Cut loose and drifting away from the shore into a major storm

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 30 June 2016, 09:58 Last update: about 9 years ago

Quite frankly, I don’t know how David Cameron is still upright, unless he is one of those men who have that impressive ability to take no blame for any of the consequences of their actions, see those consequences as nothing to do with them, justify everything, and hence, feel no guilt or shame. They might even blame others for what they have done themselves, or see it as inevitable and therefore nothing really to do with them.

For let’s not forget that all this is of Cameron’s making. He promised a referendum to ensure his survival as Conservative Party leader, for the pledge was made to restrain dissenters in his own party. It was not a pledge made primarily to electors who had asked for it (they hadn’t asked for it). People in Britain were not talking about a referendum on leaving the European Union. They grumbled like crazy about the European Union, led by the Eurosceptic press – which means most of the British press – but they never talked about a referendum vote to leave. But then Cameron put that on the table, so suddenly it became a real option. And now it’s a nightmare.

It became a real option without any consideration of what it entailed. The crazy thing about Cameron’s referendum is that it put forward no concrete basis for the vote, which is extraordinary. It is usual, in a referendum, to know what you are voting for or against, but in this case, it didn’t happen. The failure of the Remain campaign is that it did not point this out. But it couldn’t point it out, because it was the government – which proposed the referendum – that was responsible for doing all the work that would give people the proper basis for a vote. And Cameron’s government had neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Nor would it have been able to, in reality, because the EU would not have negotiated for the UK’s departure from the bloc simply to give the British people a proper basis on which to vote.

When the people of Malta voted in a referendum to decide whether they wanted to join the European Union or not (and thank heavens Joseph Muscat failed in his efforts there, because where would we be now), we did so not in 1990, before the government presented its formal application to join, but in 2003, when all formal negotiations with the European Union had been concluded and we knew exactly what we were voting for, what joining the European Union would entail.

We had, so to speak, the contract on the table and could peruse it and decide whether we liked the terms. Many people did not bother with this: they knew they wanted to be EU citizens whatever the parameters. Other people did not bother to consider the terms and consequences of membership because Joseph Muscat and Alfred Sant had told them that they would be better off locked onto a rock 17 miles by nine, and those words of wisdom were enough for them. But to many other people, the terms and conditions mattered greatly, and if those terms and conditions had not been spelled out in black and white as the result of negotiations, they would have voted differently.

All referendums related to European Union matters have been taken on this basis too: with the terms on the table so that people know exactly what they are voting for. There have been referendums on the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Treaty of Nice, the Lisbon Treaty, allowing new member states in in 1995, 2004 and 2013 (Croatia), joining the Eurozone, the European Constitution, the European Fiscal Compact, the Unified Patent Court, and the Greek bail-out. But in this case, the British were asked to vote on leaving the European Union without having a contract or negotiated agreement on the table telling them exactly what this would entail. So instead, they voted on myths and legends and “we’re English, we don’t want all the other people”. Or better still, “we want to take back control”. The result, as the world now knows, is disaster.

Oddly, one important fact has been completely missing from the wall-to-wall coverage of the Brexit fall-out: it is not the first time that the British government has asked its people to vote on whether they should stay in the European bloc. This referendum was the one exception, other than the referendum of last week, to the fact that people always know what they are voting for when they vote in a European Union-related referendum. In 1975, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson called a referendum on whether the UK should stay in what was then the European Economic Community. It follows that people voted to stay, which is why they are still there now. But the seeds of nasty Euroscepticism were sown in that campaign 40 years before this one. Many elements in British society did not accept the result as a matter concluded, and have been fighting the same battle ever since. Back then, however, the press was mainly for remaining, with the notable exception being the then highly influential The Spectator, which was for leaving, and which is still for leaving 41 years down the line. Boris Johnson edited that publication for six years.

Unfortunately, the absence of this bit of crucial information was one of the ‘lies of omission’ of the Leave campaign, and one of the failures of the campaign to Remain. The Leave campaigners repeatedly said – and the message was taken up in the street – that the British never voted to join the European Union and that they were taken in against their will. This is mendacious. Edward Heath, the Conservative Prime Minister who took the United Kingdom into the EEC in 1973, did not hold a referendum before he did so. But in the general election the following year, the Labour Party pledged in its electoral programme to hold a referendum on this matter. And one year later, it did so, and the British voted to stay, with the outcome being a two-to-one victory for the ‘Keep Britain in Europe’ campaign.

Meanwhile, back home in Malta I can’t help noticing how our own politicians are badly misjudging people’s interest in what has happened in Britain and the fall-out from it. They are treating it almost as a side-issue, as foreign news. But even those Maltese who do not read the news about the effects on markets, the plunging pound, the negative effect on investor decisions and the start of the break-up of the United Kingdom have correctly intuited that this is the beginning of something very bad indeed, something that will affect us all in ways that we probably thought were gone forever. People in Malta are galvanised by what is happening and the politicians would be idiotic to carry on behaving as though it is somehow an external matter.

Malta has done its bit to contribute to the damage by causing a major European Commission corruption scandal that hit the international headlines and fed the belief that all EU bureaucrats are wildly corrupt, and by putting a price on EU Schengen passports and selling them to all-comers from China, the Middle East and the former Soviet bloc, plus the odd American on the run. Our Prime Minister tours the markets of the world selling Schengen passports. It’s that bad. We can’t do anything about the colossal mistake that was John Dalli now (though the Prime Minister can start by cutting him loose), but we most definitely should stop selling EU passports at this stage, or on our heads be it. And that means that even the Opposition leader has got to take some pretty stiff new decisions on where he and the rest of his party stand on this disgraceful matter. Short-termist thinking on raking in the money is going to lead, ultimate, to serious trouble.