The real problem is continental drift: Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is getting further and further away from England. Or at least that is British Prime Minister David Cameronís line.
Cameron made his long awaited speech promising a referendum on continued British membership in the European Union and he placed the blame squarely on plate tectonics: “People are increasingly frustrated that decisions (are being) taken further and further away from them...”
The “frustrated” people in question are English, of course. Hostility to the European Union is mainly an English thing but that matters a lot in the United Kingdom, where 55 million of the kingdom’s 65 million people live in England.
The “Little Englander” glories in the notion of England being unencumbered by foreign ties and commitments and the phrase is now used to describe strongly nationalist, even xenophobic people on the right of English politics. Those people, always present in significant numbers within Cameron’s Conservative Party, have now won the internal party debate.
Every Conservative leader has had to deal with these people. They always managed to contain them in the past but things have changed. The long recession and relatively high immigration of recent years have increased the popularity of the extreme right in England, and the Conservatives are losing their more right-wing supporters to the anti-EU, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
Cameron’s promise of a referendum on EU membership is first and foremost an attempt to steal UKIP’s thunder and win back the defecting Conservative voters. He doesn’t really want to leave the EU but he really does want to win the election that is due in 2015.
His reluctance to be the man who took Britain out of the EU was clear. The referendum would not take place until after the next election, and only if the Conservative Party won enough seats in 2015 to form a government on its own. (Its current coalition partner, the Liberal Democratic Party, opposes the whole idea).
Cameron says he will spend the next two years renegotiating the terms of Britain’s EU membership to “repatriate” many powers from Brussels to London and to make various changes in the way the EU is run. Then, if he is satisfied with the outcome, he will support EU membership in the election and in the subsequent referendum, which will be held by 2017. But he had no satisfactory answers to the hard questions that followed his speech.
What if the 26 other EU members refuse to tie themselves up in knots just to ease Cameron’s local political problems? Would he support continued EU membership in the promised referendum if he didn’t have a “new deal” to offer the voters. He simply wouldn’t answer those questions.
So for the next four years, all those foreign companies that use the United Kingdom as a convenient, English-speaking centre to produce goods and services for the European market will be rethinking their investment strategies. If the United Kingdom may leave the EU by 2017, is this really the right place to put their money? It will probably be a long dry season for the British economy.
How did an allegedly grown-up country talk itself into this position? It’s an attitude that was summed up in an apocryphal English newspaper headline of the 1930s: “Fog in (the English) Channel; Continent Cut Off.”
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.