realclearworld Newsletters: Europe Memo
Europe Memo last week caught up with Simon Hix, head of the government department at the London School of Economics, to discuss today's vote in the United Kingdom on whether Britain should remain a member of the European Union, or leave. Polls are tight - unexpectedly so. As I type this, Britons are casting their votes.
How did Britain reach this point? And will the Continent turn into a 27+1-country brawl? The below interview has been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
RCW: The polls are not looking good for Remain. What is your feeling, and what are you hearing?
Hix: It’s been surprising that over the last two weeks the Leave campaign have really got momentum, all of the polls are showing that. There’s two interpretations for that. There’s generally this anti-establishment feeling, and the more that [Prime Minister David] Cameron and [Chancellor of the Exchequer George] Osborne make certain claims, the more it backfires. Osborne is saying we have to have an emergency budget if we leave, and that kind of stuff backfires. People just don’t believe it anymore.
The second thing is the Leave campaign have been pressing the immigration button relentlessly. They’ve waited until the end of the campaign to talk about immigration, immigration, immigration. And that really has resonated. They knew that was the one issue they could win on, because the Remain campaign doesn’t have an answer for that - there’s no way they can explain how immigration will go down if we stay in the EU. And [United Kingdom Independence Party leader Nigel] Farage just has to say things like that every year a city the size of Newcastle moves to the UK, that’s not sustainable.
RCW: What would your answer have been? If you were in the Remain campaign’s shoes?
Hix: I think they should have done two things. They relied way too much on economic risk, because that worked in the debate about Scotland. But the difference in Scotland is, Britain being independent is not really a step into the unknown for people. They have confidence in Britain. Scottish independence is a step into the unknown. So people are willing to accept there might be an economic downturn in the short term, but that happens all the time. So we have an economic downturn for two years, whoop-dee-doo. They haven’t been able to persuade people that the economic risk in the medium and long term is really damaging. And that’s the only argument they really have. They’ve not really said, okay, if we stay in the EU and migration carries on being high, here’s what we’re going to do in terms of domestic policy. Are we going to spend more money on public services, are we going to think about social integration, are we going to come down on unscrupulous employers who pay cash in hand? They’ve not said any of that. They have no answers when people say high immigration means pressure on wages in certain sectors, pressure on public services, they’ve got no answer.
The second thing is, they really haven’t had a positive narrative of why we should stay in the EU. It’s not obvious to people! So I wrote something a few days ago because I got frustrated about this, and I had some people come back to me and say, wow that’s the first thing I’ve read that’s made a positive case for the EU!
RCW: The traditional case prime ministers made involved a duality: This is good for Britain and it’s good for Europe. Why has that duality disappeared? Why is no one making that case?
Hix: Because for 10 years we’ve really been isolated in Brussels. The problem for Cameron and Osborne and the people around them is they can’t credibly now make the case for Europe, because nobody would believe them, because for years they’ve been wailing about Europe! So the onus was then on [the Labour Party] to do it, and I think they were hoping Labour would do it, but Labour haven’t done it because of [Labour Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn.
RCW: Were you alarmed when Corbyn was selected as the Labour Party’s leader?
Hix: A colleague pointed out right from the beginning, said that support from Labour is going to be absolutely critical, because in all EU referendums across Europe, it’s the splits in the center-left that ultimately decide the outcome. You tend to get a leadership of the party that’s pro-European and a membership that’s anti-European because they don’t like globalization and they don’t like immigration. That really has happened. And we’ve seen the polls even amongst Labour supporters changing. Among people who said they voted Labour in the last election, at the beginning of the campaign, they told pollsters they were 80 percent remain, 20 percent leave, and now it’s looking more like two-thirds to one-third.
RCW: What happened?
Hix: We got into the period called purdah, which is where the government can no longer use the instruments of the state to campaign. So they can’t use the Treasury or the Bank of England or the Foreign Office, or the Home Office, they can’t use any of the civil servants to produce reports related to Europe. So it was an open playing field for the Leave campaign to run riot, and there’s been no coordination between what Labour are doing, what Corbyn and Cameron were doing. Everyone’s been relying on the government machinery. They were all expecting it would all be done and dusted, and they could cruise through the last few weeks. And it’s come as a real shock to them I think. They assumed there would be a big status quo bias, that economic risk would win it. But what we know is that older people and economically vulnerable people are the ones that care most about economic risk. But these are the same voters who care most about immigration! It was stupid to think that economic risk was going to win it.
RCW: If the vote is to leave, what comes next? Is the government ready?
Hix: They’re not ready at all. They assumed they were going to win. From what I hear internally, they have no clue what they’re going to do. If the vote is to leave, Cameron and Osborne I think are gone. But nobody really knows what happens next. They can’t choose a new leader until the autumn, because the Conservatives have to go through a new leadership election, so who steps in as an interim leader? It could be really nasty. We could see [MP Michael] Gove or [Home Secretary] Theresa May as an interim prime minister. We could see someone as an interim prime minister only under the understanding that they’re not going to stand for leader.
The EU is holding an emergency summit meeting (tomorrow) because I think they’re realising this could well be a vote to leave. [Scottish First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon had a piece (last week) saying that if it’s a vote to leave, she’s going to want to stay in the EU. I don’t think she’s serious about that, I think she’s just trying to up the rhetoric. If we vote to leave the EU, I think it will be very hard for her to win a second referendum.
RCW: Why is that?
Hix: One, the polls are even closing in Scotland. At the beginning of the campaign it was 70 remain, 30 leave in Scotland, it’s now 60-40 and it’s narrowing quick. If it’s 57-43 in Scotland, that’s not enough to say that Scotland overwhelmingly wants to stay in the EU. But even if it was 70-30, the main argument the SNP had during the independence campaign was that you wouldn’t notice independence. There’d be no border, there’d be no passport controls, no customs controls, you keep the pound, you keep the queen, you keep the BBC, you basically wouldn’t notice. Whereas now if Britain is outside the EU, and we want to leave Britain and join the EU, that’s a completely different proposition! There would be border controls, and passport checks, and god knows what else!
RCW: Would Parliament stand in the way of a Leave vote?
Hix: I don’t think so. There is a lovely irony here. The Leave campaign is campaigning on getting out of the EU to restore parliamentary sovereignty, and using a referendum to do that, and saying that Parliament has to respect the outcome of the referendum. They don’t really see the irony, but I do.
I can imagine a scenario where the majority in parliament says we want to stay in the European Economic Area as an interim measure, at least until the next general election, it’s too risky to be out of the single market in the short term, we need to calm the markets. That does mean we won’t be able to have restrictions on migration. And that could be explosive. That might be okay in the short term, but in the medium term, we might see pitchforks outside Westminster if we vote to leave and the main thing driving the Leave vote is immigration, and we can’t stop EU migrants coming in.
But anyway, if people think leaving the EU means lower immigration, that’s mad. We already have net 180,000 non-EU migrants coming every year - between 160,000 and 200,000. Even if we then leave the EU and we introduce a points-based system, we’re going to have net 70,000 or 80,000 EU coming. So we’re going to have net 250,000 anyway! The idea that we’re going to leave the EU and bring immigration down below 100,000 is just ludicrous. So we’re going to need to think about how we’re going to address that, we’re an open, high-immigrant society, and that has a very big distribution of effects.
RCW: Expectations from the rest of Europe? Again, what comes next?
Hix: It’s economics versus politics. Britain leaves the EU, there will be huge pressure from economic interests - agriculture, car manufacturers, financial services - for there to be a generous and open deal with the UK, because the UK would be the EU’s largest external trading partner. The UK would be 16 percent of the EU’s external trade. But then the politics says, if there is a generous or comprehensive trade agreement with the UK, and the UK gets to control free movement of people, well Denmark will say hey we want that! And Sweden will say we want that. And Austria, Hungary, god knows who else. So then the domino effect starts, so the politics is saying, we’re going to have to make an example of the UK to make it painful - to make sure no one else goes down the UK route.
RCW: And the knock-on effects of that, lord only knows.
Hix: Exactly. So I think we’re going to see a real fight between economics and politics on the Continent.
