbyn – through timidity rather than conviction – placed himself on the losing side and missed the chance to exploit the unavoidable blow to the authority of the Tory government that the Brexit decision represents.

He took refuge in urging Labour supporters to vote remain on the surprising ground that there were provisions, particularly concerning workers’ rights, that could not be changed by an elected British government.  How odd that Labour should endorse the concept of government by an unelected European bureaucracy!  How much more constructive and politically astute if he had faithfully represented the views of Labour voters as a step towards a democratically elected Labour government that would be the best protector of workers’ rights.

And how ironic that Corbyn’s opponents are now using the failure of their own analysis and strategy, and their own arrogant assumption that it was the voters’ duty to come to them rather than the other way round, to attack him.  Among the many insights the Brexit decision provides is a spotlight on how far detached most of Labour’s parliamentary leaders are from the voters they claim as their own.

Bryan Gould

26 June 2016

As the polls suggest yet more insistently the possibility of a vote for Brexit, the language of the Remain campaign becomes ever more extreme.  There is of course hyperbole on both sides of the argument; but while the Leave campaign has without doubt been guilty of using on occasion exaggerated and emotive arguments, the prize for outrage and vehemence must go to those who insist that only the dishonest, recklessly misguided and downright wicked could possibly vote to leave.

These extreme sentiments are given additional weight by being expressed in the measured and sonorous tones of those who are accustomed to being taken very seriously – the political and business leaders whose views on such matters have always prevailed.  These are the figures who are now being wheeled out with increasing frequency to convince the as yet unconvinced that Brexit would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

And unimaginable is, in their minds, exactly what it is.  In the landscape of their imaginings, to leave the European Union would mean a kind of full stop.  There is no conceivable world that could exist beyond such finality.  It would be the equivalent of toppling over a precipice or of a train running into the buffers at full speed.

Hence the dire warnings that we would be turning our backs on Europe, or that our trade with the EU would come to a juddering halt, or that our economy would go into free fall.  They can see no future for a post-Brexit Britain because they have neither the wit nor the will – or even the daring – to conceive of such a thing.

This failure of imagination, this refusal to think beyond the possibility of Brexit, is only to be expected, of course, in the run-up to the fateful decision; to admit it is only to encourage it.  Instead, the Remain campaign repeats with blood-curdling emphasis the threats of retribution pour encourager les autres that are naturally to be heard from our European partners in the weeks and days before the vote.  In the event of a decision to leave, though, all that would change.  The rules of the game would transform overnight.

The cards in the hands of those involved would no longer be those of dark threats on the one hand and schoolboy “Yah, boo, sucks!” on the other.  A new negotiation between sovereign negotiating partners will – after some initial jockeying for position, no doubt – get under way with the aim of arriving at a new and mutually beneficial arrangement.  It beggars belief that either party would permanently turn its back on valuable trading and other opportunities in a fit of pique.

That negotiation will no doubt be difficult, drawn-out and detailed, as all the UK’s negotiations with our EU partners have been.  But self-interest on both sides, to say nothing of the underlying value placed by all sides on European cooperation, will certainly produce an outcome that all parties can accept and endorse.

That outcome will of course differ in some important respects from the one we have become accustomed to over the last 40 years.  The British parliament will regain some of the powers of self-government that have been conceded to undemocratic and unaccountable European lawmakers.  Our ability to serve the interests of British industry, even at the cost of some damage to the supposedly sacrosanct principles of the unfettered free market, will increase. The trade balance, particularly in manufactures, might actually move in our favour instead of remaining stubbornly in deficit for every one of the last 34 years.  Our ability to negotiate in our own interest trade deals with powerful emerging economies – as even little New Zealand, for example, has been able to  do – would increase.

We have, after all, been here before.  The same horrified voices now raised against Brexit urged us not to be “left behind” when we were pressed to join the euro zone.  Our failure to do so certainly meant that we were in many senses excluded from the EU inner circle, but who would now dispute that we got the better of that bargain?

The truth is that the bien pensants who prefer grand visions and theories to practicalities have always been animated by a fundamental lack of confidence in the UK’s ability to function as a valuable partner and good friend to our continental neighbours while maintaining the powers of self-government, the policies and the trading links that best serve our interests.

It is that same defeatism that now makes it impossible for them to contemplate a re-negotiation of our arrangement with the EU.  A Brexit would of course have costs as well as benefits – that is, after all, what a negotiation would be about – but a post-Brexit Britain would not be so inconsiderable that it could be tossed aside in anger by an EU that has its own severe difficulties and needs all the friends it can muster.

And as for “turning our backs” on Europe, a re-negotiation would confirm, not weaken, the undeniable truth that we are historically, geographically, politically, culturally and in every other way a part of Europe.  It would allow us not only better to define our own role and contribution but also potentially to help set Europe itself on a more constructive course.  A Brexit could be a new beginning both for us and for Europe.

Bryan Gould

7 June 2016