The UK woke up on Friday morning to enthusiastic crowing from many of the wrong sort of people after the decision to leave the European Union.
The leaders of far right European political parties – Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France – hailed the referendum result as heralding the break up of the EU as a whole.
Closer to home, the splenetic Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, whose campaign posters depicted thousands of non-white refugees under the headline “breaking point”, described the result as a victory for “decent” people – as though the 48 per cent who voted to remain were in some way morally challenged.
The anti-European rump of the ruling Conservative party will finally have its day. David Cameron, the UK prime minister, has said he will step aside, leaving a leadership vacuum at this critical time. The ambitious Boris Johnson has triumphed, having neatly shifted from championing the integrity of London’s status as a global financial services hub when he was London mayor, to helping to engineer the biggest threat to that same status as a leader of the Brexit movement.
Scotland, which overwhelmingly voted to remain in Europe, now has the best case it could hope for to separate from the rest of the UK. The pound is in free fall. Recession is a threat and the further dissolution of the EU or its recalibration on purely German and French terms, appears more likely.
No better signal as to the global trend towards isolationism and political and social retrenchment could be sent – save, perhaps, for a landslide victory by Donald Trump later this year.
The pattern of voting, if not the result, was entirely predictable after a campaign decided in large part on the issue of immigration. Working-class Labour voters in the north of England – concerned about pressure on local services and wages being undercut by cheap European labour – found common ground with the provincial middle classes who struggled culturally with the influx of Eastern Europeans under the free movement conventions of the EU.
Many older people voted Leave because they were scared of the pressures of immigration on the health service. But funding that same health service requires healthy tax receipts and a strong economy. Running the service relies significantly on the cheap, young labour of the kind that will be limited by immigration controls.
Even the Brexiteers admit that the UK is in for a stormy period. Capital flight will continue. The economy is bound to shrink, leaving a black hole in the nation’s finances, one that will require either austerity measures or tax rises or a lethal combination of both.
If you are a foreign company seeking to take advantage of the UK’s status as an English-speaking gateway to the wider European market, are you now going to site your factory or retail operation there?
I wrote on these pages two weeks ago that the Brexiteers appeared to believe that the UK’s natural economic and political heft would carve out a new and beneficial set of trading and strategic relationships. Britain is no longer an empire. It is not even a particularly robust global manufacturing base any more. More than 40 per cent of its trade is with the same Europe that Britain has so categorically divorced itself from. One of the UK’s largest exports is financial services. This vote will have set this sector squarely within the retaliatory crosshairs of a vengeful EU and an opportunistic Wall Street.
True, Europe has hardly presented itself as a cohesive and well-ordered economic, social and political construct in recent times. It has failed dramatically to tackle the challenges raised by its “one-size-fits-all” set of fiscal protocols for the eurozone and its open-border credentials have been discredited by the influx of political and economic migration from outside the EU.
It has become undemocratic, its leadership is seen as remote and elitist and it has failed to communicate the benefits not only of membership, but of a strong Europe in the context of global affairs.
Brexit will not just have an effect on Britain’s status in the world, but could diminish Europe’s political and strategic standing as well.
Britain’s departure will probably prompt other countries to consider either outright divorce from the EU or a cycle of blackmail and bargaining by member nations seeking to free themselves from some of its conventions and to satisfy restive populations increasingly inclined towards nationalism.
Europe’s diminution as a common purpose trading and diplomatic bloc will give Russia freer rein to pursue its geopolitical ends. The so-called “Atlantic rim” principles of democracy and self-determination, upheld in significant part by Europe, could have less influence in a troubled world.
Economies in the Middle East could fall prey to the ensuing super power chess game as a relatively cohesive European consensus loses its influence on the world stage and leaves things to an expansionist China and an unpredictable America.
In truth though we have little idea of how this might play out apart from the shorter term economic effect on UK finances. Britain still has to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty under which the process of separation formally begins.
Things will probably muddle along for a couple of years while feverish negotiations take place on the UK’s new place in the world and while decades of laws governing its relationship with Europe are repealed or renegotiated.
Only one thing is certain: out is out – and nobody knows, whether rich or poor, Brussels bureaucrat or British isolationist, where all this will end.
Martin Newland is a former editor in chief of The National
