THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  Leave was allowed to set the agenda on the democracy question and forced Remain onto the defensive. What was lacking was a clear counter attack to explain how the EU actually worked, an approach that would have allowed Remainers to point out that in reality the European Union is nowhere near as undemocratic and unaccountable as is often claimed, and in some respects is more democratic than the national government of the UK. The very small number of attempts to do just that were well-researched and well-written, but their contribution turned out to be too little and, crucially, too late. An unsigned piece on the website The Conversation set out to answer the question How democratic is the European Union? (2016), and concluded: ‘So all in all, the EU is, or is at least working to be, a democratic organisation. It has its failings but national governments have just as many – if not more.’ Nine days before voting day Jennifer Rankin (2016) asked the similar question ‘Is the EU undemocratic?’ and pointed out that, contrary to popular misconception, the European Commission does not pass laws, but enforces and monitors laws and treaties decided by EU governments via the Council of Ministers and approved by the directly elected European Parliament. She also demonstrated that qualified-majority voting does not mean that the UK is frequently outvoted, citing research conducted by the London School of Economics showing that between 2009 and 2015 Britain was on the winning side 87 per cent of the time. Her verdict:

  The idea that laws are dictated by Brussels by unelected bureaucrats is simply wrong. In fact EU laws have to pass high hurdles before they get onto the British statute book. The British government has considerable clout in shaping those laws despite the growth of qualified-majority votes.

  When leave campaigners talk about laws made by Brussels, what they mean is ‘laws made by the EU’s directly elected governments and more often than not the European parliament through the co-decision procedure’. Not as snappy, but more accurate.

  Another carefully researched piece was posted by Simon Hix (2016) on his blog on the website of the London School of Economics and Political Science, but on 21 June when it was rather late to have much impact. He notes that the allegedly unelected president of the European Commission and the individual commissioners, though not directly elected by the populace, are at least indirectly elected in that they are first of all proposed by the twenty-eight heads of government on the European Council, then confirmed by a majority vote in the European Parliament. He finds this no less democratic than the way in which the Queen effectively chooses the British prime minister – by convention the leader of the largest party – who then chooses members of the cabinet as s/he sees fit. Furthermore, he believes that EU procedures have become more democratic in the last decade.

  Jennifer Rankin and Simon Hix were lone and late voices. Brexit and Lexit campaigners were allowed to promulgate the line that the EU was irredeemably undemocratic and that there was nothing Britain could do to get rid of unelected bureaucrats who proved to be inadequate or worse. Remainers tended to admit that there was a ‘democratic deficit’ that needed to be addressed and did not counter attack by pointing out that the European Parliament has the power to dismiss members of the European Commission. No one noted that the EU, like any governing body in a democracy, is subject to scrutiny by the fourth estate, or recalled that in 1999 the entire European Commission led by Jacques Santer was shamed into resigning following very public allegations of financial mismanagement which eventually resulted in one commissioner, Édith Cresson, being prosecuted in the European Court of Justice. Attention was not drawn to the fact that when a British government has a comfortable parliamentary majority, the House of Commons may become little more than a rubber-stamping service for decisions taken in the cabinet office.

  Ironically, it can be argued that Remain lost the referendum because of faults in the democratic process not in Brussels, but in the UK. The precise margin of the Brexit victory reported by the Electoral Commission was 1,269,501 votes. David Cameron’s first and second governments made two decisions that deprived a great many British citizens of the opportunity to vote in the referendum, and most of them were the sort of people who, given the chance, would have expressed a preference to stay in the EU.

  In 2014 the Cameron government introduced individual voter registration. Previously, just one member of a household could register all the residents eligible to vote, while institutional landlords could complete the registration for tenants. Universities, with their halls of residence, are major institutional landlords and under the old rules they simply sent the relevant local authorities a complete list of students eligible to vote. Individual voter registration resulted in many of Britain’s nearly two million students failing to register. The date of the referendum – 23 June – created further problems for those students who had finished their exams and had already moved away from their term-time address since they either had to re-register at the address they would be living at on referendum day (if they knew where they would be), or apply for a postal or proxy vote at their term-time address. Despite the efforts of individual universities and the National Union of Students to inform students of the registration requirements, a considerable percentage ended up being unable to vote on 23 June.

  Post-referendum analyses of how the various sectors of British society voted revealed that those university students who did vote mostly voted for staying in the EU. That is hardly surprising: the so-called millennials had grown up taking freedom of movement for granted, had no memory of residence and work permits, and had most to lose from an outcome that jeopardized their right to study and work wherever they wished in the twenty-eight member states. As Megan Dunn (2016) put it:

  We are instinctively internationalist, as lives lived online do not respect national frontiers. We travel, work, and study abroad to a greater degree than previous generations. Politically, we involve ourselves in global struggles, such as climate change, international development and global justice.

  Of course, we will never know whether those students who failed to get on the electoral register would have voted in a similar way to those who did go to the polling station, and it is perfectly legitimate to say that young people who did not make the effort to register had no right to complain when the result was not the one they would have wished for. They were not so much disenfranchised as victims of their own apathy. However, as a particularly mobile population, they had registration hurdles to overcome that other sectors of society did not have, and it is reasonable to assume that David Cameron has wondered what would have happened if more of them had managed to put a cross on that ballot paper.

  Other UK citizens really were disenfranchised: a significant percentage of the approximately 1.3 million Britons who, like me, live in another EU member state. British citizens who have lived abroad for more than fifteen years lose their right to vote in UK elections and referenda, so those of us who have put down roots in another EU member state could not make our opinions count. In the case of long-term expatriates, we are on fairly safe ground in saying that if they had been able to vote in the referendum, the overwhelming majority would have voted to protect their rights to health care, social services and possibly a state pension in their host country.

  To sum up, the democracy question contributed to Remain’s defeat in two ways. First, David Cameron, George Osborne and other high-profile figures made little or no attempt to confute Brexit and Lexit supporters’ exaggerated, sometimes dishonest statements about the undemocratic EU, unaccountable bureaucrats, dictatorship from Brussels and the like. Leave campaigners were given a clear run on the democracy question, and some went so far as to write of a dastardly conspiracy to suppress democracy (inspired by a Frenchman) that began in the years immediately after the Second World War. Second, imperfections in the UK’s democratic system meant that absentees from the electoral register included two groups of people whose votes just might – and here the epistemic modality is essential – have cancelled out the 1,269,501-vote margin of Leave’s victory.

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  ‘Free’: A little word that did a big job for Brexit

  Brexit campaigners presented the referendum debate as an epic battle between on the one hand high-minded principles that we all hold dear – freedom, democracy, independence – and on the other, aspects of EU reality – regulation and bureaucracy, the unelected Commission, impositions from Brussels – that are paltry by comparison and difficult to defend. If Remainers allowed Leave to manipulate the democracy issue as they wished, they did little better at resisting Brexiteers’ commandeering of the word free.

  It is a syntactically flexible word that can be used as an adjective or as a verb, and in the former case combines with a series of nouns in collocations that are highly positive in meaning, such as free speech, free will and free-range (freeloader is a rare exception of a negative denotation, while the desirability or otherwise of free love is something for each individual to evaluate). Similarly, the related noun freedom is nearly always a good thing, unlike its synonym liberty which is sometimes diabolical, and in the expression to take a liberty refers to disrespectful behaviour.

  The Leave argument was that by quitting the EU Britain would be free from European laws, regulations and bureaucracy, which in the tabloids were collectively summed up with metaphors of restraint, in particular the word shackles, or terms with military connotations, such as the German loan word diktat. The headline of a short article on the website betteroffout.net contains a metaphor of restraint and a comparison with the economic consequence of breaking free: Tied to the EU, growth is 0.3%. Free from the EU it’s more (2016). In the brief (and grammatically clumsy) piece that follows, tied is used twice more along with the adjective trapped.

  Five days before voting day Rebecca Perring and Monika Pallenberg (2016), writing for The Express, used the noun shackles in both the headline and the lead of their article, then the emotive word bloc in their opening sentence. Free is also used twice in the headline and lead, and in both cases it is capitalized for emphasis. The nefarious nature of the European Union is made clear in a reference to the strongest member state’s concern that the UK could ‘go unpunished’ if the British people voted to leave the EU. In just sixty-six words the EU is portrayed as an authoritarian institution that puts its members into fetters and would not like to see a rebel escaping punishment.

  No more shackles: UK could BREAK FREE of EU laws as early as June 24 if Brexit wins

  Germans fear Britain will be able to break FREE from the shackles of European laws on June 23 if the nation backs Brexit

  Bundestag experts have expressed concerns the UK will go unpunished if the people vote to quit the 28-nation bloc during next week’s EU referendum.

  In an article that is considered in more detail in Chapter 13 of this volume, Hawkes et al. (2016) in The Sun report on Boris Johnson’s urging viewers to ‘grab the chance to break free from European shackles’ during a televised debate. Never a man to rely exclusively on hackneyed phrases, however, he added that taking back control meant not having to comply with ‘every jot and tittle’ of EU regulations.

  Jots and tittles are irritants, but the farming minister in the Cameron government, George Eustice, is quoted as using a much stronger expression to describe EU policy on the environment (Neslen 2016): ‘The UK could develop a more flexible approach to environmental protection free from “spirit-crushing” Brussels directives if it votes to leave the EU, the farming minister, George Eustice, has said.’ In the same article Eustice is reported as dismissing EU environmental regulations as ‘voluminous documents from Brussels’.

  Another frequently used collocation featuring the word free was, unsurprisingly, set Britain free. It was used in the headline – SUN ON SUNDAY SAYS A vote for Brexit is all it takes to set Britain free (2016) – of an unsigned editorial in The Sun shortly before voting day, then again in the first sentence of the article along with inclusive we. Not content with putting us into shackles, the EU now has us in a ‘stranglehold’.

  Just four days from now we can set Britain free.

  Free from the stranglehold of the EU superstate which, from its modest beginnings 60 years ago, has grown into a monster engulfing our democracy.

  For 20 years they would not let us join. Now, with us in, they have progressively tied us up in millions of new regulations.

  In an unsigned editorial in the Daily Mail entitled How leaving the EU could set Britain free (2016), Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s warnings that leaving the EU would be disastrous for the economy are contrasted with the leading Brexiteer Michael Gove’s florid rhetoric on the ‘galvanising’, ‘liberating’ and ‘empowering’ effects of a victory for Leave.

  After George Osborne’s apocalyptic warning that a vote to leave the EU would permanently damage the British economy and cost every family £4,300 a year, Michael Gove struck a markedly contrasting tone yesterday.

  In place of scaremongering and despair, here was a message of confidence and optimism. Where the Chancellor had said that saying No in June would be a catastrophe, Mr Gove persuasively argued it would bring ‘a galvanising, liberating, empowering moment of democratic renewal’.

  How refreshing to hear a politician who so passionately believes in Britain. ‘Our best days lie ahead,’ he said. ‘This country’s instincts and institutions, its people and its principles, are capable not just of making our society freer, fairer and richer but also once more setting an inspirational example to the world.’

  The ‘shackles’ and similar metaphors were generally used as shorthand references to what was perceived as excessive EU regulation that created unnecessary costs for businesses and hindered economic growth. Mark Littlewood (2016), director general at the Institute of Economic Affairs, wrote:

  The single market might sound like a wonderful idea in theory, but it has morphed into an obsessive single regulatory area, with a zeal for applying uniform standards for all products and services right across the Continent. The Europhile argument goes that if you’re going to have genuine free trade in, say, widgets that you need to have identical rules determining the exact shape, size and definition of a widget in all 28 member states.

  Damien Gayle (2016) cites Vote Leave chief executive, Matthew Elliott, also expressing the view that EU regulation creates obstacles to free enterprise: ‘Brussels hinders small businesses, particularly those firms who can’t afford to lobby Brussels to curry favour.’ Similarly, Steve Hilton, a former political adviser to David Cameron, is quoted referring to ‘anti-market, innovation-stifling’ EU regulations (Slack and Groves 2016).

  It is hardly surprising if associations of small businesses and right-wing newspapers are opposed to rules and regulations that make it more difficult for companies to operate and could affect their profits. Regulation per se is not necessarily a bad thing, however, nor even a necessary evil, but is entirely positive if it prevents toy manufacturers from using toxic paints and varnishes or obliges the food industry to label products fully and precisely. One might expect the political left to take a very different view of regulation designed to protect workers’ and consumers’ rights; indeed, some Lexit campaigners argued that, in certain respects, the EU did not have enough regulation, particularly with regard to the banking sector and the tax avoidance schemes operated by the multinationals. Furthermore, the referendum campaign was conducted while the EU was in secret negotiations with the United States over the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which many leftists opposed energetically, fearing that it would open the European market to American foodstuffs produced without the controls applied in Europe, and would enable multinational corporations to sue governments that threatened their profitability with measures such a national minimum wage or a windfall tax on exceptional profits.

  However, just as prominent figures in the Remain camp did not directly challenge Leave’s claims concerning the lack of democracy in the EU, so they did not make effective use of the data available to demonstrate that the costs incurred by comp
lying with EU rules were more than offset by the access to markets that such compliance guaranteed. It was (and is) not difficult to find reliable data produced by academics and professionals more interested in the truth than in promoting a political agenda: Full Fact (https://fullfact.org) is a factfinding charity with a small team of professional researchers; Open Europe, since the referendum Open Europe Today (http://openeurope.org.uk), is a non-partisan think-tank with offices in Brussels and London; The UK in a Changing Europe (http://ukandeu.ac.uk), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and based at King’s College London, aims to provide evidence-based impartial analysis. To take just one example, two months before the vote Full Fact posted a report entitled EU facts behind the claims: regulation and the single market (2016), a comparative analysis of Leave’s claim that the top 100 EU regulations cost the UK economy £33.3 billion each year, and the Remain counterclaim that the single market of 500 million people means that UK exporters only have to comply with one set of EU regulations instead of twenty-eight national ones. Remain’s case does not stand up to analysis since individual member states still have their own contract, transport, competition, labour and planning laws, and oblige foreign businesses to comply with all of them. As for the bill of £33.3 billion per year, Full Fact’s study shows that the benefits of EU regulations often outweigh the costs, some of the costliest regulations are part of international agreements that have nothing to do with Brussels (and would therefore remain even after a hard Brexit), and despite the shackles and diktats, ‘the UK is still a lightly regulated economy compared to other rich countries’. That final observation comes as no surprise to someone like me – a British citizen living in the heavily regulated society and economy that is Italy – but Britons who have never been resident abroad are generally unaware of how fortunate they are to live in such an uncomplicated country.