Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

40
was not pain-free. Britain is not the only
country with EU-related dilemmas, or
where politicians must strike a balance
between what they think is strategically
necessary and electorally viable.Yet we
expect our allies to be relaxed, indulgent
even, as we divert them from other
problems: an epoch-defining movement
of refugees across the continent; Russian
territorial aggression; aftershocks of
the last financial crisis; perhaps early
tremors of the next one. We hijack the
agenda with our demands for special
treatment in exchange for … what,
exactly? The good fortune to have us
still in the club. Maybe. Subject to a
referendum.
Our collective responsibility in that
vote reaches beyond these islands.
Compared to David Cameron, other
EU leaders do not have as much
invested in the deal that was struck last
week, but they are still exposed. A British
rejection of membership on revised
terms would be a symbolic detonation of
inter-governmental compromise as the
EU’s vehicle for crisis management, and
a potential trigger for nationalistic and
populist contagion elsewhere.
It would not even neutralise those
forces at home. The leave campaign
channels appetites that cannot be met
by technical changes to the terms on
which Britain exchanges goods, services
and people with the rest of Europe. If
the UK votes to quit the EU, it will be an
expression of economic and political
frustration for which Brussels has long
been a convenient scapegoat, and which
cannot therefore be dissipated by a ritual
slaughter of treaty obligations.
Any workable application of an OUT
vote would end up looking like a partial
reconstruction of EU membership. Then
each segment of the coalition for leave
would feel betrayed, one by one. The
Tory libertarians would complain that not
enough regulation had been scrapped;
the hard left, like the Socialist Workers
Party who bewilderingly advocate an OUT
vote, would find corporate capitalism
still rampant; Ukip nativists would see no
sudden restoration of ethnic homogeneity
to the streets. The disparate pot of
resentments, heated and stirred through
the long campaign against “Europe”,
would break and its contents flow into
other political vessels and causes.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 8