Scary
I was very glad to have attended the EPOW seminar series this week, where one of my longer-standing thoughts about Brexit finally got some more robust grounding than the impressionistic approach I’ve taken to date. Sara Hobolt was presenting her co-authored paper on the impact of attitudes towards Brexit on attitudes towards your own country’s membership of the EU, using the EES in May 2019 to conduct an EU28-wide experimental design. You can watch Sara’s excellent presentation on the link, but essentially if you think Brexit is bad for the UK, then you’ll think your country leaving the EU will also be bad, especially if your country is economically more exposed to the UK. But the team went beyond this with this experimental arm, exposing sub-groups to positive or negative statements about Brexit, to see if that had any effect. Here, the negative messaging – on economic costs – didn’t have a significant impact on attitudes, but the positive messaging – on taking control over laws, including migration – did have a measurable effect, making people more likely to consider that their country would do well from leaving the EU and to vote to Leave in a referendum. The argument for this differential was that respondents have likely been desensitised to negative messages on Brexit – remember that May 2019 was after the second extension of Art.50 and the middle of the ratification arguments in the UK – so only the positive messages would have been novel and surprising. Thus, even if Brexit has been a deterrent so far to further withdrawals, the scope for that to change in the future is clear. And it’s here that Sara’s evidence seems to give substance to the argument I’ve been making about the ‘ice-breaking‘ nature of Brexit. The simple fact of the UK’s withdrawal has opened up a new political potentiality for others to exploit: leaving the EU is no longer a theoretical possibility, but a political reality. And the generally negative framing of that process in other EU member states – by media, by politicians, by publics – leaves open a strong possibility of that potentiality being exploited by eurosceptic and anti-EU political actors. As we know from the UK, the relative unwillingness of political elites to communicate why the balance of costs and benefits tips towards membership doesn’t mean that it’s not an issue, but rather than critical voices tend to make the running in the public debate. To use Hooghe and Marks’ phrase, the constraining dissensus that characterises the past couple of decades of European integration tends to lead to a more defensive positioning by elites, reacting rather than agenda-setting. And so we might expect that in the next phase of Brexit, as the UK moves out of transition, the potential for sceptics to sell a new message about the process to publics across Europe will grow. Even in the most pessimistic economic analyses, the UK will not collapse as an economy or as a state (pace Peter Foster’s thread yesterday on Scotland and the UK internal market). Thrown in the considerable disruption that everyone will experience from Covid, plus all the non-economic dimensions and it’s not that difficult to fashion a narrative that the UK has benefited from leaving. That would serve domestic agendas of eurosceptics in other countries, especially if the EU’s response to Covid is the seeming imposition of more obligations – financial or political – on member states or the weakening of benefits – reduced structural funds, less free movement, etc. If publics are more susceptible to positive messaging, as Sara’s work suggests, then that opens the possibility of a similar outmanoeuvring of elites as too place in the UK in the run-up to the referendum: benign neglect and a belief in the weight of the status quo isn’t a robust basis for those who wish to maintain the system. Marlene Wind makes a similar case in her recent book, arguing that there has to be a much more pro-active promotion of the liberal and democratic values that European integration claims to protect. Whether governments and parties actually follow through with that agenda is rather more in question than you might expect.The post From deterrent to contagion: Brexit as a cautionary tale? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.
The referendum question asked if the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
REMAIN A MEMBER OF THE EUROPEAN UNION □
LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION □
We all knew what remaining in the EU meant; we’d had it for over 40 years.
But nobody knew what leaving the EU would mean. It wasn’t defined or explained in the referendum.
Even leading Brexiters couldn’t agree with each other. We still don’t know.
We may as well have had a referendum with the question:
DO YOU WANT TO STAY WHERE YOU ARE? □
DO YOU WANT TO GO SOMEWHERE ELSE? □
If you ticked to ‘stay where you are’, you knew what you’d be getting.
But if you ticked to ‘go somewhere else’, you’d have no idea where you’d be going.
If you voted to go somewhere else, wouldn’t you then expect another vote on where precisely you’d be going?
That would make logical sense, wouldn’t it?
But no. That’s not what’s happened.
Slightly more people ticked the box to ‘go somewhere else’, but the government has refused to give us any say on where we’re going.
The government is making the decision, without any referral back to us.
What if we don’t like where we’re going? Too bad.
Some years before the referendum, arch Tory Brexiter MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg explained that it was important to:
“work out how to phrase a referendum – or a series of referendums if necessary – that will be understandable.”
Well, the referendum phrase was NOT understandable.
How could a referendum be understood when one of the options had not been explained?
Mr Rees-Mogg also said then that we could have two referendums. He told Parliament in 2012:
“As it happens, it may be more sense to have the second referendum after the renegotiation is completed.”
Yes, that would make sense.
It would mean that we could then have a more balanced, second referendum; one that compared, for the first time, a fully defined Leave with the already-known status quo of Remain.
But it wasn’t to be. Mr Rees-Mogg has now disowned what he said in 2011.
Despite the pre-election promises by Boris Johnson of an ‘oven-ready deal’, we are now heading towards a no-deal, cliff-edge Brexit, even though nobody voted for that.
Indeed, polls consistently show that Britain most definitely does NOT want a no-deal Brexit.
Tough. We are not being given any choice.
Back in the day, before the referendum campaign, when the then Conservative government was pro-Remain, they presented the three main Brexit alternatives.
[Link: BrexitVersions.Reasons2Rejoin.co.uk]
All of them, said David Cameron’s government, would cause damage to Britain. If you’re a Brexiter, which one did you vote for?
① THE NORWAY OPTION – meaning Britain would leave the EU but still have free and frictionless access to the EU Single Market, by far Britain’s most important and lucrative export and import market.
But this option would mean Britain continuing to pay the EU and obey its rules – including free movement of people – without any say in them.
② THE CANADA OPTION – meaning Britain would have tariff free trade with the EU, but not the highly cherished and valuable frictionless trade.
And there would only be limited access for our services sector, which makes up almost 80% of our economy.
③ THE WTO OPTION – (often referred to as ‘no-deal’ and now ridiculously described by Boris Johnson as the ‘Australia Deal’) meaning relying on World Trade Organisation rules.
But that would mean new tariffs and complicated, costly procedures on UK trade with the EU, hurting British consumers, businesses and employment. It would also suddenly and catastrophically end all EU membership benefits, affecting all our daily lives.
NONE OF THESE OPTIONS were presented as choices in the referendum that voters could opt for. The only choice was for Remain, or a meaningless and undefined Leave.
The Leave campaign would have struggled to win if they’d had to specifically define the version of Leave they were selling.
WHICH IS WHY the Leave win was such a con.
It was much easier to sell to the nation a vague and idealistic idea of Brexit, rather than the realistic, down-to-earth details.
The only way to find out what ‘the people’ now want is to have a new referendum comparing the new-deal Boris Johnson negotiates with the EU, with the option of being an EU member.
The government won’t offer that choice because they are not really interested in what ‘the people’ want. They only want what they want.________________________________________________________
The post Which version of Brexit did Britain vote for? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.