The voters that Leave needs to deliver victory in tomorrow’s referendum would be the ones hit hardest if we left the EU
You gotta dance with the one that brung ya. Ronald Reagan’s aphorism, taken from a 1920s country song, expresses a general truth about politics. On the way to victory you acquire allies and incur obligations, and when you get there, you cannot ignore them.
Politicians, like the heroine of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, might dream of consummation without commitment. Like her, they may see it as ‘the purest thing there is’. But like her, they’re doomed to discover that such a relationship ‘is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.’
It’s because you gotta dance with the one that brung ya that we are having this referendum in the first place. David Cameron was not free to ignore the demands of his political base. And it is because you gotta dance with the one that brung ya that I believe that leaving the EU promises only failure.
There is a tension between the politics and economics of Leave that would prove fatal were they to win.
During this referendum two nations have emerged out of one: Remainia and Leavia. The inhabitants of Remainia benefit from globalisation, have university degrees, live in cosmopolitan cities and do not fear international political and economic engagement because they are the ones doing the engaging. They are more willing to embrace change but are often complacent about its costs.
The inhabitants of Leavia feel intensely every pound earned or withdrawn, have less formal education, are more wary about international forces and more distant from power, live in settled communities and are more resistant to change.
In the most recent YouGov poll, voters in the highest social class ABC1 split 53 to 38 per cent for Remain, while those in the lower C2D2 class split 52 to 29 per cent for Leave.
Naturally not every Remain or Leave voter is typical. To say that having a degree is correlated with wanting to remain in the EU is far from suggesting that only non-graduates want to leave the EU. And it certainly doesn’t mean that being in favour of Remain is necessarily a sign of greater intelligence.
Whatever the personal background or inclination of those running the Leave campaign, their pitch has been solidly aimed at the inhabitants of Leavia. They are counting on them to deliver victory tomorrow.
The expectation of these voters, certainly their hope, is that leaving the EU can restore to this country control over its own destiny. They are hoping for greater protection from the social and economic change brought by globalisation. They seek more work, better-funded public services, less power to corporations and the elite and, above all, less of the immigration that they believe puts pressure on their wages and communities.
This is the politics of Leave. What about its economics?
While there is a dispute over its scale, most Leave supporters accept that if we go there will be instability and, therefore, a cost in the short term. They proclaim themselves willing to pay it. And that’s fair enough, if more than a touch insouciant. While the cost may be considerable, and more keenly felt by inhabitants of Leavia than Remainia, it’s entirely reasonable to argue that it would be justified by the long-term benefits the Leave campaign believes would occur. After all, we shouldn’t make a decision that will have an effect lasting many decades purely on the basis of its impact over the next two years.
Consider, however, how these long-term benefits might be obtained and you begin to see the problem.
By leaving the European single market, Britain makes itself a less attractive place for big businesses to invest. This is hard to dispute, and in any case they are overwhelmingly telling us themselves. It will also make it harder for us to trade. So unless we act, we will be poorer. The Leave economic argument is that by freeing ourselves from the EU we will be able to act. The Remainiacs aren’t getting this, they argue. We won’t just be sitting here, suffering. We will be taking back control.
Now think what this might mean in practice. To be a success outside the single market, to be attractive to businesses and to investment, we would need to be a European offshore low-cost competitive Mecca for companies. We would have to offset the increased cost of doing business here that leaving brings (in the form of barriers, both tariff and non-tariff, to European trade) by cutting our own costs even more sharply.
We would need to have lower taxes on foreign rich people than the Continent, pay lower wages to unskilled people than elsewhere in Europe and cut public spending further to keep taxes down. We would need to make old people work longer. Oh, and we would need a huge influx of immigrants, both skilled and unskilled, to ensure that we had a very competitive workforce.
We would also need new trade deals to replace the ones we had abandoned. In Europe, for all its faults, corporate interests are balanced by those of workers but in any other trade deal we would need to overlook these. Our regulation would have to be more attractive to corporate elites, not less. It would be vital that corporate lobbying was even more successful than it has been in the past.
I have always been respectful of those who say they wish to escape the EU to turn to the world, as long as we are clear what it means. It seems to me monumentally unlikely that we would be able to implement such a programme in the event of voting to leave the EU. Politically it would be hard to advance at any time. After a victory won with the votes of Leavia it would be impossible.
I’d go further. It would be something of a betrayal of the legitimate expectations of the people voting for the Leave option. They would have a right to expect that if they win they are winning for more social protection for themselves and their families, for less corporate power, for more democracy and fewer immigrants.
Yet if Britain were to go down such a path, the strongest Leave supporter would surely acknowledge that Brexit would be an economic disaster.
The politics of leaving go one way, and its economics go the other.