Allister Heath
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My case is straightforward. Every so often, all successful countries need to reboot and modernise themselves, upgrading their institutions and refreshing their ruling classes to reflect changing realities. There have been several such inflection points since the Second World War: the election of the Labour government in 1945, our decision to join the Common Market in 1973, the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair’s triumph in 1997. This is another such pivotal moment: our first real opportunity to make Britain fit for a globalised, multi-polar world with opportunities and threats that were unthinkable even 20 years ago.
The difference this time is that our decision would have a far greater impact than merely within our own borders: if we vote leave, in a hundred years from now, historians will celebrate the referendum as the day that not just Britain but the whole of the Western world began to rediscover its core values and its self-belief. Other countries will follow our lead, and within a couple of years the UK will be at the head of a group of at least six or seven nations, all committed to free trade and economic integration but opposed to political centralisation.
The difference this time is that our decision would have a far greater impact than merely within our own borders: if we vote leave, in a hundred years from now, historians will celebrate the referendum as the day that not just Britain but the whole of the Western world began to rediscover its core values and its self-belief. Other countries will follow our lead, and within a couple of years the UK will be at the head of a group of at least six or seven nations, all committed to free trade and economic integration but opposed to political centralisation.
The key issue is this. Economic globalisation has been hugely empowering, creating wealth and opportunity for billions of people, and unleashing wonderful technologies that have brought humanity dramatically closer. It has given all of us greater control and choices over our lives while making the world safer, healthier and hugely more prosperous. Long may it continue.
But political globalisation, as currently practised at least, has had the opposite effect: by pushing decision-making upwards and beyond the reach of democratic checks and balances, it has reduced ordinary citizens’ influence and stake in many of the great decisions of our time. This is fuelling distrust and anger and imperilling economic globalisation itself.
The EU is an especially tragic failure: it is a regional, inherently insular and unaccountable bureaucracy designed during the Cold War, in the days when the world was still neatly divided into geographical blocks, before the internet was invented and prior to the emergence of mass migration and networked terror franchises.
Most damningly of all, its ideology and governance is drastically at odds with the last 300 years of political progress. Over the past few centuries in the UK, the Crown’s power has decreased, replaced by that of Parliament; and our politics has become increasingly democratic, with the extension of the franchise and the dominance of the House of Commons. Ireland has become independent, and our empire rightly dissolved. Ever since the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, people power and the idea of national self-determination have been on the march around the world, with decolonisation and the end of the Soviet Union spurring many more countries to embrace democracy.
Yet this process has gone into reverse in Europe, the very birthplace of democracy; appallingly, this has gone furthest in Greece, a country that is now little more than a protectorate of Brussels, bankrupted by the EU’s absurd monetary economics. Our own democracy survives, of course, but in a hollowed-out state. Many of the laws and policies that govern our daily lives are no longer determined by politicians we can kick out, but by amorphous, undemocratic, detached and in some cases disgustingly corrupt bodies in Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg.
Political parties cannot stand on manifestos to change these diktats, and the British public have for all intents and purposes no say in any of them. Seen in this way, the growing arrogance and detachment of our elites is understandable: we the public no longer have a say, so how dare we question what the experts are telling us?
Our system of governance is now part democracy, part technocracy, an ahistorical, irrational state of affairs that even supporters of Remain never explicitly condone. A Leave Vote would end this charade and allow us to return to our erstwhile path of ever-greater democratic accountability. It would give Britain the impetus it needs to fix our broken constitution. It would allow us, crucially, to build new institutions to preserve and extend economic globalisation. Most important of all, perhaps, it would save Europe from itself, reminding the continent that there is a way forward that is compatible with its democratic traditions.
There is no trade-off between any of this and greater prosperity; in fact, the very opposite is true. The premises of Project Fear – that Brexit would trigger economic dislocation, a trade war and a recession – are utterly bogus. We would join the European Economic Area in the short-term, like Norway, retaining access to the single market, before negotiating our own, à la carte deal with the EU, presumably with far greater control over immigration. Being part of the EEA would allow Britain to argue its case directly in global rule-setting bodies, increasing rather than diminishing our global influence.
European business interests will do everything in their power to ensure that the transition is smooth: any attempt to punish Britain would backfire, hurting European companies and pushing up unemployment in the Eurozone ahead of the French presidential election. It won’t happen. Markus Kerber, who runs the BDI, Germany’s equivalent of the CBI, and is hugely influential in Berlin, was clear about this. In a key intervention this week, he called for free trade and open markets to be maintained if we vote to leave the EU.
So forget the doom-mongers. One question matters above all else: how should Britain and every other country be governed? We have rightly turned our back on absolute monarchy and aristocratic rule. Today we must reject technocracy, and vote leave to rebuild our democracy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/22/a-last-minute-plea-vote-leave-and-help-change-the-course-of-hist/
