24 June 2016

Philip Stephens: Brexit: a vote that changes everything

[...] A vote against the EU could well turn out also to be a vote against the United Kingdom. The Brexiters were English nationalists. Scotland and Northern Ireland wanted to remain. So did London, the pre-eminent global city. So the leaving of one union may be the death of another. Who could blame the Scots for preferring Europe over an England turned in on itself? How long before the English tire of picking up the bill for Northern Ireland?

The political shocks from this revolt against the ancien regime will be felt well beyond Britain’s shores. It is a big blow to Europe, and a warning to established parties across liberal democracies. The outcome was shaped as much as by a revolt against globalisation as by the peculiar British antipathy towards the Eurocrats of Brussels. Immigration loomed largest — this in a nation that has always been open to the world. How easily expansive patriotism can curdle into narrow-eyed nationalism.

Across advanced democracies politics has been soured by resentment against wealthy elites. Look across Europe, or across the Atlantic to Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign, and you see the same seething discontent about globalisation, migration and cuts in welfare. The postwar political order, dominated as it has been by parties of the centre-right and centre-left, is under unprecedented strain. Rising populism of the extreme left and right has begun to sound echoes of the 1930s.

In England, the divisions were apparent in the pattern of voting. London voted overwhelmingly to remain. The leave vote was strongest in those parts of provincial England — the north-east and north-west notably — that feel left behind by globalisation.

Mr Cameron will have to go. History will remember him as a prime minister who gambled the nation’s future on an attempt to appease his own party. But the political consequences will reach well beyond the choice of Conservative leader. Labour voters defied the party line in their millions. With the Tories divided and Labour rebuffed it is hard to imagine how the present order can be sustained.

In the short term, the economic shock and the turbulence on financial markets will be most likely matched by political paralysis. The people have voted to leave the EU, but there is no agreement about what might replace membership. Whoever among the Outers replaces Mr Cameron in Downing Street — and the favourite Boris Johnson would be absolutely the worst choice — he or she will struggle to build a consensus. [...]

The world no longer belongs to the west. Liberty, democracy, the rule of law — the values that Britain often claims as its own — are under challenge. Europe, for all its flaws and annoyances, was the agency through which Britain could make a difference.

For much of the past 70 years Britain has sought, in the words of one former foreign secretary, to punch above its weight in global affairs. Now it plans to withdraw into itself. Yet going it alone ignores at once the international nature of Britain’s interests and the stark geopolitical realities. How long before the regret sets in?

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