In the immortal words of
Clint Eastwood, “You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky’?” If the British feel lucky we will trust Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. We will agree with them that the economists warning of recession, the trade unionists warning of an attack on workers’ rights, and the Nato allies warning of threats to the unity of the west are wrong. All wrong.
What am I saying – “wrong”? The Brexiters can never concede that a bearer of unwelcome arguments is debating in good faith. They are not just wrong. Wrong is too weak a word. They are lying. They are corrupt. No critic, however outwardly pure, is free of a sickly compulsion to deceive us.
After the Institute for Fiscal Studies said leaving the EU would damage the public finances
so badly it would extend austerity, Vote Leave did not attempt to dispute its figures. I have always found the institute to be the most fastidious organisation in British public life. But Vote Leave knew better. It could see through the mask of impartiality to the rottenness below. The IFS was the “paid-up propaganda arm of the European Commission”, engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the British people for the most base of motives.
The conspiracy it has joined includes so many, it is amazing that it has been able to work in secret for so long, The governor of the Bank of England is in on it.
Mark Carney warned about a collapse in the pound and a fall in investment. His forebodings appeared reasonable. Britain is knitted into the EU. Leaving would require an unravelling of relationships in every area of economic, constitutional, diplomatic and cultural life. Questions from whether we will need visas to visit the continent to whether foreign firms would continue to invest demand urgent answers. But Vote Leave offers only threats and conspiracy theories.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a boorish know-nothing, whom the British in their class deference treat as an affable gent, revealed his true authoritarian self when he called for the governor
to be fired. Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC that Carney used to work for Goldman Sachs, and the bank was the secret force behind the Remain campaign. “We see Goldman Sachs running all the way through this,” he confided, darkly. The way he is heading we will soon see Duncan Smith wandering the streets in his pyjamas shouting about the Bilderberg Group.
Perhaps not. Perhaps we will be lucky, and this apparently raging and incontinent fantasist will be revealed as a truth teller. Maybe, too, Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, is not wholly enclosed in the prison of rightwing ideology. He certainly gives every appearance of being the political equivalent of a cultist. To his fevered mind, criticism of his one, true faith can only come from polluted sources. Facing hard questioning from Andrew Tyrie, of the Commons Treasury committee, Cummings did not accept that anyone proposing a revolution in his country’s relations with the rest of the world must expect scrutiny. Instead, he snapped that Tyrie was biased because he had been a “very firm supporter of the euro and the ERM”.
Tyrie told him that he had supported neither. “But do not let it worry you, Dominic. It sounds as if you are as fast and loose with those facts as you are with all of the other facts that you have provided so far.”
Everyone who has raised doubts about disruption to trade and a flight of investment has been accused of ulterior motives. The International Monetary Fund had no right to “interfere in our democratic debate”. The CBI should stay silent because it has received
grants from the EU. Obama is not urging us to stay because he is our ally but because he is some kind of Mau Mau with a “part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
When ITV said it would host a debate between
Nigel Farage and David Cameron, Vote Leave, the official campaign no less, sounded like a Russian gangster threatening a dissident journalist when it warned the broadcaster: “There will be consequences for its future – the people in No 10 won’t be there for long.”
I never thought I would see a Britain where political hacks could threaten to punish broadcasters for organising a debate. “I want my country back,” I thought to myself. But as significantly, the attempt at censorship also revealed the hatreds on the right. Vote Leave hates Leave.EU and so wants Farage off air. If they lose, there will be civil war as Farage damns Cummings, Carswell damns Farage and everyone damns Johnson. But what if Leave wins? Presumably Johnson will be prime minister. Presumably a squabbling gang of Brexiters, who hate each other as much as they hate the EU, will have to form a government, and face a crisis that will go far beyond the economic.
They show no sign of being ready for it. When Scottish nationalists say that they would seize the chance to hold a second referendum, our patriots do not worry that their defence of Britain will lead to the
break up of Britain. They are as silent on the consequences of rebuilding a border on the island of Ireland – even though no one with a knowledge of history thinks of messing with the Good Friday agreement.
“Progressives” seduced by denunciations of neo-liberal Brussels must hope their luck holds too. They must trust that a triumph for Johnson, Farage, Gove and Duncan Smith will not lead to an assault on the workers’ rights the EU guarantees, even though these gentlemen have spent their political lives
denouncing workers’ rights as red tape that destroys competitiveness.
There are dozens of good reasons for leaving the EU. Before endorsing them you should ask, do you feel that the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Bank of England, IMF, OECD and the hundreds of economists we survey this week are all lying? Do you feel that all our allies who are begging us to stay wish to lead us to our ruin? Do you feel that
Boris Johnson is fit to be prime minister or any kind of minister for that matter? Do you feel that Scotland won’t leave? Do you feel that Irish politics won’t darken? Do you feel that Putin won’t rejoice? Do you feel the Leave gang will find answers in June to the questions it cannot answer in May?
In short, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?
Well, do ya, punk?
I'm not a huge fan of garlic either...