Are Britons Opposed to EU Xenophobic Nationalists?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Following an intense see-saw battle that has lasted for months, the June 23 “Brexist” referendum on British membership in the 28-member European Union is now upon us.

Led by British Prime Minister David Cameron, the “Davos nomenklatura” that runs the EU, along with their intellectual fellow-travellers, has pulled out all the stops to prevent Britain from leaving.

Historian Anthony Beevor, writing in the left-wing Guardian, remarked, incredibly, that if Britain quit, “we will instantly achieve most-hated nation status, not just in Europe but far beyond.”

In the Times Literary Supplement, published in London, 31 British cultural figures in academia, literature and the humanities signed a plea to voters to stay. “Please don’t leave us alone,” they pleaded.

“If we succumb to fear mongering, to emotional appeals to nationalism at the expense of good sense and compassion,” commented Shamim Sarif, a British novelist and filmmaker, in the New York Times, “we are ringing our own global death knell as a country that puts nationalism ahead of humanity.”

There is strong anti-Europe sentiment in much of England, reflecting a view that its identity and values are being washed away by subordination to the bureaucrats of Brussels. Nationalism and multiculturalism have been a key part of the debate.

Cameron accused the Leave side of being opposed to immigration, pointing to a poster with a warning that Britain had reached a “breaking point.”

 The campaign seemed hardly about Europe at all, but “all about us and the English identity,” observed Cambridge University Professor Robert Tombs.

That’s why pro-EU advocates, while making dire economic predictions should the United Kingdom leave, seldom spoke out for the idea of Europe or appealed to Britons’ sense of shared identity with the continent.

One of the main “Leave” proponents, former London mayor Boris Johnson, accused Prime Minister Cameron of insulting voters by suggesting that those who wished to leave were “somehow against the spirit of modern Britain.”

In an article in the right-wing Telegraph, Johnson pointed to the EU as an increasingly anti-democratic system that is now responsible for 60 per cent of the law that goes through the British parliament, coming as they do from “dictates passed down from Brussels and rulings upheld by the European Court of Justice.”

This, he maintained, is “a phenomenon that contributes so powerfully to the modern voter’s apathy, the sensation that we no longer control our destiny, and that voting changes nothing.”

Calling the Remain side “Project Fear,” Johnson described them as “a cushy elite of politicians and lobbyists and bureaucrats, circling the wagons and protecting their vested interests.”

Those who value national identity and sovereignty are increasingly being castigated as “racists,” “fascists, “ultra-nationalists,” and “xenophobes,” not just in Britain but everywhere in the West. For globalists, a state’s independence is now viewed as an impediment to a more “progressive” world.

Taken to its extreme, the end result of this logic would be the ultimate creation of a superstate without borders and a homogenous culture. Is that really what people want?