Mick Hartley

Feeling a little hungover? Waking in the morning and thinking, oh shit? Fed up with the endless prophets of doom and disaster? Cameron gets us into this mess by foolishly promising a referendum, and promptly resigns when the result doesn't go his way – petulantly exacerbating the sense of a crisis. And that's without the Labour Corbyn farce. At times like this we need at least some positivity. This is, after all, where we are now. There will be no second referendum. Articles telling us how stupid we've been, frankly, tend to pall after a while. [For what it's worth I voted Remain, not out of any sense of conviction or love of the EU, but simply because the fall-out was all too predictable.]

So, here are a few of what seem, to me , to be some of the more positive contributions, post-Brexit. First, Fraser Nelson in the WSJ:

The world is looking at Britain and asking: What on Earth just happened? Those who run Britain are asking the same question.

Never has there been a greater coalition of the establishment than that assembled by Prime Minister David Cameron for his referendum campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union. There was almost every Westminster party leader, most of their troops and almost every trade union and employers’ federation. There were retired spy chiefs, historians, football clubs, national treasures like Stephen Hawking and divinities like Keira Knightley. And some global glamour too: President Barack Obama flew to London to do his bit, and Goldman Sachs opened its checkbook.

And none of it worked. The opinion polls barely moved over the course of the campaign, and 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU. That slender majority was probably the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.

Mr. Cameron announced that he would resign because he felt the country has taken a new direction—one that he disagrees with. If everyone else did the same, the House of Commons would be almost empty. Britain’s exit from the EU, or Brexit, was backed by barely a quarter of his government members and by not even a tenth of Labour politicians. It was a very British revolution.

Donald Trump’s arrival in Scotland on Friday to visit one of his golf courses was precisely the metaphor that the Brexiteers didn’t want. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee cheerily declared that the British had just “taken back their country” in the same way that he’s inviting Americans to do—underscoring one of the biggest misconceptions about the EU referendum campaign. Britain isn’t having a Trump moment, turning in on itself in a fit of protectionist and nativist pique. Rather, the vote for Brexit was about liberty and free trade—and about trying to manage globalization better than the EU has been doing from Brussels.

The Brexit campaign started as a cry for liberty, perhaps articulated most clearly by Michael Gove, the British justice secretary (and, on this issue, the most prominent dissenter in Mr. Cameron’s cabinet). Mr. Gove offered practical examples of the problems of EU membership. As a minister, he said, he deals constantly with edicts and regulations framed at the European level—rules that he doesn’t want and can’t change. These were rules that no one in Britain asked for, rules promulgated by officials whose names Brits don’t know, people whom they never elected and cannot remove from office. Yet they become the law of the land. Much of what we think of as British democracy, Mr. Gove argued, is now no such thing….

Megan McArdle, with a view from the States:

The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told….

The answer to these uncertainties, I submit, is not to simply keep doing what we’re doing. There’s a lot of appeal to the internationalist idea that building superstates will tamp down on war. But there’s a reason that the 19^th century architects of superstates (now known simply as “states”) spent so much time and effort nurturing national identity in the breasts of their populace. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.”

The EU never did this work. When asked "Where are you from?" almost no one would answer "Europe," because after 50 years of assiduous labor by the eurocrats, Europe remains a continent, not an identity. As Matthew Yglesias points out, an EU-wide soccer team would be invincible — but who would root for it? These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them. Trying to build the state without the nation has led to the mess that is the current EU. And to Thursday's election results.

Elites missed this because they're the exception — the one group that has a transnational identity. And in fact the arguments for the EU look a lot like the old arguments for national states: a project that will empower people like us against the scary people who aren’t.

Unhappily for the elites, there is no “Transnationalprofessionalistan” to which they can move. (And who would trim the hedges, make the widgets, and staff the nursing homes if there were?) They have to live in physical places, filled with other people whose loyalties are to a particular place and way of life, not an abstract ideal, or the joys of rootless cosmopolitanism.

And finally, Dominic Lawson in today's Sunday Times [£]:

The BBC’s Katya Adler politely put her question to Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, at his Brussels press conference on Friday: was the British referendum vote to leave the EU “the beginning of the end” of this organisation? First, he pretended not to hear. Then Juncker uttered the single word “No” — and abruptly walked out. The bulk of the assembled journalists, after a moment of dawning realisation . . . applauded. What a cosy, complacent club.

The British radio audience got their own taste of it when Martin Schulz, the European parliament’s president, told Radio 4’s Today programme that “this is not a crisis for the European Union”. Well, anyone can understand the need not to appear to panic; but sublime indifference to the public’s expressed wishes at the ballot box is almost a sacred principle of the EU.

This is ingrained in its very origins: Jean Monnet, one of its founding fathers, envisaged a new Europe governed by an elite cadre of bureaucrats who would be magnificently aloof from populism and the petty day-to-day concerns of the masses. It was a Platonic vision — that is to say, one of a benign dictatorship.

This would be infinitely superior to the malign dictatorship that had almost destroyed the continent in the 1940s — and to that which oppressed the peoples of eastern Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eternal credit is due to it for the two achievements of tying the bonds of peace between Germany and its immediate neighbours and of assisting the path to market economies for the former communist states.

Unfortunately, the European movement, as it sometimes calls itself, has one thing in common with the Marxists. It, too, is a form of secular faith. Its advocates see a fully federal European state as a historically predetermined outcome, the very definition of progress. But, like the Bolsheviks, they are not prepared to wait for history to take its inevitable course; paradoxically, such alleged inevitability must be pressed on the peoples of Europe, whether they wish it or not.

Juncker is just the most disarmingly frank of these men (they are all men — the system-loving sex that worships grand ideas and scorns common sense). He it was who said in 2005 — when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s imperial European constitution began to run into the buffers of hostile plebiscites — “If it’s a yes we will say, ‘On we go’, and if it’s a no we will say, ‘We will continue.’”

After its rejection by Dutch and French voters, “we will continue” was manifest in the Lisbon treaty, which, as Angela Merkel noted, “preserves the substance of the constitution. That is a fact.”

This was when Gisela Stuart — the Labour MP who with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove led the Vote Leave campaign — became convinced of the need for what would come to be known as Brexit. The German-born MP for Neville Chamberlain’s old Birmingham Edgbaston seat was one of our parliamentarians on the committee drafting the European constitution.

She told me afterwards how whenever she and her colleagues put in clauses with the purpose of bringing the EU institutions more under the control of the national electorates — and closer to them — they would always be mysteriously struck out at the last minute.

Stuart realised then that this was a movement with contempt for the notion of democratic accountability; that unlike other political institutions in what we call the West it was not to be created as a response to the call for reform by the people but to be imposed top-down.

No one has expressed this better than Michael Burrage, the author of Class Formation, Civil Society and the State: “In contrast with the evolution of democracy in English-speaking democracies, the new European polity has evolved backwards, with an executive and a court preceding a legislature, which is still nominal, with civil society very much an afterthought . It cannot therefore perform quite the same functions as the voluntarily and spontaneously organised civil societies of the English-speaking world.”

It was, in fact, an astonishing experiment in conducting an upside-down pseudo-democracy, with the transmission of instructions not from the people upwards, but from the European Commission downwards.

This political system most closely resembles that of the People’s Republic of China. The difficulty for its proponents is that the citizens of Europe do not, on the whole, have the Chinese willingness to endure imperial governance. Funnily enough, it was a former Maoist and later president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, who declared that the EU is a “non-imperial empire”….

We invented parliamentary democracy and prospered mightily under it. Unlike the great majority of member states, we did not join the EU as part of the escape from war (France and Germany) or dictatorship (Spain, Portugal, Greece). We also have an ancient legal system, characterised by popular participation, which has not shrunk from checking the powers of the executive. The British people do not need their liberties guaranteed by the European Court of Justice. At some visceral level, they realise that.

Last week I advocated a vote to leave, which would show Europe that “there is another way”. There may be referendums elsewhere in the EU. What then happens is up to those countries’ own peoples — of whose existence, a French publication observed yesterday, “the European Commission has just been reminded”.

It is endlessly said that there is a “growing loss of faith in democracy” across the western world. The British vote to leave the EU has been described as a manifestation of this malaise. On the contrary: it is a vote for the re-establishment of parliamentary democracy and a fully responsible, accountable elected government. It might even catch on.

I don't know how much I agree with any of this but, as I say, they offer a salutary break from the relentless negativity. It's going to be a long hard slog: this is one of the most momentous political moments for decades. But we'll survive – and no, I don't hear the sound of marching jackboots, or the death throes of European civilisation. But it's change, for sure.