Liberals leading the Brexit charge are riding a statist tiger

Maybe next time he will wink at the camera between sentences or cross his fingers as he grips the lectern. Short of these visual clues, Jeremy Corbyn cannot give less sincere advocacy to the European cause than his effort in London last week. Britain's Labour party leader smoked with resentment of the EU while commending it to voters. Everyone suspects he is open to exit because everyone suspects he thinks everything he thought circa 1975, when the far left equated continental integration with the bosses and their flighty capital.

For Eurosceptics, Corbyn’s speech embarrassed and encapsulated a Remain campaign made up of conscripts and mercenaries cringing before Leave’s unfakeable passion as the referendum nears. But this is Britain. If Corbyn’s line on Europe blends grudging trust in continuity with impatience for the question to go away, it is the one feature of his politics that matches the popular will.

Leavers have another, deeper reason to take no joy in his hedged interventions. If such an unreconstructed socialist flirts with their cause, the awkwardness is as much for them as for the other side. The fishiest thing about British Eurosceptics is not the narrowness of their obsession but the breadth of their movement. Here is a coalition of economic liberals and nostalgic statists who dislike the EU for opposite reasons that cannot both be valid and who, for the tactical imperative of campaign harmony, pretend not to notice.

Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Daniel Hannan, Nigel Lawson: the principal Leavers are ultraliberal Conservatives who smell in Brussels a will to stifle and ossify. For them, exit can Singaporise this country, priming it for an unforgivingly competitive century as a zone of light regulation and porous capital borders. (An account of Britain as it is, you might think). But for almost everyone who will vote their way on June 23, the EU is a callous enabler of markets not a check on them, an intrusion by the outside world not a barrier to it.

Paternalist economy

Their picture of a sovereign Britain evokes Japan more than Singapore: a stable culture, a paternalist economy, a place that forgoes some growth for cohesion.

Eurosceptics at the top of public life are early middle-aged, hyper-educated and sanguine to the point of credulity about Britain’s future as an entrepôt. Their sensibilities formed under Margaret Thatcher and the west’s liberal turn since the 1970s. Eurosceptics in the country are older, poorer and bitterly disrupted by the same liberalism. Their sensibilities formed during the Keynesian imperium of the mid-20th century, when jobs were for life and economic flows between nations were for wise men to modulate.

You can see dazzling heterogeneity in this or you can see a lot of people lying to themselves and each other. They do not just want different things, like the trade unions and employers who favour the EU for distinct but compatible reasons. They want opposite things. This dissonance was plain in the spring, when free-market Leavers pretended to mind European state-aid rules that proscribed the subsidisation of Welsh steel. It was plain on Sunday, when Gove promised curbs on both EU and non-EU migrants that lie far from his instincts.

Prominent Leavers go through these contortions because they know their audience. It is, in its taste for a more ordered past, nearer to Corbyn than to them. It is also nearer to Nigel Farage, who leads the populist UK Independence party, and the hard-to-place Labour MP Frank Field.

Liberalism to control

The telling axis does not run from left to right but from openness to closedness, from liberalism to control.

If liberal Leavers feign illiberalism during the campaign, the problem is not their cynicism. The problem with their pact of convenience is that it only makes strategic sense for the other signatories, the illiberal Leavers. In a sovereign Britain, they would have the electoral numbers. The clamour to become an even more globalised economy under a nightwatchman state is, despite Hannan’s fluency, nearly nil.

David Cameron campaigned yesterday with the leaders of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats – and Harriet Harman, as if the Labour grandee also led her party. Corbyn's equivocation says something about Remain's half-heartedness but more about Leave's incoherence. For a cause fronted by such market-friendly futurists, it tempts many who think the British economic model was just right around 1970. Liberal Leavers must look at the tiger they are riding and wonder if they and everything they cherish will end up inside. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016